Support for veterans

I REFER to Chris Wighton’s letter (20/4) regarding mental health treatment for our veterans.

In last year’s Budget, the Government made mental health treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety and alcohol and substance use disorders free for anyone who has served one day fulltime in the Australian Defence Force.

The veteran does not have to prove the condition was related to their service.

For more information, call the Department of Veterans’ Affairs on 1800 555 254 or visit www.dva.gov.au/nlhc.

The Veterans and Veterans Families Counselling Service also offers free and confidential counselling for veterans and their families 24/7 on 1800 011 046. Dan Tehan, Minister for Veterans 1607: Captain John Smith lands in Virginia with the first group of colonists to establish a permanent English settlement in America. 1828: Russia declares war on Turkey. 1865: John Wilkes Booth, assassin of US President Abraham Lincoln, is surrounded and killed by troops near Bowling Green, Virginia. 1872: Civil war breaks out in Spain. 1890: Banjo Paterson’s poem The Man from Snowy River is published in Sydney, as a supplement to The Bulletin magazine. 1923: The Duke of York, the future King George VI, marries Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in Westminster Abbey. 1942: At least 1540 die in the world’s worst mining disaster in Benxi, Japanese-occupied China. 1964: African nations of Tanganyika and

Zanzibar merge to form Tanzania. 1966: A sidewinder missile, launched by a US jet plane, shoots down the first Communist MIG-21 in the Vietnam War. 1986: The world’s worst nuclear accident occurs at the Chernobyl plant in the Soviet Union. 1989: Death of US comedy actress

Lucille Ball (above), aged 77. 1994: South Africa holds its first all-race elections for the national assembly and provincial parliaments.