Radio Interview, FIVEAA Adelaide, Mornings With Leith Forrest

SUBJECTS: Saluting Their Service Commemorative Grants; Defence Recruitment; Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide.

LEITH FORREST, HOST: The Minister for Veterans’ Affairs and Defence Personnel, the Honourable Matt Keogh, is in town. Let's find out why. Minister, good morning.

MINISTER FOR VETERANS’ AFFAIRS AND DEFENCE PERSONNEL, MATT KEOGH: Good morning. Great to be with you.

FORREST: You’re with the local veterans, you're discussing some news today. What can you tell us?

MINISTER KEOGH: I am out meeting some various veteran communities in South Australia today. And later today we'll also be making announcements of grants through the Saluting Their Service Program that we run through the Department of Veterans' Affairs. This is a really important program that rolls out a number of times across the year, which is providing local community level grants of up to $10,000 as well as some larger grants of up to $150,000 to support projects to recognise the service and sacrifice of those that have served in our Defence Force, whether it's been through wars, other conflicts and even in peacekeeping operations. And it's about making sure that whether it's in a local community or whether it's even at a national scale, we properly commemorate that and provide opportunities for people to learn about that sort of service and sacrifice. And the Grant Program just covers so many different sorts of things, as I'm sure many people would expect. It helps with fixing up or upgrading or adding plaques to local memorials, but it also supports things like documentary programs and history books and renovations to important historical sites from the Second World War, for example, across Australia.

FORREST: Well done. How do people put their hat in the ring in terms of the grants and the projects and the activities?

MINISTER KEOGH: Yeah. So, while today I'm announcing some of the grants that are rolling out from an earlier phase of the Program, the next phase of the grants actually closes on the 5th of February. So, organisations that are interested in accessing these grants can go to the DVA website, just search for ‘Saluting Their Service’ and they'll be able to find all the information about that Grant Program and how they can apply, you know, whether they've got a local memorial that needs fixing up, as I said, or even a local school which is looking to install, say, flag poles and a memorial so that they've got an opportunity to properly respect and commemorate service and sacrifice for their school community as well. We do provide grants through this Program to support those and so people can find all that information on the DVA website.

FORREST: What a great initiative. I guess the people that are granted those grants, Minister, I mean, they'd be thrilled, you know, to be able to do that for their public and their community.

MINISTER KEOGH: Look, they absolutely are. And what I find so interesting is when we look at these applications and the sorts of Programs that are supported through these grants is the great diversity of activity that people are looking to do to remember and commemorate that service and to bring that alive in their local community and make it more accessible. And whether that's, you know, I've been to places where, for example, there's gun installation tunnels from the Second World War that people can walk through and understand what that environment was like during the Second World War, to see that in real life. Or it might be the creation of a documentary video series around Lemnos, which is an island off Gallipoli that had the hospitals for those that were requiring attention when they were fighting, when the Anzacs were fighting in Gallipoli and understanding the history there. We have such a significant Greek community here in Australia, especially from Lemnos, in fact. So, being able to bring that to life for people to see that in an actual documentary is incredibly important and it shows you the diversity of what goes on under the grants in these Programs.

FORREST: Well done. Minister for Veterans' Affairs, Defence Personnel Matt Keogh is my guest. Minister, there's a lot to talk about in your field. Recruitment, retention. How are you going with that when it comes to our ADF? 

MINISTER KEOGH: Certainly, recruitment and retention is an incredibly important issue for us. We've seen it in the Defence Strategic Review, the National Defence Strategy. We are now facing as a nation the most complex set of geostrategic circumstances since the Second World War. And it's why we released the Workforce Plan in November last year. We inherited a situation where the numbers in our Defence Force under Peter Dutton's leadership when he was Defence Minister, the numbers were going backwards and we needed to grow the Defence Force. The previous government said it would grow the Defence Force, but didn't fund how that was going to happen. What we have now been able to do is to turn that around. To December, we've seen our numbers in Defence grow by some 9% and we're projecting by the end of this financial year that that growth in recruitment will be over 20%. So, we're really happy to see those recruitment numbers going up, but also that the churn rate, if you like, the separation rate has now reduced to be just over 9%. So, that's the people that were leaving the Defence Force. It's reduced now down to less than the long term historical average. And that's really important because we're retaining more people and we're able to recruit more people as well so that we can meet the trajectory that we've set out in the workforce plan to hit 69,000 personnel by the early 2030s.

