Tribunal upholds WW2 medical claim

A tribunal has ruled that a man's heart disease stemmed from the anxiety triggered by his war service in the 1940s.

Joseph Onorato was 90 years old when he died of heart disease in 2008.

He had served as an Australian soldier in the Second World War, but that was not of any particular note to anyone but family and friends those 63 years later. Now, it is.

Ron Sutton has the story.

Did an Italian-born Australian soldier from the Second World War die six decades later in part because of the horrors of war and ethnic taunts he faced from a commanding officer?

An appeals tribunal says yes, entitling his widow to a range of benefits, and the Legacy charity group that supported her says it could now revisit hundreds of other potential cases.

The Legacy group has supported the families of Australia's military dead for almost 90 years.

But Sydney Legacy chairman Andrew Condon says the ruling on the death of a Sydney man named Joseph Onorato may open a door that has never been opened.

"What it means is, in the way determinations are made in regard to claims for pensions, there is really a change to the standard of proof.

"There is essentially a chain of causation associated from members' service to their death, and, previously, what was required were standards of proof at each link in that chain of causation.

"And that was based on a legal term, or concept, known as balance of probability. Now, with this ruling, that is reduced to an assessment, really, of reasonable hypothesis. And so it actually reduces the burden of proof, if I can use that term, quite significantly."

Joseph Onorato, an Italian immigrant, died in 2008 at age 90, from heart disease.

The Administrative Appeals Tribunal ruled the hypertension that caused his heart disease stemmed from the anxiety triggered by his war service from 1942 to '45.

A psychiatrist told the tribunal of two key components to that wartime anxiety.

First, at the Cowra prisoner-of-war camp in New South Wales, Mr Onorato was deeply upset after finding the body of a Japanese officer who committed ritual suicide.

As well, Mr Onorato suffered long-term bullying from his own commanding officer calling him a dago, a derogatory term for people of Latin race, especially Italian.

A son, Tony Onorato, says he never knew about his father's travail over the suicide until a Veterans' Affairs psychologist called him after talking with his father when he was 85.

The suicide, it turned out, had played on his mind all those years, causing him to wake at night with tremors, covered in sweat.

"Dad was a gentle soul, that's the thing. He always saw the best in people. That's why he had a very soft spot for the Japanese soldiers -- and even the Italian soldiers and other soldiers that he was looking after.

"He just had a soft nature about him. He didn't see them as ... as bad people. He obviously saw them as, you know, they were doing a duty for their country. And that's the way he viewed life."

Joseph Onorato's wife, Carmel, had known the story of her husband walking into the prisoners' toilet at 2 o'clock in the morning to find the Japanese officer dying from suicide.

But she, too, had stayed quiet through the years, as her generation so often did.

Carmel Onorato knew, too, about the abuse from his own officer, abuse he endured for a long while before finally telling a superior officer and getting it stopped.

She says that treatment was a continuation from the school days of pre-war Australia and affected not only soldiers from the Italian community.

"In the same way that the Italians, the Greeks, the Lebanese, when they went in the schools before -- and they stopped after that -- they called them wog, they called them dago, you know? If they were born in England, that didn't matter."

Joseph Onorato had migrated from Italy with his family in 1935 at age 17.

Tony Onorato says his father, who served in New Guinea during the war, still had a thick Italian accent upon entering the army, which perhaps made him a particular target.

But Legacy's Andrew Condon says the veterans' mental-health issues often have gone unexposed over the years because the stigma surrounding them provoked silence.

He says the cases from the Second World War have been the most difficult to prove because the stigma was strongest then.

Those men and women virtually never sought help, so there were no records of anxiety which could link them to hypertension, then heart disease.

Now, Andrew Condon says, with the burden of proof lightened by Mr Onorato's case, Legacy will take another look at all of its mental-health cases.

"We handled here in Sydney Legacy last year about 206 cases through the Veterans' Review Board, where we had our Sydney Legacy advocates represent cases. And we think, of that 200-odd, we'll go back and probably find about 30 to 40 that probably deserve another look.

"What that means then on a state basis ... because we probably handle, of the war widows' pension claims, about 60 to 70 per cent of them ... so that brings the number up slightly. But I think, on a national level, we probably handle about 10 per cent of the cases, so we're probably talking (that) cases to be re-looked at would probably measure in the ... in the hundreds."

The Administrative Appeals Tribunal's ruling means Carmel Onorato is entitled to a war widow's pension, most pointedly the veterans' gold card that provides free medical treatment.

Tony Onorato says his mother still enjoys good health but having access to the card will give her peace of mind.

Still, he says, it was the principle of the matter he was fighting for.

"In principle, I just thought, you know, if a man serves his country, his spouse, who's had to help him, especially in the last few years when Dad did get sick ... she was there for him, to help him, so why shouldn't she be entitled to my father's entitlements?"