DVA repair being turned into budget control

Dear Editor,

DVA is confusing repair with control.

Veterans were told the system would be fixed after the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide. Instead, DVA now seems focused on making veteran need easier to manage, not easier to meet.

A veteran’s injury becomes a claim. The claim becomes a process. The process becomes a risk. The risk becomes a gate, limit, referral rule or exception pathway.

DVA then calls that reform.

Budget discipline has its place. Fraud should be hunted. Dodgy providers should be cleaned out. But veterans should not become the place where DVA proves to government it can control costs.

Veterans’ affairs was not created to protect the Budget from veterans. It exists because Australia owes a duty to those it sends to serve.

If you send them and you bend them, you mend them.

A cleaner gate is still a gate.

I expand on this argument at markcroxford.net/read

Regards,

Mark Croxford
20-year Navy veteran and
former media and political adviser to a Minister for Veterans’ Affairs

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