Goff Phil: Coroners Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Coroners Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 07 June 2016. Volume:714;Page:11766. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): I would like specifically to address clause 32 of this bill in so far as it makes a change relating to coroners’ inquiries into Defence Force personnel killed while on operational service as a result of hostile action. The status quo is that the coroner is able to report on deaths as a result of enemy action by New Zealand Defence Force personnel out on service in an area such as Afghanistan. What this bill does is it takes away the coroner’s right to provide independent scrutiny and to produce a report that is accessible to the public. Those are the critical points. What the coroner enables us to have as members of Parliament and enables members of the families of armed services personnel who are killed in action to have and allows the public to do is an independent person scrutinise the causes and circumstances of the deaths of those personnel and provide a report that the public has access to.The reason why this has been brought to the House in this bill is that the New Zealand Defence Force took umbrage at a report by coroner JP Ryan into an incident in 2012 where three members of the New Zealand Army were killed in an improvised explosive device incident in Bamiyan: Corporal Luke Tamatea Lance Corporal Jacinda Baker and Private Richard Harris.I have read the report by coroner JP Ryan and I have got to say it is an inoffensive report. It does not in any way intrude on issues of national security though that is the pretext in which this amendment is being made to the Act. The coroner’s report is available to all of us—any member of the House can look at it—and there is nothing concerning in that report I argue that could in any way be regarded as jeopardising New Zealand’s national security.The second argument by the New Zealand Defence Force is that these matters are non-justiciable—that is the coroner as a legal figure has no right to second-guess the decision that is made by a commanding officer on the battlefield. I do not believe that Ryan’s report does that either. What I do know is that unless you have the right to have a coroner’s report there is no mandatory requirement for an investigation into the death of a soldier on the battlefield. That point is made in the memo that I have briefing the Chief of the Defence Force.The coroner’s inquiry is the one mandatory requirement that the cause and the circumstances of the death of a soldier in action should be established. The Defence Force can of course hold a court of inquiry but that is not mandatory. Secondly when the Defence Force holds a court of inquiry its decisions and its reasoning are not available to you or me or most importantly to the families of the soldiers killed.One of the strongest points that I have read was made in fact by the partner of Corporal Luke Tamatea who herself is in the military. She makes the point very very strongly that she and her family took reassurance from the fact that an independent person—who was interested in finding the actual causes of the death and not interested in protecting the reputation of the Defence Force—had looked at this and had given information to the family. I say why should we as a House deny the members of the families of soldiers killed in action from receiving such a report?