Veterans’ Support Bill

I move, That the Veterans’ Support Bill be now read a third time. It is with a sense of both accomplishment and no small amount of relief that we come to the end of what has been a long journey. Some would say it has been too long, but I make no apology for the need to take care in getting correct the rewrite of such an important piece of legislation.

I want to thank the parties in this House for their strong support of the bill; the Social Services Committee, ably led first by Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga and then by Melissa Lee; my ministerial predecessors Barker, Collins, and Guy, who all made important contributions; the officials of Veterans Affairs New Zealand, the New Zealand Defence Force, the Ministry of Social Development, and ACC; and the many others who worked incredibly hard and helped bring us to this point. I especially want to thank those individuals and groups in the veteran community and wider community who were involved in the development of the bill, particularly the Royal New Zealand Returned and Services’ Association.

The bill continues a tradition of support for veterans that dates back to 1866, when the first veterans legislation was introduced. Such support is never without its tensions. This country has a proud legacy of support, but we do not always agree with one another or with the veteran community about the manner and extent of that support. Indeed, as far back as 1928 the then Minister of Finance was reported in The Star as saying “When one amends the war pensions legislation, one is likely to be shot at from all directions.” Perhaps that is an unfortunate metaphor, but I understand the sentiment. This bill will maintain the key foundations from previous veterans legislation, including the principle of benevolence. Service eligibility criteria will remain the same, and all deployments currently covered under the 1954 Act will remain covered. The bill establishes two schemes. Scheme one will cover veterans who served from the Second World War through to, and including, the Viet Nam War. Scheme two will cover veterans who have served since 1 April 1974.

The bill adopts the statements of principles, or SOPs, made under the Australian Veterans’ Entitlements Act 1986 as the main reference point for deciding claims. The statements of principles are comprehensive, are based on robust international medical and scientific evidence, and will introduce much-needed certainty into decision making. Scheme one is based on entitlements available under this 1954 Act with some improvements. Veterans will continue to receive periodic disablement pensions for impairment. Veterans who are under 65 and unable to work will now have the option of receiving weekly income compensation at 80 percent of the average wage. The entitlement payments of veterans receiving support under the 1954 Act will not reduce. Scheme two is based on entitlements available through ACC, with an additional top-up to recognise the special nature of military service.

The bill also includes common entitlements that can be available to veterans under both schemes. These include a modernised approach to rehabilitation and continued access to medical treatment for service-related impairments. A key change in the new legislation is that the veterans pension will be made available to all veterans aged over 65 with qualifying service. This will enable an extra 16,000 veterans to access additional support over and above that provided to other New Zealanders who have reached superannuation age, in recognition of the sacrifice veterans have made in service to New Zealand.

Extending the veterans pension to all veterans with qualifying operational service and tailoring the subsequent entitlements to the veterans’ varying levels of impairment provide the legislation with the flexibility to better recognise the impact that service-related impairment has on the lives of veterans of operational service. Quite a large amount of time was spent in the Committee of the whole House on the recommendation of the Law Commission around the extension to all veterans of a lump sum paid on the death of some veterans. I do not wish to relitigate that debate except to remind the House that the Law Commission admitted that its recommendations were not costed. I am satisfied that the final $60 million package of improvements was generous to our veterans in the circumstances. I also would never consider a payment to further veterans after they die while at the same time quietly planning to increase the age of entitlement for the veterans pension from 65 to 67. I would not do that; my party would not do that.

I also want to acknowledge the Māori Party and the United Future party for their valuable assistance in improving the entitlements framework. It is fitting that this third reading is before the House today, given the milestones that bookend its passing. Yesterday marked 100 years since Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, marking the commencement of hostilities, and next Monday marks the 100th anniversary of the start of New Zealand’s involvement in the First World War, a war that become known as the Great War—if there was ever a literary contradiction, it is in the description of war as great.

Some members debating this bill have remarked on the futility of war and the cost paid by the participants, their families, and their descendants, and they caution against glorifying war and war service. I agree with many of those sentiments, but I do not believe that we need to glorify war in order to honour those who participated. We honour them in many ways, and this bill, when passed, will be another important way to do so.

In the first reading debate on this bill I referred, as many others did, to the silent sentinels that surround us in this House, the names of the theatres of war in which New Zealanders honoured us with their service and sacrifice: Gallipoli, Passchendaele, the Somme, Monte Cassino, Korea, Viet Nam, and many others. They are sentinels that remind us that the freedoms we enjoy today are all too often forged in the fires of conflict and are a constant reminder of the human cost of the decisions we make to send our people into harm’s way in defence of those freedoms. We owe it to them to support our veterans and to always remember them. I commend this bill to the House.

