Goff Phil: Veterans’ Support Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Veterans’ Support Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 22 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19296. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill):I want to pick up the theme of what I was saying about the Veterans’ Support Bill and the fact that although Labour is strongly supporting this bill very clearly the omission from this bill of recommendations made by the Law Commission and supported by the Returned and Services’ Association weaken the bill are penny-pinching and do no credit at all to this Government in honouring the service of our veterans.Yesterday I attended the funeral of one of my constituents. She was 99½ years old. She was due to turn 100 in January of next year. Her name was Audrey Stevens. A few years back I had attended the funeral of her husband Ivan. Audrey and Ivan were married in 1940. Three weeks after they were married he sailed for Europe with the 24th Battalion and he was not to return again for more than 5 years. Ivan like my father-in-law was captured in Crete.Audrey received a telegram. It said that Ivan was missing in action presumed killed. She had the appalling trauma of thinking that her husband whom she had just married had been killed and then later she was informed that he was a prisoner of war. Ivan never talked about his experiences as a prisoner of war as was the case with so many of those people including my father-in-law who were captured and held by the Germans for many many years. They simply did not want to talk about it. It was deeply traumatising.When Ivan came back from Europe he and Audrey were effectively strangers. Imagine marrying somebody and not seeing them for 5 years. It was not just the length of time that he was away; it was the trauma that he had endured and in those days there was no counselling for our vets—no counselling at all. For the rest of his life Ivan suffered from the conditions that he had endured at war and as a prisoner.Is there anything that can persuade this Government that it is now time to be generous with our veterans rather than penny-pinching over whether or not there might be a lump-sum payment available to those veterans on their death? The Minister of Veterans’ Affairs said to me in an earlier reading in the House that it is no good having the lump-sum payment because that would be for the benefit of the families and not the veterans. I want Minister Woodhouse to contemplate what Audrey had to endure all of those years because of the service that her husband had given this country at war.The inscription on the wall over there right in front of me—Crete—is what it was about. That family suffered. That family sacrificed so much and all I am asking of this Minister is that he honours the recommendation of the Law Commission which was set up independently to advise first the Labour Government that introduced this process and then the National Government. The Law Commission said to give these veterans every one of them a veterans pension and make it on the same terms as for those who are currently eligible for the veterans pension.The Minister has been persuaded that his first position was unsustainable—that the veterans pension went to those with 52 percent disability. Why 52 percent? That is absolutely arbitrary. There is no justification for it. He has given the community services card. He has said that the pension would not be suspended if a person is in hospital but he has penny-pinched by saying there will be no lump-sum payment on death. I asked the Minister this question in the estimates debate: what would it cost? Do you know what it would cost? It would cost $7.5 million this year dropping by about $1 million every 2 years. Is that too much to ask for?This Government spends countless billions of dollars every year and we are asking for a tiny amount of money in line with what the Royal New Zealand Returned and Services’ Association has asked for and what the Law Commission recommended. Why will this Government not honour the vets in the way that we are asking?