Military doctor who instigated Royal Commission into veteran suicide slams Liberals

The letter below was sent by Afghanistan veteran Dr Dan Mealey(left) to the Liberal Party Executive and every federal Liberal member.

THIS letter is written with a heavy heart, but with clear conviction. It is a letter that ought never have needed writing, had your party remained the bastion of national integrity, strategic competence, and moral leadership that once defined the Liberal Party of Australia. Instead, what now stands is a hollowed institution whose trajectory over the last decade is marked by intrigue, cowardice, and a wilful betrayal of those it sent to war.

I speak not as an ideologue, nor a partisan. I speak as a veteran, a military doctor, and as someone whose work, sacrifice and persistence assisted in bringing about the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide. My credibility is not self-claimed — it is publicly and formally acknowledged by the Commission itself. Commissioner Nick Kaldas, in his opening address to the Royal Commission, thanked me first by name as a key force in bringing that critical national inquiry into being.

For over a decade, the Liberal Party of Australia did not champion the Royal Commission — it obstructed it. When the veteran community cried out for an inquiry into the systemic failures that drove more than 2,000 veterans to suicide, your party offered instead a politically neutered and reputation-sparing mechanism: a “National Commission” you called it— a faux construct, designed to shield Defence hierarchy and Departmental negligence from scrutiny. A betrayal in slow motion, cloaked in bureaucracy.

I was the whistleblower who exposed that betrayal.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s announcement of the National Commission was not an act of leadership — it was a calculated act of political deflection. A covert meeting took place on 12 December 2019, where a select group of civilian medical professionals and other civilian industry stakeholders met with Morrison to dissuade him from a Royal Commission. Every attendee, as per their own correspondence, advised against it. And why? Because the psychiatric framing of suicide would bring funding, power, and contracts. Morality was bypassed for money. Public scrutiny was bartered for reputational insulation.

Your party —  once rooted in Menzian ideals of personal responsibility and institutional accountability — endorsed this subterfuge. Worse, it did so while continuing to send our soldiers to war, praising them in peacetime parades and scapegoating them in peacetime politics.

When the war in Afghanistan ended after two decades — after 22 (twenty-two) deployments for some soldiers — those same soldiers returned to a nation that vilified them. Left-leaning journalists weaponised war stories without context. Military leadership remained mute, forsaking its most loyal warriors. And the Liberal Party, the very institution that committed those troops to battle, turned its back on them when the battles ended.

How dare you.

I wrote at the time to several of your MPs — Andrew Hastie, Phillip Thompson, and James Brown among them. Their responses ranged from silence to apathy. Mr Hastie, now Shadow Minister for Home Affairs, a man who styles himself as the warrior-politician, was perhaps the most galling. Not because of his own military errors — such as authorising a strike that killed two Afghan boys — but because of the hypocrisy with which he judged and condemned others, including soldiers under his own previous command.

In 2015, The Australian reported Mr Hastie was not responsible for those boys’ deaths. Yet by 2016, Mr Hastie admitted responsibility, telling the Herald Sun he “felt sick” after authorising the fatal airstrike. But this admission came a full year after winning his Canning by-election. His silence was tactical. His eventual candour was calibrated.

Contrast this with his treatment of Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith VC, MG — a soldier sent into war by your government, condemned without trial, sacrificed to appease a media class your party once claimed to resist. The Liberal Party, through Mr Hastie, decided who could be guilty, and who could be spared — before any court had its say. This is not justice. It is political opportunism wrapped in the Australian flag (whatever that looks like in 2025).

And so, the culture within the ADF has mirrored the culture within the Liberal Party: protect the officers, damn the diggers. Reward silence, punish integrity. Careers are made through complicity, not courage. Those who demand justice — like myself — have paid dearly. I lost my career, $1.2 million in income, and was rendered homeless in 2020 because I refused to stay silent about the collusion between your government and those who wanted the truth buried. You failed not only veterans, but the entire nation.

And what of the war crimes allegations? The Liberal Party permitted an international trial by media. It allowed soldiers’ reputations to be destroyed without the presumption of innocence, while your own Ministers made selective statements to shape public opinion. Mr Hastie called WO1 John Letch — a soldier photographed drinking from a Taliban’s prosthetic leg — “an honourable man who did the wrong thing.” But when it came to others, like Roberts-Smith, no such grace was offered. The standard shifted depending on rank, influence, and political value. This is not leadership. It is cowardice.

The recent Federal Election was not just a loss — it was a repudiation. Australians saw through the hypocrisy, the careerism, and the moral emptiness. The Liberal Party, which once stood for national service, now stands for self-service. You have become a party of careerists who trade soldiers’ lives for personal advantage, who deploy warriors for geopolitical optics and then discard them when they are no longer useful.

You sent soldiers to war and then abandoned them.

You ignored their suffering until public pressure made it untenable.

You tried to kill the Royal Commission before it could expose your complicity.

And you continue to shelter those responsible for the moral rot at the heart of our military institutions.

If the Liberal Party wishes to survive — not just electorally, but with historical dignity — it must reclaim its moral compass. And that starts with an unqualified, unequivocal, enduring loyalty to the soldiers and military doctors your party sends to war. No more obfuscation. No more optics. No more platitudes.

It is time for moral courage. It is time to tell the truth.

Yours in continued service to Australia,

Dr Daniel J Mealey 

Veteran, Military Doctor.