Estimates Debate — Vote Defence

I was thinking the previous vote was vote foreign affairs and defence; I beg your pardon. The Minister sitting in the chair, the Minister of Defence, put me off. I reiterate what I said previously, that I do think the Minister of Defence has brought a lot of energy and passion into the defence role and he should be applauded for that. However, there are a couple of areas that I want to highlight in my speech. The Minister has been put into an invidious and a difficult situation around the signing-off of aircraft for the use of various Ministers to joyride both around New Zealand and overseas. I want to touch on this—and we have brought it up in the past—because it is an area where I have asked repeatedly for answers to questions and have not yet received them. That makes me rather suspicious that there is a lot more there than we are led to believe. In fact, we hear there is a lot more there than we are led to believe. If there was nothing to worry about or there was no issue, why have we not seen the papers, after several months of asking for them?

Let me go through what that means. I have asked, for example, for all the papers pertaining to Murray McCully’s flight to Vanuatu on 13 February. I have asked for those papers and was told they would be coming. They did not arrive. I went to the Ombudsman. The Ombudsman said they had been in contact with the office. The papers did not arrive. I went to the Ombudsman again. They wrote back to me and said that yes, the papers would be coming, but they did not arrive. I then wrote again to the Ombudsman and said: “Why aren’t these papers coming, when you have already asked for them to come?”. The Ombudsman said: “I have formed the opinion that there has been a failure to meet the requirements imposed by the OIA.” They went on to say: “I understand that a response is imminent. If you have any concerns about the substantive response to your request, please feel free to contact me again.” That was in June. We still have not had any reply to that Official Information Act request. I have written to Murray McCully, who sends back notes that say “I refuse to answer that member’s request.” Murray McCully, of course, does not have to be accountable to Parliament on how he spends money.

💬 Jo Goodhew: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I believe we are on the estimates debate. I am not sure about the relevance of this particular discussion in terms of the estimates debate.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): This debate has been quite wide-ranging during the course of this afternoon. The point has come up before, and I know that the member will get back to the estimates. He is talking about the Minister and we are on defence matters now. I know that the member will be concentrating on defence, as in the estimates.

Thank you, Mr Chair. That was exactly where I was getting to. I was providing the context to July, when we had the Minister of Defence in front of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee to respond to the estimates questions. We had put a number of standard estimates questions to the Minister and, in addition to that, there were 140 other questions to the Minister, all of which came in very, very late. They came in the day we were sitting in the select committee, so we had really no time to go through them. I argue that that was an abuse of the process. Of those 140 questions, guess what? Eleven were not answered. What did those 11 pertain to? The 11 pertained to VIP transport and aircraft that the Minister is responsible for signing off. That was in July. Those were estimates questions put before the Minister in good time to be answered, yet the Minister did not sign them off.

The reason I bring this up is that I am not getting an answer. Somehow, there is an expectation that if we stop asking, then the matter will simply go away and we will drift through to the election without getting an answer. That is not good enough. I say to the Minister that if he thinks this will go away, it will not. That is why I am raising it today. Those estimates questions, like the Official Information Act requests and like the written questions, have absolutely got a blank.

Here is what I think may have happened on this occasion. Mr McCully decided to fly to Vanuatu and he told, asked, or bullied the Minister of Defence to allow him to take a 757 up there. The 757 was scheduled along with the other 757 to fly down to Antarctica and take the relatives of the Erebus crash with them, as well. I believe that Dr Mapp—I think he is an honourable person and I believe he was supporting the Ministry of Defence—tried to persuade Mr McCully not to do that, but Mr McCully was pretty insistent. We understand that he was insistent because there was no business-class flight to Vanuatu around that time, so he decided he would have the VIP seats put into the 757, and the 757 flew off to Vanuatu.

A matter of hours after it left the ground, the other 757 on the ground in Christchurch needed unscheduled maintenance—it was somehow not foreseen before that. When the 757 arrived and deposited Mr McCully in Vanuatu it had to fly straight back again, and they had to send an Orion to pick up Mr McCully the following day. The whole trip cost $70,000-$75,000 all up. The key issue is that Mr McCully could have flown up there on a commercial flight for about $4,000. It costs about $4,000 to fly up there. If he had been able to schedule it around a direct flight, it would have cost even less than that. So, $4,500 would be the absolute tops to fly up there. Instead he chose to spend $70,000-$75,000 to do that.

The reason I bring that up is that as we go into the next year we come back to those estimates questions, for which we still do not have answers—we still do not have answers about how much an aircraft costs to fly, how much an aircraft costs to run, and how often Ministers will be using those aircraft. What are the criteria that those Ministers follow to use those aircraft? Is it that when their own personal travel bills get too high they then go to the air force and ask it to subsidise their flights? I do not know. There might be a perfectly good, logical reason for why a Minister needs to have an air force aircraft to fly him up to Vanuatu to attend a meeting, rather than going by a commercial flight. There might be a very, very logical reason.

But what makes me very suspicious is that after all this time, after the Official Information Act requests, the appeals to the Ombudsman, and the estimates questions we have lodged, we still do not have the real reason. Yet just last week when a National Party blogger put through an Official Information Act request to our Security Intelligence Service he got it within 3 days. He got it within 3 days. So why is it that we started this process in March and here we are in August, and Dr Mapp’s office has yet to give the answers we require? The answer to that is that there is something there that Mr McCully does not want us to see. There is probably something there that will embarrass Dr Mapp, as well. But, definitely, Mr McCully had been badgering, bullying, cajoling, threatening—whatever—Dr Mapp to sign off an aircraft to fly up to Vanuatu.

I am sure we will probably see that pattern in the future, because this is the beginning of the arrogance—well, not just the beginning of the arrogance—of power, that somehow a Minister is able to use our military aircraft and our service people, who are out there doing a good job for New Zealand, to fly around for his or her own benefit. Whether it be to Vanuatu or to use helicopters to fly down to see the V8s, a Christian fair, the rowing champs, or whatever, our air force and our air assets are not for that sort of purpose.

I am perfectly able to see the case for using a 757 to go around the Pacific with a group of defence, political, or non-governmental organisation people—that is a legitimate use. I also want to see us flying our veterans across to a Second World War commemoration. I can understand that. What I do not understand is why the Minister of Foreign Affairs is able to twist the arm of the Minister of Defence to enable him to fly in a 757 with its VIP seating at the enormous cost of $75,000 up to Vanuatu because this man is unable to get a business-class flight on a commercial airline.

Vote agreed to.

Vote Defence Force agreed to

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