The Squiz 

After 3 years, 6,000 submissions and hundreds of witness statements, the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide handed in its final report yesterday. It’s a big one – 7 volumes and 122 recommendations aimed to prevent the 3 suicides of serving or ex-defence members every fortnight in Australia. The report calls that statistic “unacceptably high” but says, given it comes from data collected between 1985 and 2021, the numbers “underestimate the scale of the problem”.

Give me the main points…

The big takeaway is a recommendation to set up a new body to support former Australian Defence Force (ADF) members’ transition to civilian life when their military careers wind down. The idea is for that organisation to be run by people with defence experience who would help veterans with their compensation and rehab needs, along with connecting them to health services and monitoring their ongoing mental health. A few other notable recommendations involve setting up an inquiry into sexual violence in the ADF, improving training for recruits to encourage “help-seeking behaviours”, introducing “measures to reduce the frequency of relocation” for ADF members and their families, and a national register of suicides for current and former ADF personnel.

How’s that gone down?

With all eyes on the ADF and its response, Chief Admiral David Johnston and Department of Defence Secretary Greg Moriarty released a statement yesterday saying it was “sobering” to hear the accounts, “particularly where Defence has let people down”. They reckon implementing recommendations “will require significant reform”, but they’re “committed to doing better”. How far it goes will be up to the Albanese Government, but yesterday Defence Minister Richard Marles apologised for the failures over “many, many years”. He said the government will respond to the report “in a manner which is timely” and “with complete thoroughness”. That’s something the Coalition’s Veterans’ Affairs spokesperson Barnaby Joyce wants – he’s pushing to “get it resolved” sooner rather than later “out of respect for those who died”.

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