2026 Veterans’ Affairs Budget deserves much closer scrutiny than it’s getting

After the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide, veterans were promised structural reform. Instead, the Budget now introduces a $5000 Annual Monetary Limit on allied health, lets Invictus Australia funding fall away, and keeps other supports temporary, tapered or conditional.

That is not what many veterans heard when the government accepted the Royal Commission’s recommendations. They heard a promise that care would move closer, delay would shrink, and the system would stop treating them as claims, costs and workloads.

The Department of Veterans’ Affairs and its predecessors were built on a national obligation, not charity. Billy Hughes gave voice to that obligation in the promise: “When you come back, we will look after you.”

My formulation is – when you send them and you bend them, you mend them.

I have set out the argument in more detail on my Substack, here. 

Veterans should not be asked to settle for the language of reform while the Budget rebuilds the old cages in cleaner administrative prose.

Regards
Mark Croxford
Navy veteran and former media and political adviser to Minister for Veterans’ Affairs 2000-2001

.

.

ChatGPT_image

.

.


.


.