Veterans advocate Julie-Ann Finney has a message for the Australian Parliament and she will not be silenced.
Ms Finney has flown into Canberra from Adelaide for every Senate estimates since her son, 38-year-old Royal Australian Navy petty officer David Finney, died by suicide in 2019.
On Tuesday, she sat in the public area of a Senate committee room wearing a t-shirt that read: "Destroy Discard and Die. That's the ADF way."
Ms Finney will be back on Wednesday, when the Defence and Veterans Affairs department secretaries will front estimates, and every day this week.
She won't hear any suggestion that her quiet protest is breaking any rules - although she revealed that she has been questioned by security officers.
"I know what I'm doing, but at the same time, my statements aren't political," she told The Canberra Times.
Visitors to Parliament House can watch proceedings in its chambers or committee rooms, but are not allowed to display advertising or disrupt proceedings. Ms Finney says her shirt does not breach this.
She has a rotation of T-shirts bearing messages ranging from "I'm David's mum" to "Ask me why Dave's dead".
"And I'll get more made up," she said.
Ms Finney started making the T-shirts after growing frustrated by the response to the issues raised at the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicides, which found thousands of current and former ADF members had died by suicide in recent decades.
The Albanese government received the seven-volume final report of the three-and-a-half-year Royal Commission in September and Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles has committed to implementing "the thrust of the report".
But Ms Finney says this is not enough - she wants all 122 recommendations to be followed, because lives are at stake.
"I know that they want me to stop this, but I'm not stopping until I get to a place where I can have a voice," she said.
"They continue to die. They continue to die because of the way they are treated, because of the lack of human rights."
Ms Finney travelled around Australia to attend every Royal Commission hearing, in addition to giving evidence about her son's treatment by the Royal Australian Navy, which she says contributed to his death.
"They used him ... And then, when they finished with him, they destroyed him so that they could discard him, so that he could die," she told this masthead.
"The military justice system needs to be fixed."
As for the Albanese government's $50,000 incentive payment for ADF recruits to stay in the Australian Defence Force beyond their mandatory service period - which Mr Marles announced on Tuesday is being expanded - Ms Finney could not be more blunt.
"Why would we enlist to kill our kids? Why?" she said.
Tasmanian senator Jacqui Lambie, who has spent years advocating on behalf of veterans, told Ten on Tuesday that Mr Marles "can keep throwing out this money, but the reason that they are leaving is because you have leadership issues going on in the military."
"That was brought out very loud and clear during the Royal Commission," Senator Lambie said, calling on the government to "stop tinkering around the edges on this."
"He's not going to get anywhere because what the problem is, the root cause of the issue here is the leadership of our military. And until he starts clearing the decks of those out, people are not going to join."
The senator's advice to potential ADF recruits and their families was: "Don't enlist until it's fixed."
"Do not let your children enlist, because quite frankly, if you didn't hear from the Royal Commission until they fix that leadership problem, it is causing deaths and suicides in the military."
Mr Marles told reporters in Canberra on Tuesday: "We are meeting the challenge of what we inherited, which was a shrinking Defence Force."
He said the government was confident that expanding the bonus would "make a difference" by growing middle ranks of the ADF, those with service of seven to nine years.
