Veterans’ Support Bill

I want to pick up the theme of what I was saying about the Veterans’ Support Bill, and the fact that although Labour is strongly supporting this bill, very clearly the omission from this bill of recommendations made by the Law Commission and supported by the Returned and Services’ Association weaken the bill, are penny-pinching, and do no credit at all to this Government in honouring the service of our veterans.

Yesterday I attended the funeral of one of my constituents. She was 99½ years old. She was due to turn 100 in January of next year. Her name was Audrey Stevens. A few years back I had attended the funeral of her husband, Ivan. Audrey and Ivan were married in 1940. Three weeks after they were married, he sailed for Europe with the 24th Battalion and he was not to return again for more than 5 years. Ivan, like my father-in-law, was captured in Crete.

Audrey received a telegram. It said that Ivan was missing in action, presumed killed. She had the appalling trauma of thinking that her husband, whom she had just married, had been killed, and then later she was informed that he was a prisoner of war. Ivan never talked about his experiences as a prisoner of war, as was the case with so many of those people, including my father-in-law, who were captured and held by the Germans for many, many years. They simply did not want to talk about it. It was deeply traumatising.

When Ivan came back from Europe, he and Audrey were effectively strangers. Imagine marrying somebody and not seeing them for 5 years. It was not just the length of time that he was away; it was the trauma that he had endured, and in those days there was no counselling for our vets—no counselling at all. For the rest of his life, Ivan suffered from the conditions that he had endured at war and as a prisoner.

Is there anything that can persuade this Government that it is now time to be generous with our veterans rather than penny-pinching over whether or not there might be a lump-sum payment available to those veterans on their death? The Minister of Veterans’ Affairs said to me in an earlier reading in the House that it is no good having the lump-sum payment because that would be for the benefit of the families and not the veterans. I want Minister Woodhouse to contemplate what Audrey had to endure all of those years because of the service that her husband had given this country at war.

The inscription on the wall over there, right in front of me—Crete—is what it was about. That family suffered. That family sacrificed so much, and all I am asking of this Minister is that he honours the recommendation of the Law Commission, which was set up independently to advise, first, the Labour Government that introduced this process, and then the National Government. The Law Commission said to give these veterans, every one of them, a veterans pension, and make it on the same terms as for those who are currently eligible for the veterans pension.

The Minister has been persuaded that his first position was unsustainable—that the veterans pension went to those with 52 percent disability. Why 52 percent? That is absolutely arbitrary. There is no justification for it. He has given the community services card. He has said that the pension would not be suspended if a person is in hospital, but he has penny-pinched by saying there will be no lump-sum payment on death. I asked the Minister this question in the estimates debate: what would it cost? Do you know what it would cost? It would cost $7.5 million this year, dropping by about $1 million every 2 years. Is that too much to ask for?

This Government spends countless billions of dollars every year, and we are asking for a tiny amount of money, in line with what the Royal New Zealand Returned and Services’ Association has asked for and what the Law Commission recommended. Why will this Government not honour the vets in the way that we are asking?

This Veterans’ Support Bill is a bill that has been long in its gestation. Its genesis goes back to—and Phil Goff will be able to help me with this—about 2006, I think.

💬 Hon Phil Goff: 2006 under the Labour Government.

It was 2006 and, as Phil Goff points out, under the Labour Government. That is true. Rick Barker, who was the Minister of Veterans’ Affairs at the time, asked the Law Commission to carry out a comprehensive review of the War Pensions Act, which, of course, came into being as far back as 1954. That review of the original legislation was a very long time coming. Then the review itself took a long period of time, and that was appropriate because there were a lot of opinions that needed to be canvassed, there were a lot of people who needed to be spoken to, and there was a huge range of issues that needed to be dealt with. The Law Commission eventually came back to Parliament, after the current Government had been elected, with a comprehensive report, and then the Government sat on that report for a very, very long time indeed. Frankly, veterans and their families started to despair that progress would ever be made on this legislation.

