This year for National Homelessness Week, it’s time we put a spotlight on the veteran homelessness crisis throughout Australia. Despite putting their lives on the line for their country, almost 6000 veterans experience homelessness every year, compared to 1.9 per cent of the broader population.
The fact that we allow our veteran community to shoulder this disproportionate burden is unacceptable – especially when you consider all the ways that our government could be doing more but is choosing not to.
Take the Officer Training Unit in Scheyville National Park, NSW, for example. This historic military site has 80 abandoned rooms that could quite easily be repurposed into crisis accommodation for just as many homeless veterans. Yet our local and state governments and the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) refuse to allow this to happen.
Meanwhile, there are veterans who I’ve found sleeping rough in the National Park itself. Why are we letting these rooms sit empty when we have thousands of veterans who desperately need a safe place to sleep?
This is just another example of the lack of support and dehumanisation our veterans face when they return to civilian life. Most Australians couldn’t imagine the levels of discipline, training, and experience needed to be in the Australian Defence Force (ADF). Yet when our veterans are discharged, they’re told they have no skills for employment and no chance of getting a rental due to a lack of rental history.
I recently spoke with a veteran who was struggling with this extreme lack of support following a medical discharge from the infantry. After 15 years of service, this man returned to civilian life only to find that he couldn’t get a job, a rental property, or even a DVA staff member to look at his support claim. Things soon became so difficult that he was forced to live out of his car while his wife and two children moved back to WA to live with family.
As devastating as this story is, it’s one I’ve heard hundreds of times before. This is what happens when we ignore the needs of our veterans: we break up families, put people on the streets, push them to the brink of mental illness, and tell them they’re not good enough despite their years of sacrifice and hard work.
In the case of the young man I met recently, this dehumanisation stripped him of all the pride he once felt from being a member of the ADF. Now, he doesn’t tell people he’s a veteran for fear of being judged or labelled as useless.
We didn’t need the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide to figure out why Australia’s heroes are taking their own lives. What we need is to fix this broken system that works against veterans at every turn.
It can’t – and shouldn’t – be up to charities like Taskforce Veteran to tackle the broken system alone. I challenge Australia’s decision makers to speak with these heroes for five minutes and still come away defending the system that leaves so many feeling hopeless and ashamed.
What we need is for our leaders and communities to acknowledge and fix the system that is nothing but a disservice to Australia’s bravest men and women. Until then, we must live with the shame of overlooking the very people who commit their lives to safeguarding our country.
Brett Wild established Taskforce Veteran in 2018, after more than a decade in the Australian Defence Force, to support the wellbeing of past, present and future veterans and their families during the transition to civilian life.
