Power Simon: Mercenary Activities (Prohibition) Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Power Simon: Mercenary Activities (Prohibition) Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:618;Page:14252] 
SIMON POWER (National—Rangitikei) 
: 
 I look forward to this being the first of my three calls on Part 2 because this is the part of the bill where we get to discover as a Committee of the whole House the actual I guess detailed impact of the disgraceful and sloppy drafting we saw in Part 1 relating to the definition of “mercenary”. 
Part 2 contains issues relating to recruitment—which I know my colleague Ron Mark from New Zealand First is very keen to cover in some detail in one of his three calls on this part—as well as the financing of mercenaries. I know my colleague Dr Wayne Mapp is also going to spend extensive time this afternoon working his way through those particular clauses. I also know that my colleague Dr the Hon Lockwood Smith is very keen to walk the Committee through the training of prospective mercenary clauses and the effect that those clauses will have. 
It is clause 13 though and the issues surrounding jurisdiction that most interests me. The reason for that is to return to the commentary on the bill by way of a link from the jurisdiction clauses contained in Part 2 and look at just how widely subscribed to this convention and therefore this legislation is. My colleague Dr the Hon Lockwood Smith got part-way through taking the Committee through those countries that have ratified this convention. At this stage of the debate it is worth asking the question that the National and New Zealand First members of the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee included in their minority report and it is this: why would we bring in domestic legislation which is ill-defined and sloppily drafted that gets us ahead of those countries that we would normally involve ourselves with at the point of armed conflict or the like in particular the US the UK and Australia that have not signed or ratified the convention? 
But we can all breathe a sigh of relief because although the US Australia and the UK have not signed this particular convention Costa Rica has. What a great relief it is for the New Zealand public to know that we will be signing up to legislation which fortunately for all of us Uruguay has considered important enough to sign up to! We simply ask this question and perhaps we could ask the question directly of the Minister: why would we as a country ratify sloppy legislation when the UN itself has said that the definition involved is inoperable cannot be used and is unworkable? 
So what do we do? Well the Labour Government might believe that this is political leadership. It also thought that telling the world that we lived in a benign strategic environment was political leadership. Well it got that one pretty badly wrong. I suggest that we now find ourselves signing up to a particular piece of legislation that no equivalent country to New Zealand has signed up to and that no country with which we have traditional and historic links has signed up to. 
The question for the Minister in the chair is simply this: why would we sign up to and pass domestic legislation for an ill-defined concept of mercenary at the same time that countries like Azerbaijan Barbados Belarus Cameroon Costa Rica Georgia Libya Mali Togo and the Ukraine have signed up to it? This is just ridiculous. The Minister sitting in the chair needs to take the opportunity to get on her feet and answer these questions. Why is New Zealand ahead of its traditional friends and allies on this issue?