We went through the whole term of the last Parliament without any progress being made, and here we are, right at the end of this Government’s final term—the second term of Parliament under this Government—and we are only just now at the point where this legislation has been progressed far enough that it may well, indeed, be passed finally into law, just in the very last breaths of this second term. It is over 8 years on from when the original instruction was given by the then Minister of Veterans’ Affairs, the Hon Rick Barker, to embark on this process. We knew it was one that was always going to take a long time because there are a lot of issues that need to be dealt with, but it simply did not need to take this long to get to this point.

The question that is at the front of our minds over on this side of the Chamber in this part, Part 1, is the question around the veterans pension. Through Phil Goff’s advocacy, I am really pleased to see that the Minister of Veterans’ Affairs, Michael Woodhouse, eventually saw reason and saw fit to propose the changes to the legislation—or most of them—that Phil Goff was proposing around a universal application of the veterans pension. This is something that does not cost Governments a large amount of money. It is unusual in that as time goes on, the cost to the Government actually decreases. Usually, when you introduce a new entitlement or a new policy, the costs actually tend to go up over time. The costs for this policy actually reduce over time.

It is a small way of recognising the contribution that our veterans have made around the world to our safety, our security, our peace, and our place—not just that of the veterans themselves but their families as well. As Phil Goff rightly pointed out, the impact of serving overseas, particularly on those veterans who served in full-scale combat in a full-scale war that a generation ago took people away from their family for years—not just for 6 months at a time in a rotation but for years and years and years—is a significant contribution to our nation that has been made by the veterans themselves and their families.

It was a shock, really, that it took as much advocacy from the Opposition spokesperson as was required to get the Government to see fit to apply the veterans pension universally to all veterans. What the Minister has not seen fit to do yet is allow a lump-sum payment to be handed out as well. That is the final component of this issue that Labour would like to see put in place. We implore the Government to take that last step. It has come a way—I was going to say a long way, but it was never a long way to get from where it was to what Labour has been proposing. It was never a long way. The Government has taken most of the steps required. It just needs to take one final step so that we as a nation can properly acknowledge the contribution of veterans and their families to ensuring that we have security and safety here in our country and that we are contributing to peace and security around the world. New Zealand has for a long time had a very good reputation as a keeper of peace and as a pursuer of peace, both in a diplomatic fashion and, where necessary, by deploying our military.

Until recent times we, of course, had our forces serving overseas in three different locations on multiple rotations, and that is something that is well acknowledged by the international community. We should justifiably be proud of that and we should be proud of our veterans who carry those tasks out on our behalf. It is not a huge ask for us as a nation to recognise those efforts through the changes that are being made throughout this legislation, particularly in Part 1—in particular, around providing a veterans pension and for lump-sum payments that, certainly, in some cases, may be of direct benefit to the families rather than to the veterans themselves. But, as Phil Goff has outlined, plenty of military families have made a significant sacrifice themselves, as well as the person who was actually in uniform and serving offshore on behalf of the nation.

There are a number of parts to this legislation and there are a number of aspects that we on this side of the Chamber do want to consider. We believe that given the long gestation of this legislation and the comprehensive nature of it, it does deserve a comprehensive consideration here at the Committee stage of this legislation. So I look forward to future contributions.

I have spoken on the Veterans’ Support Bill before, and I firstly just want to compliment Phil Goff on the work he has done on this, because he has progressed it from a point where we had very limited benefits for servicemen who had served our country abroad. Through his lobbying and intensive action on this bill, he has made some real differences, and that will bring about some real differences for many of our veterans. As we all know, we ask our service people to go off and serve our country and to put themselves in harm’s way. We respect them for doing that and we honour them for doing that, but that honour is not just in the form of medals and parades, etc. It is also about the way we treat people in terms of the abilities and the type of support we can get in behind them, in terms of financial support and recognition. This is what this bill is really all about. It is about making sure that the proper recognition is given to our service people for the work and the service that they have undertaken for us.

