I was 29, a newly widowed single mother, sitting in front of three Veterans’ Review Board lawyers, desperately pleading my case as to why my baby daughter and I should get support.
My husband Josh had gone to Afghanistan healthy, and come back with a brain tumour. Naturally, I thought that the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the organisation that we’re told would be there for us in times like this, would be… well… there for us.
It was not that simple.
While navigating deep, deep grief, I set off through the DVA claim process, but it didn’t take long for a horrible realisation to dawn on me. Due to the way that the Repatriation Medical Authority had categorised brain cancer, a disease we know very little about, I was unlikely to receive any support whatsoever.
After my claim was initially rejected, I appealed and appealed and appealed.
Eventually, this would lead to me sitting in front of these three intimidating lawyers.
At the hearing, I read out a statement, highlighting all the things Josh had achieved during his time in the Air Force. About how he was one of the youngest operators to achieve 200 hours of active service overseas. About the silver commendation he received for the impactful work he did after being considered non-deployable. And more importantly than that, about the impact his death had on us; on my daughter who will never get to meet her superhero Dad, his family and mates, and on me, who was terrified, lost and alone.
I finished my statement with this: “To you it may be a box that can’t be ticked, or a process that can’t be followed – but for me it is the ability to maintain a quality of life for my child that Josh and I had planned to provide. The one she deserves. If that doesn’t fit into one of your boxes, then maybe you need some new ones.”
My appeal was rejected again.
I look back on the decade that followed, and there are so many moments where I could have given up. Moments that I was ashamed of at the time.
The eating disorder. The post-natal depression. The suicidal thoughts, including the “car accident” that nearly took me from my daughter too. All of these things were difficult to navigate, alongside grief and single parenting, but none of that compared to the one looming truth that sat on my shoulders throughout this whole time: nobody cared.
As far as these support systems like DVA were concerned, once my veteran was gone, I also ceased to exist.
It makes me wonder how many people like me have given up on their fight to get the support they deserve. People who have taken no for an answer. People who feel they have nowhere to go in this community, or worse, that they’re not a part of this community at all.
But every time I thought, “I should stop. Walk away. Focus on what I do have in my life,” there was another voice that answered. “Or, what if I don’t?”.
And so I didn’t.
Statement of Principles (SoP) are documents introduced in the 1990s by the Repatriation Medical Authority to determine whether an illness or injury is accepted as service-related.
The SoP I was looking at said that Josh’s brain tumour had to have popped up “at least two years” post-deployment. “At least two years”. Four words. That’s what stopped my daughter and I from receiving anything.
So, I figured, this SoP needed to change.
At the time, I worked in the neurology space, and had connections to neuro-oncologists and other specialists. Brain cancer is idiopathic, meaning we don’t know what causes it, or why it shows up when it does. This meant that, regardless of any connections I might have had in the space, the difficulty actually lies with the fact that the scientific evidence is still evolving.
Since the 90s, the SoP system has been very good at answering the question: “What evidence do we need to prove this condition is service-related?”, and for some, this “SoP system” works.
But for me, I needed a different question: “What if the evidence doesn’t exist yet?”
Over the last two decades, Australia has seen a series of exposure controversies. From the F-111 Deseal/Reseal “goop troop” workers, to concerns over “forever chemicals” in firefighting foam, to the one that Josh experienced first-hand – the burn pits in the Middle East.
In each of these scenarios, we knew that veterans were exposed, and yet each time, the burden of establishing a causal connection between illness and service rested on the family, who were required to prove what that exposure did to them.
I began to look at what other countries were doing, especially the Five Eyes countries that we served alongside. Canada and the UK were examining occupational presumptions, and in the United States, the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act (the PACT Act) was signed into law in August 2022. Under the PACT Act, the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) presumes there’s a service connection for certain conditions, changing where the burden of proof lies.
When I went on to the VA website, guess what the first condition listed as presumptive was?
Yep. Brain cancer.
