Mapp Wayne: Armed Forces Law Reform Bill — First Reading 
Mapp Wayne: Armed Forces Law Reform Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:637;Page:8065] 
Dr WAYNE MAPP (National—North Shore) 
: 
 National will be supporting this bill going to a select committee. We do note that the Minister did brief the National Party and other parties in the House. Yes it is true that our system of military justice does need modernisation but it is important to highlight a fundamental point. The actual military offences are not being changed by this legislation. What is being changed are the procedures—how those offences are in fact tried. The changes are largely around what we might loosely call the superior jurisdiction—the courts martial. 
There are some details in that that I want to bring to the House’s attention. As I am sure there will be members in this House who perhaps have suffered the impost of summary jurisdiction of their units— 
Ron Mark 
: And dealt it out. 
Dr WAYNE MAPP 
: —and dealt it out so we hear—I shall mention that that part of the procedure will not really be changing in fact. I do note that there are two colleagues at least in the House who have served in the role of presiding officers in the summary jurisdiction and I would also have to put on record I guess—as the member volunteered it by interjection—that Major Ron Mark was also a recipient of that jurisdiction perhaps as a private soldier. It clearly did not inhibit his rise through the ranks thereafter. 
That having been said I will now move to the issue of courts martial because this is a significant change. Under the existing system we essentially have a panel of military officers who try the accused. There is no jury or anything of that nature and the legally qualified person—frequently not a serving officer—is acting merely in an advisory role. At least that is the theory. Those members who have seen the film  
A Few Good Men 
 will note that in other jurisdictions such as the United States it is done quite differently. There it looks more like a civil trial with a judge sitting in jurisdiction exercising a legal approach to the trial. That is the major change that will be brought about by this legislation and I think it is a good one. When people are facing the prospect of imprisonment—and there have been many courts martial in New Zealand including those in recent years where people have been sentenced to imprisonment—there should be a legal process and all legal niceties should be observed. 
One thing I also want to bring to the House’s attention is what I think is quite a significant change. There is now established a Director of Military Prosecutions. This person who will almost certainly be a serving officer will be appointed by the Governor-General. Most probably that person will be the director-general of the legal service currently a brigadier in the New Zealand Army. The interesting point—and we will be exploring this issue in the select committee—is that that person will be under the supervision of the Solicitor-General and will be immune from command of the Chief of Defence Force. Members should note that point. A serving military officer will not be accountable for this particular purpose—that of Director of Military Prosecutions—to the normal chain of command. The responsibility is actually to the Crown Law Office which is headed by the Solicitor-General—and that person has the power to stay proceedings under military law. So this is quite a substantial change and that particular person will have substantially more autonomy and independence than any other officer in the New Zealand Defence Force. The Minister just glossed over that and did not make much of it but I suggest that that is a very significant change. We will be wanting to explore that change in the select committee in order to understand the significance of it. I am told that it is the case in the United Kingdom and in Canada so I will want to see how it is working out in practice in those jurisdictions. 
National is supporting the bill but we should not pretend that these are minor changes. They are substantial changes. By and large I suggest that they are actually changes for the good. They do modernise our system. 
I just want to bring the attention of the House to this additional fact. Some years ago—about a decade—there were only about three or four legal officers across the Defence Force. Typically there was one in each of the services plus a director. Today there are 28 which is a change in the space of just 10 years and virtually every deployment overseas includes a legal officer. Is that not an interesting change? No doubt people have it in their minds that that is OK. They guess that when people in the services go out on patrol they have to go and talk to the legal officer to work out the rules of engagement and so forth and that if they happen to fire their weapons they will be interviewed by the legal officer in the field. People might suppose that there will be a report going back to the Director of Military Prosecutions who is reporting to the Solicitor-General. 
We have to ask ourselves whether this helps or hinders the conduct of contemporary operations. By and large I think that it probably helps though perhaps not in the way that I have described because I recognise that contemporary operations and their interaction with humanitarian law which is a much greater plethora of conventions and custom law and much greater interaction with civil reconstruction—rebuilding societies—do have a significant legal dimension to them. It is not like military conflicts of the past. So things are done differently and properly so. These nevertheless are very big changes. Four legal officers to 28 in the space of a decade is a change in the culture and in the way the Defence Force now conducts its contemporary operations internationally and indeed locally. 
So National does support the bill. I personally see it as an overdue modernisation to our military law but it does raise significant questions which I trust that the select committee—under the chair of Dianne Yates—will be able to explore properly because what they really say is that contemporary military operations are different from the military operations of the past that are so well known to many members in this House and to their predecessors.