It was in 2006 when Rick Barker first looked at putting forward this bill. It was about 8 years ago. It has taken a long time for this to come to the fore. We would like to see it out of the way under this Parliament. We certainly support the bill, but we are asking for more modifications. In some of our initial Supplementary Order Papers that were put forward, we asked the Government to change the 52 percent disability impairment that was in place. That really was about the ludicrous way in which people had to prove that somehow they were 52 percent impaired. I mean, why 52 percent, as opposed to 51 percent or 55 percent? I do not know, but it was a ludicrous situation that they were in. That was changed, and I thank the Government for coming to its senses and accepting that. One of the other things that it has accepted is allowing veterans to have automatic entitlement to a community services card. Once again, it is a small issue perhaps for many of the people who are looking at this bill, but it is a very big issue for those service people, and it acknowledges the effort and the contribution they have made to New Zealand. The bill also enables the continued payment of a pension while the service person is in hospital for more than 13 weeks. Again, there was recognition and a change occurred.

These are all changes that happened to the 1954 Act, which had not been looked at really since 1954, and which the Hon Rick Barker decided in 2006 was well overdue for attention. He went about that change in a responsible way. He got the Law Commission in and asked it in 2008 to make a full inquiry and investigation into what was there and in place, and that is what the Law Commission did. It came back in 2010. Well, here we are in 2014, 4 years after the Law Commission put forward its very learned and very sensible recommendations. They were not radical; they were simply bringing us up to date. Four years on from there, we are still debating this as part of this piece of legislation.

So our Supplementary Order Papers asked for those changes, in line with what the Law Commission had recommended. The one thing that was not agreed to by this Government was the lump-sum payment on death. For some curious reason the Government believed that that was not going to go to the benefit of the service person and therefore we should not have that paid as part of that person’s entitlement. But, as Phil Goff just mentioned in his remarks before, it was not just one person who, in many ways, did the service, did the time for New Zealand; it was also their loved ones. It was their wives, or it was their husbands, who had been at home looking after kids, trying to make do without one of those parents. It was for the mothers and fathers and the sons and daughters who would have missed out as a result of that person serving our country. It seems to me that this is an incredibly small contribution that we can make to these people and to those people who had been left behind, who also made a sacrifice on behalf of New Zealand.

The cost is infinitesimally small when we look at it in the bigger picture—that is, it will cost about $11 million, according to Veterans Affairs New Zealand, for the 2014-15 year, and it will fall steadily until it gets to about $8.4 million. That is not a lot of money. Unfortunately, some of those veterans are in the last years of their lives—they are old now—which means that the number of those veterans who are around will fall and therefore the cost will fall. At some point in the future—20 or 30 years’ time from now—some of our people who have been serving in Timor-Leste, Afghanistan, and the Solomon Islands will become eligible for that lump-sum payment, but that will be some time well down the track. But what it does do is acknowledge fully, as per the recommendations of the Law Commission, the service of our people and their families—and I stress “and their families” because their families have suffered as well. It recognises that they have made that sacrifice and can be properly acknowledged and compensated for it. It means that a widow whose husband has died is able to meet the costs of a decent funeral and it will enable her to transition and make her life a bit more comfortable as a result of receiving that lump-sum payment.

These are not big things; they are just simply what we should do, as a decent and fair nation, in terms of acknowledging and getting behind and supporting those people who go out and choose to serve our country. They do that, put themselves in harm’s way, come back possibly wounded or scarred psychologically, and have to pick up the pieces and move on with their lives. Those are the costs that we are asking them and their families to bear. All we are saying is that perhaps those families deserve some recognition of their costs, and we should get in behind them. Thank you very much.

I am very pleased to be able to stand and take a call in support of the Veterans’ Support Bill and the amendment being put forward by my colleague, the Hon Phil Goff. This may seem like a small piece of legislation, but it is, in fact, a very important piece of legislation.

On a personal level I am very proud of the military involvement and contribution of members of my own family. My grandfather from Ruatōria served in the navy in World War II in the Pacific. He was mentioned in dispatches for managing to dispose of a grenade that landed on board. He used to like telling the story. My nana used to say that the real version probably involved a hell of a lot more panic and swearing than the version we were told. But I am very proud of my papa’s involvement in the navy in the Pacific.

On the other side of my family my grandfather served in the army in Italy. He was actually photographed when he was marching out in Auckland to leave for Italy. What he did not know was that his photo was used as the recruitment poster for World War II in New Zealand, which was very ironic, given that he was a committed pacifist. When he got home he was quite shocked to learn that his photograph had been used. But he served time in an Italian prisoner of war camp over there, and that had an impact on him on his return. Even though he died when I was 6 years old—so I was very young—I know that there was a great impact on my family and on my grandparents from having their men leave and serve overseas.

