The Veteran Community needs to Act

I attended the Ex Service Round Table (ESORT) last week at DVA and will provide a back brief to everyone today.  I have three statements to make.

• ESORT does not represent the needs of all members of the veteran and veteran family community.  We need to start a parallel body that does represent the needs of all the community and especially post 2000 veterans and their families.  
• The greatest risk the the successful implementation of the interim recommendations from the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide due out in August and the final recommendations in June 2024 is that the current governance arrangements remain in place.  These need to be replaced by an independent peak body operating outside of the public service.
• The McKinsey Report has been released, although I’m yet to see a full copy.  I have an A3 Overview of what I believe is one aspect.  It’s a good body of enterprise architecture, which essentially means looking at the current state of operations (the broken bits), the future state that we know we need and then throwing all the effort into the future state.  Normally you would move aside anyone that resists the changes.  It has one flaw in that it’s project director is within DVA.  Therefore it’s implementation will not be held to account by an external project director.  I don’t believe it will be delivered.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but we have yet to see widespread improvements to the health and well-being of veterans and their families.  

I invite everyone from our community to register and attend the Virtual Town Hall - The Australian Veteran Community - Good Governance and the Needs of Veterans and our Families at 2pm Eastern time on Thursday 30 June 2022.   Register here.

Ian Lindgren
Vice Chairperson