Stop making veterans carry records between two Commonwealth agencies
Service records and service medical records are held by Defence. The veteran obtains them and gives them to DVA. Two agencies of the same government, and the person with post-traumatic stress disorder is the courier.
Steps this would change
Rationale
The longest applicant-side step in the DVA claim process is assembling evidence — modelled at 120 days, and the largest single component of the pre-allocation wait.
Much of that evidence is not the veteran's to produce in any meaningful sense. It is their service record, their service medical record, their unit history, their deployment record. All of it was created by the Commonwealth, is held by the Commonwealth, and is being requested by the Commonwealth.
The veteran's role in this step is largely administrative: to request records from one agency and forward them to another. They are the transport layer.
The specific costs of that arrangement:
- It is slow, because a request-and-forward cycle between two agencies with a person in the middle takes longer than a transfer between two agencies.
- It falls on the least suitable person to bear it. The population making these claims includes people with post-traumatic stress disorder, acquired brain injury and severe depression. Document-chasing is precisely the class of task that condition makes hardest, and the royal commission found the burden of the process itself contributes to harm.
- It produces incomplete claims, which arrive at DVA missing material, which generates a request for further information, which lengthens the queue — the same request-for-information loop that dominates visa processing, in a population far less able to absorb it.
The proposal is that lodging a claim authorises DVA to obtain the relevant service and service-medical records from Defence directly, and that records transfer automatically on separation so that DVA already holds them when a claim arrives years later.
Who acts: Defence and DVA. One government, two departments, no other jurisdiction, no legislation obviously required beyond authorisation and privacy handling.
What is being traded away
Automatic transfer of medical records is a genuine privacy question and the veteran's consent matters. A person who separates from the ADF has not thereby agreed that their full medical history should sit in another department's system indefinitely against a claim they may never make. Some will object strongly, and they are entitled to. Any version of this needs the transfer to be authorised by the veteran — at separation, or at lodgement — rather than assumed, and needs the scope tied to what a claim actually requires.
Bulk transfer creates a bulk breach risk. Consolidating service medical records for the entire separated ADF population into a second department multiplies the consequence of a single failure, and these are records whose disclosure could affect employment, insurance and security clearances.
Defence records are incomplete, and shifting the burden does not fix that. Conditions that were never reported during service — which for mental health is a very large share, precisely because reporting carried career consequences — appear nowhere in the service record. A veteran will still have to establish those connections themselves, and a reform that assumes the records hold the answer may make the system less willing to look beyond them. That would be a serious regression for exactly the claims that matter most.
And the estimate is ours. Ninety days is a modelled figure. DVA does not publish how long claimants spend assembling evidence, nor what share of claims arrive requiring further information and why. Those two numbers would size this reform properly and neither exists.
Precedent
The Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide examined data sharing between Defence and DVA directly. Automatic transfer of records on separation, and on claim lodgement, requires no new information to be collected from anyone.
Sources
- Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide, interim report 2022 and final report September 2024, including findings on the claims process and on Defence-DVA information sharing
- DVA, published claim processing times as at 30 June 2026