My grandmother actually served with the Wrens up in Auckland. She was mapping all the different shipping movements in the Pacific. On an even more personal level, my great-grandfather was a medic at Gallipoli. I was incredibly fortunate to be part of a Speaker’s delegation that involved Gallipoli on Anzac Day. To stand at Chunuk Bair and to look at the trenches and to see what my great-grandfather saw when he came ashore at Gallipoli and the huge challenge that lay before them was deeply moving. I felt incredibly privileged, as his great-granddaughter, to be able to stand there honouring and commemorating his commitment and the commitment of his colleagues to our country on what was a tragic day but a day that forged a nation. So I come from a family that has had a long contribution to the military in New Zealand, of which I am deeply proud.

I also want to pay tribute to another great chief from the Eastern Bay of Plenty. On 17 April Doug Belsham passed away. Doug Belsham will be known to a number of my colleagues for being a very passionate letter writer and someone who would come along to any event we were holding and talk to my colleagues about many of the issues facing veterans in New Zealand. He was the Eastern Bay RSA welfare officer for many, many years. I think it would be a conservative estimate to say that he helped many hundreds and hundreds of people. Although he was based in Whakatāne, he actually supported veterans, ex-service people, and their families right throughout New Zealand, and even some who were living in Australia.

What always struck me about Doug in our many, many long conversations was his incredible grasp of the detail of policy and legislation relating to veterans and to ex - service people, his unmoveable commitment to ensuring that access to entitlements and assistance was not eroded, and his phenomenal memory, which allowed him to recall details of pension claims going back more than 20 years. He was a renowned historian of military and political matters, and he is greatly missed.

I was actually in touch with Doug in the months before his passing regarding the Veterans’ Support Bill, which we are debating today. This is a bill that came out of a Law Commission review, but the Government has, unfortunately, ignored a key recommendation of that review as well as many of the submissions of veterans and the New Zealand RSA. That Law Commission review, as my colleagues have said, was set up by the last Labour Government. It recommended that all war veterans put in harm’s way in an overseas deployment should be eligible for a veterans pension. The pension is in place of, rather than on top of, New Zealand superannuation and it confers some small but important benefits on our veterans, such as a lump-sum payment on death, a community services card, and the continuation of the pension if hospitalised.

Most returned service personnel who want to go on to the veterans pension do not do so because of the benefits but because they see it as their country honouring their service. However, our veterans are eligible for this pension only if they are considered significantly disabled or, more specifically, have 52 percent or higher impairment. For many years veterans have been asking that this requirement be dropped. This was a position that was endorsed by the New Zealand RSA. Unfortunately, this recommendation has been ignored. The Government has said that the recommendation shall not progress “at this point in time”. Well, that is all very well and good but time is not on the side of World War II, Korean, Malayan, and Viet Nam veterans. Time is not on their side. As the years pass their numbers are rapidly declining. The decision not to support this recommendation fails to answer the fundamental question of why it should be necessary to be significantly disabled to qualify for a veterans pension.

This year we commemorate the centenary of the start of World War I. There will be many sincere expressions of gratitude for the service of our veterans. Surely we can do more to acknowledge the centenary and our veterans in a tangible way by extending their eligibility for a veterans pension. That is why Labour is moving an amendment in the Committee stage to remove the disability requirement. We are hopeful that the National Government will see the enormous symbolism in this small gesture, reverse its position, and support the change. The cost of doing so is small—$11 million this year, declining to $8 million in 3 years’ time. The message it would send, however, is not small. It is an incredibly important one.

Labour has said we will adopt the Law Commission’s recommendation to ensure all war veterans are eligible for a veterans pension. The RSA National President, Don McIver, says that it would be “a real indication that the proud and dedicated service of our veterans, potentially with their lives having been put in harm’s way, is recognised as warranting special acknowledgement beyond that provided to New Zealand citizens generally by way of superannuation,”. A Labour Government would do the right thing for our veterans.

