Veteran Voices Shape New Foundations for Wellbeing and Advocacy
In a momentous stride toward rebuilding trust and empowerment within Australia’s veteran community, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs has engaged over 1,000 veterans, serving ADF personnel, family members, ex-service organisations (ESOs), and service providers in a landmark co-design process. The outcome is a collaborative blueprint for a new wellbeing agency dedicated to veterans and families, alongside a national ESO peak body that truly represents and amplifies the collective voice of those who served.
Listening, Honouring, Acting
Guided by Deputy Secretary and Taskforce Head Teena Blewitt, DVA embarked on a “discovery” journey capturing the heartfelt and unanimous message from the community: this new wellbeing agency must bridge the trust divide between veterans, their families, and the institutions of DVA and Defence.
Blueprints for the agency emphasise a veteran‑centric culture rooted in empathy, collaboration, adaptability, and lived experience serving as lived expertise. The community expects the agency to speak with integrity, say what it will do and do what it says, defined by independence, openness, and transparency, with families included as core stakeholders, broadly and inclusively.
From Insight to Inclusion
To ensure veterans and their families remain at the heart of this transformation, a national roadshow of information sessions is underway, visiting communities across the country to share findings and refine models for the agency’s design.
Forging a Unified Voice: The ESO Peak Body
The momentum extends to forming an ESO peak body, an organisational framework that veterans and advocacy groups nationwide have long demanded. The vision: an entity that is trusted, independent, outcomes‑focused, serving as a collective voice to government, delivering balanced representation, improved collaboration among ESOs, and a streamlined conduit for DVA‑sector communications.
Consultation insights reveal the community and sector stakeholders envision an entity that:
Advocates powerfully and collectively at government level;
Sets and upholds service standards, spurring accountability;
Simplifies navigation for veterans and families searching for support.
Participants strongly emphasised that the peak body should not function as a regulator, a gatekeeper to legitimacy, nor a frontline service provider, but rather a unifying force to amplify impact and cohesion across the sector.
Grounded in Community, Guided by Co-Design
The robust co‑design framework is supported by a structured, three‑phase methodology, encompassing discovery, blueprint creation, and business case formulation. DVA, in partnership with Nous Group, ThinkPlace, and Professor Mark Evans, has conducted 39 in‑person sessions, 5 virtual engagements, 56 written submissions, 151 online surveys, and 15 stakeholder interviews across all states and territories.
This inclusive and transparent approach is reinforcing that those most affected, veterans and families, must shape the structures intended to serve them.
Pro Patria Centre Perspective
What our veterans have long held dear, trust, purpose, unity, and a sense of shared destiny, is now being woven into the very architecture of their support. Through extensive consultation, heartfelt collaboration, and principled co-design, the DVA is not merely building services, it is rekindling relationships, honoring lived experience, and laying the foundation for an enduring legacy of self-determination and dignity.
These milestones, a veteran-led wellbeing agency and a unified ESO peak body, are not just administrative reforms. They are affirmations: We hear you. We stand with you. We walk alongside you.
