SpeechVETERANS' SUPPORT AMENDMENT BILL (NO 2)First ReadingHon RON MARK (Minister for Veterans): I move That the Veterans' Support Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a first time. I nominate the Social Services and Community Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time I intend to move that the bill be reported back to the House by 22 June 2020.The bill which has come before the House today is designed to make a number of changes to the current law that relates to veterans. Most of the changes respond to recommendations that arose out of the review of the operation of the Veterans' Support Act 2014 that was conducted by Professor Ron Paterson in 2018. Our veterans' support legislation underwent a sea change in 2014; a new Act was passed with multi-party support. It was very different from the Act that it replaced that being the War Pensions Act 1954. For this reason a requirement was built in which meant that its operation had to be reviewed as soon as practicable two years after it had come into force.SPEAKER: Order! Before the member gets any further I do want to check whether in fact it was his intention to give the full notice with regard to the sitting of the House and outside of Wellington on Fridays. The member's required to at the beginning of a speech—so he's early enough now.Hon RON MARK: Thank you Mr Speaker. I had a run sheet which had it the other way around.I move that the Veterans' Support Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a first time. I nominate the Social Services and Community Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 22 June 2020 and that the committee have authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting (except during oral questions) during any evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House and on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House and outside the Wellington area despite Standing Orders 191 193 and 194(1)(b) and (c).Continuing on?SPEAKER: If the member wants to; he can sit down if he wants to.Hon RON MARK: No. So as I said a little bit earlier—and forgive me; my run sheet had it the wrong way round—the bill that has come before the House is designed to make a number of changes and I've spoken to those. And these are on the back of the Professor Ron Paterson report in which he made 64 recommendations. His report was entitled Warrant of Fitness: An independent review of the Veterans' Support Act 2014. I do want to acknowledge at this point that when this legislation went through the select committee in the last term it was due to the credit of the Māori Party who actually teamed up with Labour and with New Zealand First to ensure that this review was cemented into the legislation—a post-implementation review. It's on the back of that decision and that support that this bill is now before the House at this time.It's been two years since that report was completed. New Zealand veterans have been hoping and expecting that action is going to be taken to address the recommendations that came out of it. This bill is doing that. Things haven't stood still. Since I received the Paterson report in 2018 I am pleased to say that a number of its recommendations have already been implemented by Veterans' Affairs; they have done that by taking administrative action where they could do this without the need for a law to be changed. Not everything can be done so simply. There are some recommendations that require the law to be changed; that is what we're now proposing to do.This bill focuses on increasing the wellbeing of veterans and their families by making it easier for them to access support and services and making delivery of these fairer. It will be addressing what Veterans' Affairs has identified as a short-term improvements programme. What is being improved are priorities for veterans. This bill if passed will provide immediate improvements in fairness and equity. Its provisions would improve access to services for veterans improve support to veterans' families improve the support available for veterans and their families at the end of the veteran's life and remove provisions of the Act which have been or have the potential to be unfair to veterans who have loyally served their country.More still remains to be done. A medium-term improvements programme has also been identified and beginning in late 2020 this will address more complex issues. There will be time for consultation on these issues and once that has been done a more thorough revision of the Act may well follow. In the meantime however we can and we should get moving to progress the areas that Professor Paterson identified as priorities. The bill now before the House proposes a number of changes to the present situation. Some of those changes would improve how mental illness is addressed for veterans. The bill would improve recognition of psychological illness and give Veterans' Affairs the ability to fund private mental health services for veterans needing this help urgently until their eligibility for public services can be established.It would also extend some services to the families of veterans. The present Act doesn't recognise some of the impacts that a veteran's illness or injury has on their families; this bill would change that situation. It would include families in needs assessments and rehabilitation support plans for veterans and extend counselling services to qualify veterans' families. Families of veterans may also benefit from an extension of the children's bursary to post-secondary vocational training and the children of eligible veterans living overseas. The bill would abolish the five-year restriction that the Act currently places on childcare assistance.Some definitions in the legislation will be modified including the definition of child". The new definition in the bill would cover for example a child whom the veteran is a guardian of and a grandchild or whāngai child of the veteran if the veteran has acted as that child's parent or guardian.Other Paterson report recommendations that the bill addresses include continuing for a transitional period to provide support and services under the Veterans' Independence Programme to the spouse or partner of a veteran when the veteran goes into long-term residential care; easing access to the surviving spouse or partner to the pension and funeral expenses; giving Veterans' Affairs the ability to fund treatment and rehabilitation services when a veteran is imprisoned until alternative arrangements can be made; extending grace periods on death; allowing discretion to consider entitlement when a veteran's injury illness or death occurred when they were briefly absent without leave or committing a minor offence; supporting families of imprisoned veterans; and improving decision making by Veterans' Affairs.There are two other measures in the bill that do not arise from the Paterson report. One is a proposal for the responsible Minister to have discretion to approve the granting of entitlements to a very small group of service personnel who serve in operations that are not gazetted for security or operational reasons. These are sensitive operations. At the moment veterans only become eligible for entitlements once the deployment that they took part in has been declared as qualifying operational service and notice is published in the Gazette. Including this provision in the bill is a matter of fairness. It aims to make sure that New Zealand service personnel who have been injured or become ill as a result of service on sensitive deployments are eligible to receive support and services from Veterans' Affairs even though their mission hasn't been publicly declared. This is something that is long overdue. I'm pleased that we now have an opportunity to do something about what is a major although unintended unfairness in the 2014 legislation.Finally the bill also gives us the opportunity to streamline the process for publishing adjustments and abatement of veterans' pension rates. It is proposed that this should be aligned with the process of reviewing the rates of all other veteran support entitlements. This is a simple proposal that makes very good sense. I look forward to seeing the report back from the select committee on all of those proposals.I want to conclude by saying: to all the veterans out there who made contributions and submissions to Professor Ron Paterson's report thank you. To all those who have been inquiring as to how we're progressing well here it is here now. I am hoping that this House will enable this legislation to be passed before the election to give our veterans and their families and dependants certainty into the future. Thank you."