The government’s response to the defence and veteran suicide royal commission’s final report came out yesterday; much of the media attention has focused on the handling of sex offenders within the military. That’s important — though it’s only one of a large number of recommendations focused on the entire military justice system and its role in enabling a safe — or as safe as can be — workplace for ADF members.
The role of bullying and sexual harassment, assault and predation in defence and veteran suicidality was one of the emergent issues of the royal commission. Effectively dealing with sexual misconduct in all its forms within the military system has been a key area of US efforts to reduce member and veteran suicide — efforts that are at least a decade ahead of ours, and still not showing evidence of success.
Member and veteran suicide is a product of a complex system of factors that commence on recruitment to the ADF and go right on through service to transition to civilian life and support — or otherwise — for veterans. Making those system works better for members and veterans is long-term work that needs permanent change, over years, within large organisations and networks — Defence, Veterans’ Affairs (DVA), primary and acute health systems run by the Commonwealth and state governments.
Those organisations and systems won’t, of their own initiative, maintain the focus required to deliver permanent change in the factors leading to suicidality. The institutional temptation will be to default to business as usual. That’s why the organisational arrangements to manage the implementation of the royal commission recommendations are so crucial.
As the final report noted, there have been scores of previous inquiries, reports and studies of defence and veteran suicide making hundreds of recommendations over the past two decades, and the problem has persisted and grown worse as those documents gathered dust on shelves across Canberra. There needs to be institutional momentum behind the implementation, which is why the government’s response to the recommendations around new institutions is so important.
Here’s what the government says it will do around institutions — broadly in line with what the royal commission recommended:
- a new, statutory “Defence and Veterans Services Commission” will be established by September next year. An interim head will be appointed shortly. Its job will be to “oversee system reform across the whole Defence ecosystem as a priority”.
- a new executive agency will be set up within the Veterans’ Affairs portfolio focused on veteran well-being, with the agency to be co-designed in consultation with veterans.
- the establishment of a national peak body of ex-services’ organisations, to address the fragmentation of consultation and lobbying in the veterans’ space.
- an expert committee on veteran research (one of many recommendations intended to address the lack of data around member and veteran well-being — we don’t even have an equivalent to the Pentagon’s annual report on member and veteran suicide at the moment).
- a taskforce within Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) to start implementation of recommendations, using external expertise.
Of these, the Defence and Veterans Services Commission and the PM&C taskforce are the most important (the new agency within DVA, if it works, will be great for veterans, but the bigger task is turning DVA into a functional, user-friendly department that can do the basics for our ex-servicemen and women).
The benefit of locating the implementation taskforce within PM&C is that PM&C has the intra-governmental authority to dictate to Defence, an institution riddled with incompetence and wholly resistant to accountability. Put simply, Defence can’t be trusted to take suicide seriously enough that it will pursue real change, so an external source of pressure is critical. Defence’s failings in relation to recommendation implementation — and Defence’s record shows there will be many — will be in the sights of the prime minister’s department, and prime ministers themselves will be answerable in Parliament for how those failings are being managed.
But taskforces come and go. The permanent Defence and Veterans Services Commission, once it’s up and running, will be tasked with “providing independent oversight and evidence-based advice in order to drive system reform”. In the wrong hands, this commission will be just another agency failing to shift the dial on the factors driving suicidality. In the right hands, it will be the scourge of Defence and DVA, and highlight the failings of state governments, when appropriate. It will be both the watchdog of long-term implementation of complex reforms and the expert on the entire defence/DVA/health/services ecosystem across multiple departments and levels of government, from military justice to mental health services to DVA service performance to what we can learn from other militaries, like the Americans.
It can grapple, for example, with complex problems like privacy — veterans’ families wanted changes to the Privacy Act so that families could override the wishes of members and veterans and access mental health information in order to better care for loved ones; the royal commission decided the case for legislative change hadn’t been made and Defence should be allowed to try to resolve that tension by better education about consent for information-sharing for both members and their families. The government has agreed to that but left the door open to future changes to the Privacy Act to address the issue.
It will be a tough gig, and if the new commission is doing its job well, it won’t have many friends in Canberra or the states. The interim commissioner will thus be crucial: the right choice will mean ensuring the 120-odd royal commission recommendations don’t just end up gathering dust yet again.
The Defence All-Hours Support Line — 1800 628 036 — is a confidential telephone and online service for ADF members and their families. Open Arms — 1800 011 046 — provides 24-hour free and confidential counselling and support for current and former ADF members and their families.
For anyone seeking help, Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue is on 1300 22 4636. To speak to a First Nations crisis supporter, call 13 YARN (13 9276). In an emergency, call 000.
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