The Veterans’ Support Bill, which is about to pass into law after its third reading is completed, was initiated way back in 2006 in a series of meetings that the then Minister of Veterans’ Affairs, Rick Barker, and I, as Minister of Defence, had with the president of the RSA, John Campbell, and the president of the Ex-Vietnam Services Association. What we were trying to do at that stage was address the justified grievances of the Viet Nam veterans, and one way of addressing the grievances was to reform and update the War Pensions Act of 1954. It was a very old piece of legislation and reform was certainly long overdue. It was also very complex. What Labour did was set it up for the Law Commission to thoroughly investigate, analyse, and consult on the changes that were desirable and that would not only modernise the old War Pensions Act but would honour our veterans in the way that we believed they needed to be honoured.

I had always assumed that this would be done with a non-partisan approach, that we would find consensus on what needed to be done, and that we would honour our veterans in that way. When members of Parliament left this Chamber to fight and, for some of them, to die in the Second World War, party differences were put aside. So I thought that this was something that, in the context of the Social Services Committee, we could examine thoroughly and reach consensus on. We almost did, in the sense that most of this bill is supported by all of the parties of this House. But where we parted company from the National Government was where it made a deliberate decision to reject the recommendations of the Law Commission and the submissions made by the veterans themselves and by the RSA around eligibility for a veterans pension.

At the select committee I could find absolutely no justification why the war veterans pension should be restricted to only those who had suffered a 52 percent disability. There was no justification for that threshold. It was utterly arbitrary, and we worked in the select committee to get it removed. National refused to do so and brought a bill back to the House that excluded most of the veterans. I raised Supplementary Order Paper 441, which would have removed that threshold and made the veterans pension available to all veterans who had served operationally overseas. In the end National had to make that change in the Committee of the whole House, but even in making that change, it did it in a mean-spirited and penny-pinching way.

Yes, all veterans will now get the veterans pension. The veterans pension, of course, is set at the same level as New Zealand superannuation, but it has some additional benefits attached to it. One is the community services card. The Minister of Veterans’ Affairs has acknowledged that all veterans will get that automatically. Another very inexpensive measure is that they will not lose their pension if they are hospitalised for more than 13 weeks.

But there was a third measure, and it was eligibility for a lump-sum payment on death. The Minister said that he is not about to relitigate this. Actually, in the whole of this debate he has never once litigated it, because he has never once justified why we should deny our veterans, who served this country so bravely, what the Law Commission—after thorough consultation—said they should get, what the war veterans asked for, and what the RSA recommended. I have heard two sets of excuses. One from the Minister at one stage was that this is a benefit that would not go to the veterans; it would go to their families. Well, the veterans are not silly. The veterans know that, and that is precisely what the veterans wanted. They wanted their families freed from the worry over the cost of their funeral expenses. It was not a lot to ask for. We could have done it. Secondly, the payment would recognise that it was not only the veterans who made that sacrifice for their country but also their families.

On Monday of last week I attended the funeral of one of my constituents, a woman by the name of Audrey Stevens. She was 99½ years—99 years and six months old. Her husband, Ivan, whose funeral I had also attended some years earlier, was a World War II veteran. They were married in 1940. Two weeks after they were married, he embarked with the 24th Battalion and went to Europe. In Crete he was captured. It was months before she knew that he had not been killed. He was missing in action, presumed dead. He then spent 4½ years as a prisoner of war. When he came home, they were strangers. When he came home, he brought home with him the trauma of his experiences in battle and as a prisoner of war, and right throughout their married life together that trauma meant that there were also sacrifices made by every other member of that family. Is it asking too much that we in this House recognise that families, too, share in the sacrifice of their loved ones who went to war?

The second excuse given by the Minister is that it is too expensive. Well, at another select committee I found out that the cost was $7.4 million—$7.4 million for the lump-sum payment, declining by $1 million every 2 years. I want to put that into context. Every year to date under the National Government the money paid out to our veterans has declined, on average, by $7 million to $8 million—not by one lot of $7 million to $8 million, but cumulatively by another $7 million to $8 million—out of the Budget every year. What we are asking for, what the Law Commission was asking for, what the RSA was pleading for, and what the veterans wanted could easily have been accommodated because of the decline in the expenditure every year under this Government in terms of payments and services to our veterans.

It is not just that. In the regulatory impact statement we found out that 28 percent of our veterans who are alive today will have passed on within 5 years—within 5 years. So imagine the cynicism of our veterans when the National Government replied to the recommendation that said they should get this benefit: “Not at this time.” That is what the Government said. Do you know what the veterans said to me? They said: “They’ll give it to us when we are all bloody dead.” That was the cynicism of the veterans, and it is understandable.

