Mitchell Mark: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMitchell Mark: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 13 April 2016. Volume:713;Page:10529. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MARK MITCHELL (Chairperson of the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee): Firstly can I start by acknowledging the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee and David Shearer who sits on that committee and is in the Chamber tonight. Can I also acknowledge Lieutenant General Tim Keating our Chief of Defence Force and the Chief Executive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade Brook Barrington.There is a fair bit to get through in 5 minutes but can I just firstly say to our New Zealand Defence Force the men and women who are serving overseas that we are proud of you you do a great job and you are wonderful ambassadors for New Zealand. We have deployed recently to Fiji which has been hit with a terrible natural disaster. We have seen the deployment of the HMNZS Canterbury which has carried the main New Zealand Defence Force contingent including relief supplies army engineers and helicopters. We sent up two navy SH-2G Seasprites. We sent up two of our new NH90s—they are obviously operational and doing a very good job—as well as our army light engineering unit. We have also got an Orion P3K up there and we have also got the HMNZS Wellington which I want to make a special mention of because the captain of the Wellington also lives in my electorate of Rodney.I also want to touch very quickly on the work that our team are doing up at Camp Taji just outside Baghdad. During the reviews we asked the Deputy Chief of Defence Force about how that deployment was going. We learnt that in the last 18 months since the coalition began operations Daesh has lost around 40 percent of its territory which is significant. This has been achieved by support provided by the Iraqi forces through airstrikes and a slow but steady campaign of targeting individuals and of course their supply routes. Weekly charts are compiled using satellite imagery and intelligence and show that there is a change of dominance in Iraq as to who controls that territory. So I want to acknowledge our troops up at Camp Taji because the work that they are doing—just their mere presence there—sends a very positive message to the Iraqi forces that are having to go out and meet this threat and that are obviously doing all that they can to seriously degrade Daesh and the threat that it poses.I just want to talk very quickly also about the role that we are playing through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and our position on the United Nations Security Council and some of the work that has been done there especially in relation to—again I will come to Daesh—the progress that we have made on the Syrian humanitarian issues in the Middle East. As a co-leader on the Syrian humanitarian issues New Zealand has been at the forefront of the council’s efforts to alleviate the humanitarian effects of the Syrian conflict. This includes leading work to reinforce protection standards and principles supporting health care in the armed conflict.I am very proud of the fact that our people in New York on the United Nations Security Council took a genuine leadership role in making sure that we could actually open up the supply routes into Syria to make sure that proper humanitarian aid medical assistance and food got through to the refugees who had been cut off from that for a long time. We saw pretty heart-breaking stories on TV about children who were having to try to exist by eating grass.The work that has been done on the United Nations Security Council also involves the degradation of Daesh in the sense that the sanctions that have been imposed on Daesh are having an effect. We are encouraged to hear that Daesh is having to levy its members now for financial contributions because the sanctions regime is starting to affect its financial resources—bearing in mind that because of the territory that Daesh actually had they had a fair amount of resources available to them especially oil and petrochemicals to actually be able to generate a fair bit of revenue which was actually funding and feeding their terror attacks in their war against Iraq and neighbouring countries. We also actually chair the al-Qaeda sanctions committee as part of our United Nations Security Council role. I just want to acknowledge the work that is being done by our personnel in New York on the United Nations Security Council.The other very important piece of work that is being done that we feel very strongly about as Kiwis is around the veto that the permanent five countries have.