FORREST: So, getting more Australian personnel, which is good news for our ADF too. I was reading the Five Eyes countries, you're getting recruitment. Can you explain that to us?

MINISTER KEOGH: That's right. So, we've been, you know, pulling out all the stops, looking at how do we make sure we're in a position to grow our Defence Force as we need to meet our capability requirements. And so as well as growing our local recruitment in terms of Australian citizens, we're also looking at our local recruitment from permanent residents. And so from the 1st of July last year, we enabled permanent residents from New Zealand to be able to sign up to join the Defence Force. And from the 1st of January this year, we allowed the other Five Eyes nation permanent residents. so from the US, the UK, Canada, who had already been living in Australia for over a year, had permanent residency to be able to sign up to join our Defence Force as well. We've got, I think just under 400 New Zealand applications working their way through the pipeline at the moment. But even more exciting in a sense, you know, we're only a few days into January and we've already got applications in from those other Five Eyes countries permanent residents as well. So, that's a scheme that we're quite happy to see that there's quite a bit of interest in as well.

FORREST: When you're talking to the local veterans here in Adelaide today, I guess the other issue is not just present day military, but also those in the past, the issue of mental health, the issue of suicide. I'm sure a lot of people talk to you about that. What are you doing as a government and as an organisation to get on top of that?

MINISTER KEOGH: They absolutely do. And in December we provided the Government's formal response to the Final Report of the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide. The Royal Commission's Final Report had 122 recommendations and we've agreed or agreed in principle to 104 of those recommendations. And the other recommendations, we've referred to a task force in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to work through what we can continue to do on those other recommendations as well. This is an incredibly important issue and that's why we've been so forward leaning to move so quickly. We got the Final Report only in September. By December, we'd released the Government's response to that. To give a very clear mandate to Defence, to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, of the work that needs to happen and to happen quickly. We know that there's a real sense of urgency from the veteran community about addressing these issues, and that's why we've moved very quickly on that. And that's going to be a key priority area of work for us this year in addressing those concerns. And part of that as well is we had an Interim Report from the Royal Commission back in 2022. We've taken action in respect of all of the recommendations that were in that Report. And critically now, the first recommendation was to harmonise and simplify the entitlement system for veterans that supports their rehabilitation and their compensation and access to health services. And we've spent the two years doing the work, consulting with the veteran community. The legislation's gone through the House of Representatives and we're looking forward to seeing it go through the Senate early this year as well, so that we can have a system that's much easier for veterans to understand and to navigate, much easier for Defence, for veteran advocates to be able to support them with those claims, and importantly, quicker for the Department to be able to process their claims so that veterans can get access to the supports and the benefits that they need and deserve in a timely way. So, we're really looking forward to that, being able to pass the Senate early this year so that those changes can be put in place, fixing up that legislation.

FORREST: We are eternally grateful for their service, so well done. We need to be looking after our veterans. Thank you for your time this morning. Before I let you go, what's the biggest issue on your desk, Minister? I'm looking at the LA bushfires and we know that Defence Force personnel don't just go to war zones, but they also help out the community. We've got the AUKUS situation here in Adelaide and the buildings that are going on there. Is there something, as your forecast for 2025, you think you might be busiest with?

MINISTER KEOGH: Well, I think one of the things that's actually really concerning me is that we made huge investments as a government into the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, increasing the number of staff, because we inherited this backlog of claims, some 42,000 claims that had not even been looked at by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs when we came into government. We increased the resourcing and the staff in the Department to get through that backlog, which we've done, and we've made sure that processing times for claims have come down. And yet Peter Dutton and the Liberals are saying that they want to cut back on staff numbers, they want to cut back on that funding, and that concerns me because that will just see a new backlog created on these veterans claims not being processed. I think that's one of the big issues in this portfolio area for 2025 in an election year.

FORREST: Well, good luck with it, Minister. Appreciate your time. Welcome to Adelaide. Thanks. 

MINISTER KEOGH: Thank you very much.

FORREST: All the best. Matt Keogh is the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs and Defence Personnel. He's in Adelaide today meeting with local veterans and also announcing the outcome of some of the Defence Force grants. It's called Saluting Their Service.