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

Dear Editor,

Labor’s abandoned $5000 veterans’ allied-health cap exposed a bigger problem.

Veterans’ Affairs needs to rediscover the first principle of repatriation – the nation has an obligation to those it sends to serve and who are harmed by that service.

My shorthand is simple:

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

Fraud, waste and dodgy providers should be pursued relentlessly. But veterans’ healthcare should never be forced to fit inside Treasury and Department of Finance arithmetic.

Scrapping the cap fixed one bad policy.

The bigger job is making repatriation, rather than budget arithmetic, the north star of veterans’ policy.

I expand on this at markcroxford.net/read

Mark Croxford
Founder, Veterans Count
20-year Navy veteran, and
former media and political adviser to a Minister for Veterans’ Affairs and Minister for Defence Personnel

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