Last week, the National Press Club in Canberra hosted two major press conferences, one day apart. The first was a desperate plea for attention from Nick Kaldas, the Chair of the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicides. The second was an all-out attack on the Voice to Parliament, via Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians.
While Senator Price’s inflammatory comments were gleefully reported by mainstream media everywhere, Nick Kaldas’s words were soon lost in the news cycle, despite the fact that veteran suicides are claiming twenty times as many lives as those lost in combat, without counting people who served before 1985.
That’s at least 1,600 deaths between 1997 and 2020.
Nick Kaldas is a remarkable character, born in Egypt. He worked as a policeman in Australia from 1981, investigating numerous homicides, then spent twenty years as a hostage negotiator.
He rose to become Assistant Commissioner of NSW Police, worked for the United Nations, then became Chair of the current Royal Commission.
National crisis
It’s most unusual for Royal Commissioners to front the media before their work is complete, but Mr Kaldas said he was driven to this step by decades of government and defence force inaction, and an almost complete lack of interest in the veteran suicide issue from the media.
He noted that for every suicide, approximately another 135 people are impacted. ‘Rarely, a week goes by that this Royal Commission isn’t alerted to the untimely death of another serving or ex-serving member,’ said Mr Kaldas. ‘It’s unquestionably a national crisis.’
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is a former deputy mayor of Alice Springs, and a woman so useful to the IPA, Murdoch media empire and Liberal-National Party coalition that if she didn’t exist they would have had to invent her.
Blossoming under the tutelage of Barnaby Joyce and Michaelia Cash, she says the kinds of things that John Howard and Tony Abbott used to say before they became unacceptable, providing cover for the most racist and divisive politicking imaginable, while simultaneously claiming Anthony Albanese is the source of all division engulfing the country.
Gems from Senator Price’s press conference included that her opponents wanted to ‘demonise colonial settlement in its entirety and nurture a national self-loathing about the foundations of modern Australian achievement’, that Indigenous Australians already had adequate political representation, and that there were ‘no ongoing negative impacts of colonisation’.
Turning point?
For Andrew Bolt on Murdoch’s Sky News, this sort of nonsense amounted to a ‘turning point’ in Australian race relations.
In Jacinta-world, tap water and supermarkets are an adequate replacement for obliterated culture. The generational trauma of convict descendants is equivalent to survivors of ethnic genocide. If you have a go you get a go, regardless of your skin colour or background, and the most dangerous people to watch out for are Aboriginal men. Sound familiar?
Senator Price, like Senator Pauline Hanson, is always the victim, regardless of her well-paid positions and increasingly amplified megaphone. ‘I’ve been told I’m a sellout. I’ve been racially abused, vilified, name-called and threatened with violence. And why? Because I want to stop children from being abused,’ she said.
Of course her attacks on others, including her former colleague on the Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council, Professor Marcia Langton, have nothing to do with it.
Missing in action
For Nick Kaldas, everyone from the Prime Minister down has a role to play in preventing the spiralling deaths of military veterans to suicide, with the Department of Defence currently doing no more than going through the motions.
He called for the country to unite over the issue, which was touching so many families.
‘It’s not enough to support and reflect on the sacrifices of our veterans only on days of commemoration and remembrance,’ he said. ‘Australia has let down its veterans for far too long.’
The Chief of the Australian Defence Force, General Angus Campbell, was present but left immediately after Nick Kaldas’ speech. The PM had other commitments.
While the main venue at the National Press Club continues to be renovated, the big-hitting speakers keep coming, with Warren Mundine and Noel Pearson on the way soon. Sadly, in any contest between unity and division in modern Australia, particularly when the media is involved, division seems destined to win.
If this story has raised any issues, current and former ADF veterans and relatives can get help from Open Arms on 1800 011 046, or Lifeline on 131 114.
Originally from Canberra, David Lowe is an award-winning film-maker, writer and photographer with particular interests in the environment and politics. He’s known for his campaigning work with Cloudcatcher Media.
Long ago, he did work experience in Parliament House with Mungo MacCallum.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