We can afford that money. A Government that can spend $30 million on subsidising the operation of a foreign multinational—Rio Tinto—can afford $7.4 million for those who put their lives at risk for their country. A Government that can spend $150 million on commissions and legal fees to sell off our assets, which most veterans do not want sold anyway, can surely afford the money that it would take to pay the veterans this small extra amount, which is what the Law Commission recommended.

On 4 August next week we mark the centenary of the start of the First World War. I was in the Chamber this afternoon when the leaders each got up and expressed their gratitude for the sacrifices made by our veterans. But three of the leaders lead parties that voted against this small gesture of thanks and respect for our veterans, and it is to their and their parties’ eternal shame that they did so. But I make this pledge: with the election of a Labour-led Government, we will give our veterans that small amount of extra money. As we look around at the plaques in this Chamber that commemorate the battles, surely we, in our lucky generation, owe it to our veterans as an expression of gratitude for what they did on behalf of all of us.

I would like to begin my third reading speech by just clarifying a couple of things so that people at home and people in the House are not confused after the speech of that member, the Hon Phil Goff. It is, in fact, all veterans with qualifying service who get the veterans pension; it is not selective. And if Labour had its way, it would give more money with one hand but take it away with the other, because it would give the pension when the veterans turned 67. So is it really giving very much? Let me just be clear, Mr Goff. The lump sum does not get paid when veterans are alive. Let me make it very, very clear that the lump sum is not paid while the veterans are alive. It is actually paid after they are dead.

I would like to first of all pay tribute to all men and women who have served our country, in particular, those Korean War veterans, who 2 days ago celebrated the 61st commemoration of the ceasefire on the Korean peninsula. I was at the Auckland commemoration held on Friday. As always, it is an honour to be among the veterans who served to keep Korea free. I am a beneficiary of their bravery and their noble sacrifice. The Korean veterans are getting on in their years, and since May this year 18 have passed away. That makes a total of 43 who have passed away since November last year. I take this opportunity to send their families my sincere condolences and my love. They have my gratitude and my love for their service in Korea.

There were 4,700 New Zealanders who served in the Korean War. Thirty-three died during the conflict. The war ended after 3 years, but the New Zealanders served until 1957. There were 3 million civilian dead and 800,000 military dead. That is a huge casualty that we have seen in recent years. As I have always said throughout the progress of the Veterans’ Support Bill—right throughout it—we need to honour our veterans.

It has been a long process to rewrite a 60-year Act and implement 132 of the 170 recommendations that the Law Commission made, which were the result of the War Pensions Act 1954 being referred to the Law Commission in 2007, as other speakers have mentioned earlier. The old War Pensions Act dealt with the physical risk associated with deployment but did not really cover the cost of the psychological and environmental risk that our troops faced as a result of their deployment. The National-led Government is committed to honouring the service of our veterans—service that these veterans have given to this country. It is a huge debt that we owe our veterans who have served all around the world in defence of our nation, for freedom and democracy, and the sacrifices they have made need appropriate recognition in legislation.

As the Minister of Veterans’ Affairs said earlier, we have committed $60 million for a package to support the new legislation. The Veterans’ Support Bill will mean that this Government will be able to better meet the needs of the war veterans who need help to remain in their own homes, and it will also enable us to meet the needs of veterans of modern day deployment who need rehabilitation and help to return to work. The changes in the bill will increase the number of New Zealanders eligible for the veterans pension from 8,600 to 25,000—that is an increase of 16,400 New Zealanders who will qualify for the veterans pension.

National has always supported our veterans. Without a doubt freedom and the legacy of service to our country came at a significant cost. Many lives have been lost in defence of this freedom and many more were injured. No veteran will have their current entitlement reduced and many veterans and their families will benefit from increased entitlement, care, and support.

I was looking for something to refer to when I was preparing for the third reading and I found a poem. It was not written by a New Zealand soldier, but I will start from halfway through in the fourth stanza. I quote Mr Frank G Gross, who wrote this in 1972:

Many countries remember their fallen with respect of honor due

but in these states such little relates and our history’s words were few

For in the hallway of the high school, mahogany plaques stand out

Of the names engraved and the sacrifice made to remind us what war is about.

There are names there of the first war, the very first bugle call,

And for the Taps that blew in world war two, and of the boys from Nam on the wall

But the Korean War, forgotten, Fifty Four Thousand lost their place

And the Eight Thousand more are MIAs, of them there is such little trace

So hear us, Five Star General, we heed to the words you say

That Old Soldiers never die, but why must they fade away.

This bill makes sure that those soldiers do not fade away. I commend this bill.

Debate interrupted.