I’m looking at a letter dated 23 April 2019 signed jointly by Bernadine MacKenzie, Head of Veterans’ Affairs and Air Marshal Kevin Short, Chief of Defence Force, sent to Parliament’s Regulations Review Committee concerning the indexation of service entitlements.

An extract … “This increase (in the tobacco excise) does mechanically affect the CPI but does not provide a principle reason for adjusting social assistance to compensate for it.”

That the government’s two principal advisers on veterans’ issues should be so crass as to refer to service entitlements as social assistance simply beggars belief.   Veterans are not and never have been social welfare beneficiaries.     Both the Veterans’ Support Act 2014 (for all its faults) and the War Pensions Act 1954 (its predecessor) recognised the debt of gratitude owed by government to those prepared to put their lives of the line in service to their country and mandated a whole range of entitlements not available to anyone else.   Those entitlements can never be classed as social assistance and it is totally demeaning to the veteran community for them to described as such.

OK, the letter was surely drafted by one of their minions.    But they signed it and, like Truman, the buck stops with them.    MacKenzie and Short should reflect on their injudicious choice of words and offer the veteran community an unqualified apology for using them.   Anything less and they will forfeit any respect due to them.