Shearer David: Veterans’ Support Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShearer David: Veterans’ Support Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 22 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19298. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert):I have spoken on the Veterans’ Support Bill before and I firstly just want to compliment Phil Goff on the work he has done on this because he has progressed it from a point where we had very limited benefits for servicemen who had served our country abroad. Through his lobbying and intensive action on this bill he has made some real differences and that will bring about some real differences for many of our veterans. As we all know we ask our service people to go off and serve our country and to put themselves in harm’s way. We respect them for doing that and we honour them for doing that but that honour is not just in the form of medals and parades etc. It is also about the way we treat people in terms of the abilities and the type of support we can get in behind them in terms of financial support and recognition. This is what this bill is really all about. It is about making sure that the proper recognition is given to our service people for the work and the service that they have undertaken for us.It was in 2006 when Rick Barker first looked at putting forward this bill. It was about 8 years ago. It has taken a long time for this to come to the fore. We would like to see it out of the way under this Parliament. We certainly support the bill but we are asking for more modifications. In some of our initial Supplementary Order Papers that were put forward we asked the Government to change the 52 percent disability impairment that was in place. That really was about the ludicrous way in which people had to prove that somehow they were 52 percent impaired. I mean why 52 percent as opposed to 51 percent or 55 percent? I do not know but it was a ludicrous situation that they were in. That was changed and I thank the Government for coming to its senses and accepting that. One of the other things that it has accepted is allowing veterans to have automatic entitlement to a community services card. Once again it is a small issue perhaps for many of the people who are looking at this bill but it is a very big issue for those service people and it acknowledges the effort and the contribution they have made to New Zealand. The bill also enables the continued payment of a pension while the service person is in hospital for more than 13 weeks. Again there was recognition and a change occurred.These are all changes that happened to the 1954 Act which had not been looked at really since 1954 and which the Hon Rick Barker decided in 2006 was well overdue for attention. He went about that change in a responsible way. He got the Law Commission in and asked it in 2008 to make a full inquiry and investigation into what was there and in place and that is what the Law Commission did. It came back in 2010. Well here we are in 2014 4 years after the Law Commission put forward its very learned and very sensible recommendations. They were not radical; they were simply bringing us up to date. Four years on from there we are still debating this as part of this piece of legislation.So our Supplementary Order Papers asked for those changes in line with what the Law Commission had recommended. The one thing that was not agreed to by this Government was the lump-sum payment on death. For some curious reason the Government believed that that was not going to go to the benefit of the service person and therefore we should not have that paid as part of that person’s entitlement. But as Phil Goff just mentioned in his remarks before it was not just one person who in many ways did the service did the time for New Zealand; it was also their loved ones. It was their wives or it was their husbands who had been at home looking after kids trying to make do without one of those parents. It was for the mothers and fathers and the sons and daughters who would have missed out as a result of that person serving our country. It seems to me that this is an incredibly small contribution that we can make to these people and to those people who had been left behind who also made a sacrifice on behalf of New Zealand.The cost is infinitesimally small when we look at it in the bigger picture—that is it will cost about $11 million according to Veterans Affairs New Zealand for the 2014-15 year and it will fall steadily until it gets to about $8.4 million. That is not a lot of money. Unfortunately some of those veterans are in the last years of their lives—they are old now—which means that the number of those veterans who are around will fall and therefore the cost will fall. At some point in the future—20 or 30 years’ time from now—some of our people who have been serving in Timor-Leste Afghanistan and the Solomon Islands will become eligible for that lump-sum payment but that will be some time well down the track. But what it does do is acknowledge fully as per the recommendations of the Law Commission the service of our people and their families—and I stress “and their families” because their families have suffered as well. It recognises that they have made that sacrifice and can be properly acknowledged and compensated for it. It means that a widow whose husband has died is able to meet the costs of a decent funeral and it will enable her to transition and make her life a bit more comfortable as a result of receiving that lump-sum payment.These are not big things; they are just simply what we should do as a decent and fair nation in terms of acknowledging and getting behind and supporting those people who go out and choose to serve our country. They do that put themselves in harm’s way come back possibly wounded or scarred psychologically and have to pick up the pieces and move on with their lives. Those are the costs that we are asking them and their families to bear. All we are saying is that perhaps those families deserve some recognition of their costs and we should get in behind them. Thank you very much.