Two years on from the Defence and Veteran Suicide Royal Commission, the veterans' affairs portfolio remains a mess. The landmark inquiry was heralded as "a once in a generation opportunity" to fix a bureaucracy so broken even its own research found its practices were contributing to mental ill health and suicidality.

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Long before his inquiry ended, commission chair Nick Kaldas publicly criticised decades-long "catastrophic leadership failures" at the highest levels, then identified a systematic overhaul of the department's governing legislation as his first "urgent" interim recommendation. The mid-2021 recommendation was to "simplify and harmonise" the three legislative acts that a 2019 Productivity Commission report labelled "archaic", "byzantine" and "not fit for purpose."

The Turnbull government's response to early campaigning for a royal commission was to bring in the consultants. From 2017 to 2021, PricewaterhouseCoopers was paid a staggering $73 million for a "veteran centric reform" window-dressing exercise including an overhaul of IT systems, with the explicit aim of avoiding "significant legislative reform." The initial 2017-18 contract alone was worth $27.5 million, the biggest consulting contract awarded by the government that year.

Over the next four years these "reforms" cost the taxpayer more than $1 billion and there are major discrepancies in the relevant budget papers. With their foot in the door, PwC and their commercial partners used another $30 million Turnbull grant and their access to private veterans' data to develop the discredited Innowell mental health software platform, then literally gifted it back to themselves.

Nobody has been held to account for these blatant catastrophes and multiple complaints to the National........

© Canberra Times