There are moments in politics that reveal exactly what a minister thinks of the people in their care. For Veterans’ Affairs Minister Matt Keogh, that moment came on Monday night, in a room at Parliament House, in front of five veterans who had travelled to Canberra to beg him to reconsider a policy they say is already costing lives.
According to those in the room, Keogh did not offer a handshake. He sat down with his arms crossed. He rolled his eyes. And by his own admission, delivered only after days of mounting pressure, he had already refused their request for a meeting entirely, forcing them to escalate to a public campaign before he would even agree to see them.
This is not a minor lapse in courtesy. This is the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, on the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan, treating a delegation of former Australian Defence Force personnel, a GP who once flew fighter jets, a mother whose son took his own life, a Special Forces veteran, as an inconvenience standing between him and a function at Government House.
Former RAAF-pilot turned GP Tim Nelson did not mince words describing the encounter. He told a Canberra press conference the minister made his reluctance to be there obvious from the moment he walked in, and complained openly about missing an appointment with the Governor-General. Nelson said the department has lost his confidence entirely, and that the $5,000 allied health cap “needs to be scrapped”.
Julie-Ann Finney, whose son David took his own life in 2019 and whose advocacy helped force the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide, went further still, accusing Keogh of gaslighting her and treating veterans with outright contempt. Her verdict was blunt: his position is no longer tenable. She wanted to know why anyone would sign up to serve a country whose Minister for Defence Personnel, in her words, simply does not care about them.
Special Forces veteran Andrew “Horse” Hudson backed up the account of the frosty reception, and warned that the policy the minister is defending was built on flawed advice, with no thought given to the damage it would do to the veteran community, a community he says is already losing people to suicide over a cap that has not even taken effect yet.
Confronted in Question Time, Keogh did what political survivors do: he apologised for the part that was easiest to concede. He admitted he was wrong to knock back the original meeting request. What he did not concede was the substance of the allegations against his conduct once the meeting finally happened, insisting he told the group to relax and that he shook hands with everyone before they left.
It is a convenient version of events. It is also one that expects veterans, several of whom have already buried friends and family members to suicide, to accept his word over their own account of what they experienced in that room.
None of this would matter half as much if the policy itself were not so brutal in its consequences. From July 2027, veterans will face an annual $5,000 ceiling on allied health spending, part of a push to strip roughly $779 million out of the veterans’ portfolio over four years.
Departmental officials have admitted under questioning that Australia has never before capped veterans’ allied health care in this way.
Labor insists the change targets overservicing and rogue providers, and that the average veteran spends well under the threshold. Advocates counter that averages mean nothing to the minority with complex PTSD, chronic injuries or ongoing mental health crises, the very veterans who need weekly care the most, and who now face an extra bureaucratic hurdle at the exact moment they can least afford one.
Campaigners say four veterans have already taken their own lives since the cap was announced.
At Senate Estimates in June, the department’s own secretary conceded it has “no service delivery capacity” for veterans in acute crisis, an admission that came after Senator Pauline Hanson read out the case of a suicidal veteran turned away by three separate Brisbane hospitals in one night, with departmental officials able to offer nothing beyond a suggestion to call triple zero.
The backlash has not stayed confined to advocacy groups. Shadow Minister Phil Thompson, a decorated veteran wounded in Afghanistan, has said plainly that he has lost faith in Keogh’s ability to put veterans first, and called for his removal from the portfolio outright.
Nationals leader Matt Canavan questioned how a minister could prioritise drinks with the Governor-General over meeting people suffering under his own policy. Former Victorian Liberal president Michael Kroger described the disrespect shown to veterans as one of the most egregious acts in Australian politics, and asked what exactly it takes to be sacked under this Prime Minister.
And what of Anthony Albanese? Faced with a delegation in visible distress, the Prime Minister managed only a corridor handshake and a referral to his advisers. He did not personally show up to vote against the Coalition’s censure motion targeting his own minister.
He has, so far, offered nothing more than a promise to “look into” scrapping the cap, while his government gives no indication the $5,000 threshold is actually going anywhere.
Keogh, for his part, says there are still ten months before the policy takes effect, plenty of time, he insists, to get it right. Veterans who have already lost friends to this policy, and a minister accused to his face of rolling his eyes at their grief, might be forgiven for asking why they should trust him to get anything right at all.
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