Veterans’ Support Bill

Well, that was a ridiculous interruption to a very important—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! I have ruled on the matter, so you do not refer to it.

Today we commemorated the beginning of the First World War 100 years ago. It was a war in which 103,000 New Zealanders served at a time when our total population in New Zealand was about 1 million. In other words, one in 10 New Zealanders, basically, one in five male New Zealanders, went away to war to fight. Eighteen thousand of them were killed and 41,000 were wounded. That is an extraordinary casualty rate. In fact, that casualty rate was exceeded per capita by only one other country, and that was Russia.

New Zealand paid dearly, and, as we heard today from a number of speakers around the House, it meant that New Zealand really forged its independence, its self-standing, on the beaches and on the fields of Europe and Turkey. It does remind us that when we send our service people away to war and to areas of conflict we are putting them in harm’s way, and that those in most recent times—whether they were in Afghanistan, Timor Leste, or in the Solomons, wherever—serve our country with honour. They do not do it for the glory or for the medals or whatever; they do it because our country asks them to do it, and they do it willingly. They put themselves in harm’s way. The least we can do in return is ensure that when they return and when they become a bit older we treat them with the dignity and grace they deserve.

The Veteran’s Support Bill, which Labour supports, gives effect to the recommendations of the Law Commission in its 2010 report recommending a new support scheme to replace the War Pensions Act of 1954. The Act was considered outdated. It was looked at by Rick Barker, who was the then veterans’ affairs Minister, and Phil Goff, who was the defence Minister. They asked the Law Commission to take a look at this piece of legislation and to analyse it and make some recommendations that would elevate it and bring it into today’s world, effectively—make it relevant for today.

So the Law Commission spent quite a long time on it. It reported back in 2010 and delivered 280-odd pages of analysis, discussions, and recommendations. It went away in 2008 and came back in 2010. It made a number of very important recommendations that we have largely endorsed. It has been through a full select committee process, and the Committee stage in the House. We are broadly in agreement around its major clauses. But there are a number of issues that we disagreed with and that the Government wanted to press on with anyway.

One of those was about disability. To get a veterans pension you needed to be 52 percent disabled. Yet nobody could actually tell us exactly how you measure, how you come up with, a 52 percent disability. This was in some ways a rather ad hoc way of being able to make that determination. We put forward an amendment, and after arguing it through with the Government—and I thank Phil Goff for his assiduous effort in this regard—the Government agreed to it. So now we do not have to prove 52 percent disability any more. That is being passed by this Government.

The other issue that the Government was not willing to accept was that the veterans would automatically receive the right to have a community services card. That too appeared to us to be the least we could do for veterans. The Government, again, disagreed. It disagreed that a community services card would be made available to them automatically. After Phil Goff and Labour put forward an amendment, the Government—reluctantly, I believe; screaming and kicking—agreed to allow veterans to have a community services card.

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

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.