I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

As we have said before on the Veterans’ Support Bill, this bill is strongly supported by Labour. Why would Labour not support this when back in 2007 I worked very hard with the then Minister of Veterans’ Affairs, Rick Barker, to introduce a scheme that would update and modernise the War Pensions Act 1954? That was part of a process of negotiation that I had as Minister of Defence, along with Rick Barker as Minister of Veterans’ Affairs, with the then president of the Royal New Zealand Returned and Services’ Association, John Campbell, and the chair of the Ex-Vietnam Services Association, Chris Mullane. What we did at that time was work out a process that was designed to achieve the best possible replacement of the 1954 Act. That replacement, we thought, would be best worked through after an extensive period of consultation by a group that was outside the political process. We gave that task to the Law Commission. The Law Commission did do its work incredibly thoroughly, and I would have thought that there was no room for political debate around this—that what we would do is put in place the critical recommendations of the Law Commission.

Part of the objective of this legislation was to be more generous to our war veterans. But for reasons that this Government has still not explained adequately, it decided to cut costs by cutting benefits to the veterans. First of all, the Minister said that he was not going to allow all veterans who had served on overseas deployments in operational areas to get the veterans pension. You would get that only if you were 52 percent disabled, and, try as I did in the Social Services Committee to find whether there was any rationale behind why a person had to be 52 percent disabled to get a veterans pension, no explanation was forthcoming. The officials had worked hard on this legislation. They could not give an explanation. The National members of the Social Services Committee sitting over there could not give an explanation either. I brought in Supplementary Order Paper 441, which would have changed that. The Minister backed down at that point because he knew his position was absolutely unsupportable, and he agreed that the veterans pension would apply to all of those who had operational service.

Along with that, there are these small benefits. You get the community services card automatically, and you keep your pension if you are hospitalised for more than 13 weeks. But in an extraordinary display of penny-pinching, the Minister said: “But we are not going to give those veterans a lump-sum payment on death to cover the funeral costs”—it is a small amount, at $5,700—“unless they are still 52 percent disabled.” I asked the Minister why. Outside of this Chamber I sought to get agreement from the Minister. First of all, he said that this would just help the families. Unapologetically, I say that the families of the veterans deserve that support, and every veteran would say that. The veterans are not naive about that. Then the Minister said that the cost was too great. I asked the question in the select committee on the estimates, and the cost is $7.3 million in the first year, dropping by $1 million every 2 years.

This Government in the foreign affairs estimates is going to spend $13 million on a conference next month in Samoa—$13 million—but somehow we cannot afford to give $7 million to honour the veterans, who put their lives at risk, who sacrificed for their country, who worked for their country. We cannot afford it. We can give Rio Tinto $30 million to keep Bluff going for another year or two, but we cannot give our veterans $7.3 million. That excuse simply does not wash. I asked the Minister what was happening with veterans’ affairs expenditure. You know, it is down $23 million over the last 5 years. It has been cut by $23 million. Over the next 4 years it will be cut by another $22 million. The money is there now, so let some person, just one person, on the National benches stand up and explain why we are rejecting what the veterans ask for, why we are rejecting what the RSA asks for, and why we are rejecting what the Law Commission recommended.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 480 in the name of the Hon Michael Woodhouse to Part 1 be agreed to.

Amendments agreed to.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 441 in the name of the Hon Phil Goff to Part 1 be agreed to.

A party vote was called for on the question that the amendments be agreed to.

Are you sure the Māori Party are opposed? They said they were going to support it.

Order! The member has been around a while and he knows that that is entirely out of order. The members casting votes know the consequences of misleading the House. No member should interrupt a vote, for any purpose.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I was trying to be helpful to the whip—just to check out that he had read his instructions right—because my understanding from the Māori Party was that it would be supporting the amendments. I would rather sort it out now than have the whip come back and explain to the House afterwards that he got it wrong.

There is a process and it is not to interject and the member is admonished for that.

I am reading from what I believe to be the instructions but I hear the point that the member is making. Maybe there is an opportunity just for me to double-check that, but it is my understanding that I am recording the vote correctly and I seek—

Let me just now score what the process is. The member who is casting the vote should do so on the instruction he has. If he gets an instruction that he has voted in error of what the intention was, it is the course of this House by leave to correct the vote. That is the way it works. So we will now ask the Clerk to continue. He should call the last vote again.