Martin Tracey: Veterans’ Support Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMartin Tracey: Veterans’ Support Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 22 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19306. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]TRACEY MARTIN (NZ First):Kia ora Mr Chair. I rise to speak on behalf of New Zealand First on the Veterans’ Support Bill. I just want to read clause 25: “The purpose of the Code is to meet the reasonable expectations of veterans and claimants (including the highest practicable standard of service and fairness) …” and I think that is a really good statement. It is about the highest standard of service and fairness. These individuals—men and women—gave us their highest standard of service. They went away to a variety of conflicts to stand for us on those fields of battle.I want to acknowledge my grandfathers. Both of them served in World War II but in different ways. My mother’s father went to Egypt and also Italy and served with the New Zealand Engineers and my father’s father was the second officer in charge at the Featherston prisoner of war camp during the particular period of the Featherston riot. So both men saw very different service for their country but they went none the less.Some might say that those servicemen went for adventure. Some really went because we asked them to. We asked them as a nation to go and stand against an evil that we believed needed to be stopped and they were among many. They expect and should expect the highest-practicable standard of service and fairness from their country when they come home. They go on to try to lead normal lives some of them after terrible ordeals in the field on our behalf.I also want to remark on how good it is that we as a nation have moved on as many nations have. Unlike the way that we thought as a nation in 1960s when we had some of our servicemen take off their uniforms and get back into civvy clothing and go home quietly late at night and without any recognition we now recognise that these men and these women serve and carry out orders because we have asked them to do so. We acknowledge their service and hold the decision makers to account for these conflicts as opposed to some of the scenes that we had in the 1960s and the 1970s after Korea and Malaya and so on.I also just want to take this moment to acknowledge Sol Te Whata who passed away on Sunday. Sol was a member of the 28th Māori Battalion in A Company. He passed away on Sunday morning in the Hokianga and his tangi will be on Thursday. Our thoughts are will him. He was one of two of the last surviving members of the Māori Battalion in the north. He lived to a ripe old age. He had three wives I believe so he was certainly a man with spirit. He was a man who gave for his country and then came back and continued to participate in his community and with his family and who lived his life to the full. So our thoughts go to him to those who served with him who are no longer with us and to those who served with him who are still with us and who deserve our care.That is what this bill is about. It is about making sure that those who served—both the gentlemen who are of a passing generation and the new veterans who are coming because the world will never be a 100 percent peaceful place. That is something that we might wish for but every now and then men and women of our nation are going to have to stand up for us and go into conflict whether to protect others or whether to actually create a line in the sand that says: “No more. This is wrong. We are here on behalf of the New Zealand people to say stop or we will actually enforce international law.”So this is just a quick call to again reinforce New Zealand First’s support for this bill and express our disappointment that it has taken so long. We believe it is timely. We believe that the burden of proof with regard to medical claims and so on and so forth should not be on the veterans. If medical records have been lost then it is not for them to have to try to convince a bureaucrat in an office somewhere that the illness that they now suffer from has come out of their service from when they served their country.