Delahunty Catherine: Veterans’ Support Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Veterans’ Support Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 22 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19308. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):I rise to take a short call. I am sure there will be space for others to do so as well at this Committee stage on the Veterans’ Support Bill. I want to speak about the real cost of the health issues associated with some veterans and about experiences that I have had both those in my partner’s family with his father and with the Viet Nam veterans whom I travelled this country with on a tour called People Poisoned Daily.We cannot underestimate the real cost of the trauma of war. I personally do not believe anyone comes back without being traumatised. I do not believe that killing or being killed and witnessing people being killed can do anything except damage and create trauma which has to be addressed at some level—as well as all of the other more noble sentiments. When I see the psychological pain that gets carried and passed on down the generations I think there is a really great need for the resources to support veterans to recover from some of that trauma. I am thinking of people who went to Afghanistan and were extremely traumatised in ways that you would not even imagine from participating in what was supposedly not even really our war.However the one I want to focus on is the Viet Nam veterans and the experience that they had because it relates to this bill and the costs—the real health costs. One of the members Melissa Lee talked about whether you can be 100 percent disabled. When people are exposed to agent orange which is dioxin they can indeed be alive but 100 percent disabled—not only themselves but their children and grandchildren. So we are talking about intergenerational poisonous effects from a chemical that was manufactured in some places in this country and used to destroy the population of Viet Nam and to destroy the jungle. It is a defoliant and it is a toxic chlorinated persistent chemical but it also affected the bodies of our veterans. For whatever reason they went to Viet Nam—and I was not a supporter and I still am not—they did not expect that they would be poisoned and their families would be poisoned and their children would be poisoned and their wives’ lives would be affected and that they would be compromised by exposure to a defoliant.When we travelled the country with the People Poisoned Daily tour the veterans told us their stories. These stories are not pretty stories. They are stories of a multiplicity of effects that are difficult to diagnose let alone fix. So it is not a matter of just identifying a health issue and getting the funds to pay to fix it. Dioxin poisoning cannot be fixed and it has intergenerational effects such as birth defects and heart conditions in the children and the grandchildren. The exposure to dioxin that those soldiers experienced has been passed on through the generations. I have met the people who have been affected. So it is not just about the soldiers. One of the reasons we were touring was that the soldiers were sick of trying to tell people that it was not just them; they wanted their children and grandchildren acknowledged as well.There is a lot of rhetoric about war in this Chamber and a lot of rhetoric about service but actually the reality is that people who come back damaged like that are entitled to be looked after and we have to be listening a lot harder to them. So I was very concerned when I heard their stories about how little support they actually had. I was very very concerned to see the effects that that dioxin poisoning had on these people and on their families—the real price of throwing poisons around in a war zone. When you see the phosphorous bombs that are falling on Gaza today and tonight and the cluster bombs that were used in Afghanistan and the uranium that was used in Iraq the endless use of chemicals we have to realise that we are creating a cost for these people not only the soldiers but the citizens of those countries who live with the permanent effects. We should apologise to the Viet Namese people for that if nothing else. And we should protect these veterans with these long-term consequences. Their children and their grandchildren are going to need help because they have been poisoned by one of the worst chemicals ever used on this planet. It is still used in other forms but no longer called agent orange and no longer used in quite the same way. We have found new ways to include toxic chemicals in war. We have found new ways to poison and destroy people and create cancer because the—