Goff Phil: Cluster Munitions (Prohibition) Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Goff Phil: Cluster Munitions (Prohibition) Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 28 July 2009. Volume:656;Page:5182. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Leader of the Opposition) 
: 
 The Labour Party supports and warmly welcomes the introduction and passage of the Cluster Munitions (Prohibition) Bill. As the Minister for Disarmament and Arms Control has acknowledged this legislation implements the outcome of an international process in which New Zealand played a pivotal role under the previous Labour Government and in which I as Minister for Disarmament and Arms Control had the privilege to be involved. I thank Georgina te Heuheu for acknowledging that fact. 
I in turn pay particular tribute to the enormous and effective role played by New Zealand’s ambassador for disarmament in Geneva Don MacKay. Don is one of the finest civil servants whom I have had the pleasure of working with. He is held in such respect that he was appointed to chair the critical committees during the negotiations that took place both in the Wellington conference and in the Dublin conference. 
I also acknowledge the critical role played by non-governmental organisations in this. They worked under the umbrella of the Cluster Munition Coalition. In particular I acknowledge the role played by Mary Wareham of Oxfam as the convenor of this process. I believe that the non-governmental organisations helped give real momentum to it. I was hugely impressed with the determination and enthusiasm they showed worldwide in pushing this cause forward at a time when countries around the world through the United Nations process were incredibly reluctant to move forward on it. 
Cluster munitions as the Minister has pointed out are effectively unexploded sub-munitions that act in very much the same way as landmines. There is a high rate of failure to detonate on impact they then lie dormant in the soil and they can lie there for decades still causing a threat to civilian life long after the conflict in which they were fired. In that sense they are very similar to landmines and indeed this treaty that we are moving to ratify by legislation today is the biggest advance in the area of disarmament since the Ottawa Convention on landmines. 
The tragedy of lost lives and horrific injuries is evident right across the world in the Balkans South-east Asia Africa and the Middle East. But the event perhaps more than any other that stimulated us to move against cluster munitions was the conflict in south Lebanon between Hezbollah and the Israel Defense Forces. It is estimated that a million sub-munitions lay in the soils of south Lebanon after that conflict resulting in casualties of more than 200 maimed and killed; a very high percentage of those casualties were children. 
I was enormously proud of the role played by the New Zealand Defence Force in helping to clear those sub-munitions. We made the decision to send it up to Lebanon. It did an excellent job as indeed I had witnessed it doing beforehand in places as diverse as Laos Cambodia and Mozambique. But it occurs to anybody who watches the painstaking clearance metre by metre of those sorts of munitions that it is far better to have the fence at the top of the cliff than the ambulance at the bottom. We saw the need to deal effectively with the phenomenon of cluster munitions. 
For 5 years in Geneva the countries of the world failed to effectively solve this problem. We worked through the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. Countries with vested interests that controlled used and stockpiled cluster munitions blocked the consensus process. We were getting nowhere. A group of seven countries all of them small nations came together to find an alternative path forward. They were Norway New Zealand Ireland Austria Peru Mexico and to its credit the Vatican. We set up what was called the Oslo process and we set out to create a treaty that would outlaw the use of cluster munitions which have such an unacceptable effect on civilian life. That Oslo process was significantly advanced when New Zealand itself early in 2008 hosted the Wellington conference. I had the pleasure of hosting delegates in the Grand Hall next to this Chamber. That conference laid the framework for creating an agreement that in Dublin would lead to a treaty to outlaw cluster munitions that would bind the signatories to it. Again I pay tribute to the role of Don MacKay in Ireland in playing an integral part in that process. 
What we achieved was a huge number of countries I think in excess of 90 signing up to the Dublin convention which bans cluster munitions causing harm to civilians and 99 percent of all sub-munitions - based weapon systems. It requires stockpiles of cluster munitions to be destroyed within 8 years. It requires contaminated sites to be cleared within 10 years. It sets out clearly the rights of cluster munitions victims and with the obligations that States have towards them. It requires States to provide international cooperation with and assistance to those countries affected by cluster munitions where they are in a position to do so. 
In Oslo in December of last year 93 countries signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions. They did not include countries such as the United States Russia China Israel India and Pakistan which have used and do stockpile cluster munitions. But I believe that the impact of this treaty will be very much the parallel of the Ottawa Convention. It will create a stigma around the use of cluster munitions which will mean that even those countries that have not signed this treaty will feel constrained from using the weapons. Therein lies the importance of this treaty and this convention that this legislation will enable us to ratify. 
We need to pass this legislation to implement certain obligations under the treaty. I think that will be relatively straightforward for New Zealand. We do not have we do not use and we do not stockpile cluster munitions. We have no plans to acquire them though there is a provision in this legislation that allows cluster munitions for the purpose of training our Defence Force which may be again deployed to disarm those munitions in countries around the world. That makes sense. Nor are there any areas under our jurisdiction and control where we have the obligation to clear such munitions. There are interoperability provisions that would enable us still to work with countries like the United States that possess cluster munitions. The treaty nevertheless puts us under an obligation to encourage non-State parties to sign up to the treaty and to use our best efforts to discourage countries that have not signed up from using cluster munitions. I see no difficulties in New Zealand fulfilling those obligations. 
I support this legislation as a necessary step for New Zealand to ratify the cluster munitions treaty and convention. This is a step forward for disarmament and for humanity. It is a clear sign of the world moving forward in an area in which for the last decade far too little progress has been made. This treaty will protect tens of thousands of people whose lives would otherwise have been constrained or blighted by the future use of such weapons. New Zealand can be truly proud of the role it has played again in the field of disarmament. I feel personally privileged to have been able to play a part in helping to achieve a ban on the use of these weapons. The world will be a better place in the absence of cluster munitions.