I kept thinking about how we ask our defence personnel to do more than the average civilian. We ask them to expose themselves to different environments and strange insects, work with chemicals, carcinogens, and withstand levels of radiation that most Australians would never be exposed to. In some cases, we don’t have a full understanding of what these exposures even are, let alone their effect on the body.
So, when our service personnel are experiencing conditions before a statistically significant number of civilians are, meaning we don’t have enough data or experience to do the research required to create an evidence-based SoP, what then?
By this point, I had built my own community of support within my local RSL Sub-Branch and Legacy Club. I was starting to connect with other families and veterans in the space who had similar stories to tell. I also heard stories that were much, much worse than what I’d been through. Stories of domestic violence and suicide. Stories of mental injury, grief and identity loss.
But what I also heard was a solution forming: this community wanted a Royal Commission.
I met the then-Victorian State Minister for Veterans, Shaun Leane MP. In one of our first meetings, Shaun said something that really stuck with me about our veterans submitting claims for support: “What if we just believed them?”.
By this time, I was aware that there were other families experiencing the same issue. Others slipping through the cracks, but with no avenue or vehicle to change things. Then something dawned on me. Fixing the specifics of my SoP might have helped my daughter and I, but it wasn’t going to help the majority of families.
We needed a system that recognised that when clear patterns emerged in the illnesses veterans experienced following a particular service or exposure, these illnesses should be presumed to be connected to service, rather than requiring each family to prove the connection individually from scratch.
And so, for me, the concept of Presumptive Liability was born (although I wasn’t calling it that yet).
So, a Royal Commission, you say? I’m in.
I joined the ranks of community advocates who were calling for the establishment, many of them bereaved family members just like me, and on 19 April 2021, the Government announced the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide.
This was a landmark moment, and a great first step, but we knew it wasn’t enough on its own.
We knew that the Royal Commission would be operating under a Terms of Reference (ToR), a document that sets out what the commission is required to investigate, the scope of its inquiry, its objectives, and any specific matters it has to report on.
So, it was important that this ToR was focusing on the right things.
I don’t know what Josh did overseas. I’m not allowed to. I sat in front of those three VRB lawyers and read out what his mates had told me. How the radiation in the air made their torches light up spontaneously. How all manner of things were thrown haphazardly into the burn pits nearby. It was all third-hand knowledge, and without his mates, I would have had nothing at all.
When the official ToR was published, I went through it with a fine-tooth comb.
There. The stipulation that the Commission was directed to examine “systemic issues and common themes” and make recommendations about “improving the systems, policies, practices and procedures”. A complete review of the system, not just the specific compensation rules, was exactly what we needed to instate a PresumptiveLiability structure. Perfect.
The ToR also stated that the Commission is explicitly empowered to recommend “changes to laws, policies, practices and procedures”.
This means the Commission would have the authority to expand presumptive conditions, alter evidentiary thresholds, change the burden of proof, and introduce new exposure-based presumptions. We were on our way.
The Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicides was a huge achievement for the many advocates and families that contributed to it, but man, was it difficult for us.
We attended hearings in person, and listened in on the ones we couldn’t. We learned about experiences that had led to events that were absolutely soul-crushing. We retraumatised ourselves and each other, over and over, again and again. And we learned that what happened to us had a more profound impact on our lives than we’d realised.
On the 9th of September 2024, after over 3 years of harrowing, brutal honesty, the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide handed down its final report.
And there it was: Recommendation 95: Support the expanded application of ‘presumptive liability’
Then, on the 13th of February 2025 (Josh’s birthday), the Veterans’ Entitlements, Treatment and Support (Simplification and Harmonisation) Act 2025 (the VETS Act) was passed.
It is the biggest reform to Australia’s veteran support system in more than a century.
As part of the VETS Act, DVA will be able to identify certain injuries and diseases on a presumptive basis. It provides a genuine alternative for those families where the SoP structure doesn’t work.
For those conditions, the system no longer starts from a place of doubt. It starts from a place of understanding.
When I sat in front of those three VRB lawyers, I knew that what was happening wasn’t right.
They told me I didn’t fit their box, and even though it took nearly a decade, they finally built a different one.
And along the way, I learned I was never standing there alone.