Mark Ron: Mercenary Activities (Prohibition) Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Mark Ron: Mercenary Activities (Prohibition) Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:618;Page:14257] 
RON MARK (NZ First) 
: 
 That was an excellent speech and I really wish the Government would accept that what we are arguing is that the definitions in this legislation make it unenforceable. It is not workable. It is feel-good. We all know what the Government is talking about. We have known about people like Mike Hoare for years. Yet there are ways in which countries can deal with those issues. In passing this legislation with all the ambiguity that is contained in it we scoop up into this net men and women who are doing excellent work—men and women whose morals virtues and integrity cannot be questioned. 
Look at the training. Take for example an officer with 20 years’ service in the New Zealand Army who was decorated for his service in Vietnam on behalf of his country served with the British defence forces and became internationally renowned as a specialist officer. He is recruited into a Middle Eastern country that is struggling to contain its internal security and border security problems. He is recruited along with a number of British personnel as a contract officer to train teach and command the Middle Eastern soldiers and soldiers who are recruited from other parts of the world. So he goes to Pakistan Nepal and India puts his net out amongst the wider community within those Middle Eastern countries and recruits people whom he then trains. 
The moment they become actively engaged in combat he is a mercenary. Despite all the good work he is doing to enhance the security of the situation in the Middle East and to help relationships between his country and the host country—the country that his company has been contracted to support with the knowledge of the British and New Zealand Governments—suddenly he is a mercenary and therefore is liable on conviction to face 14 years in jail. 
We have to get our heads up and look at the situation. The world has moved on. We know what the Government is talking about when it uses the very stigmatised term “mercenary”. Those are people who will go out and do despicable acts who are brought in only by money and greed who do not care about the ideological causes or about sovereignty and who go in for one purpose and one purpose alone. They do not care who their masters are; they just want to earn the big money. 
My message is that today those people are increasingly a very small minority. The vast bulk of the people employed as private defence contractors and security personnel are in legitimate companies that are well known and indeed are utilised by Western powers. The problem with this legislation is that it is so ambiguous that it scoops up all those people into the one basket thereby putting them in a situation whereby they can be prosecuted for the good work they have done because someone has slapped a label on their forehead and deemed them to be horrible nasty mercenaries of this type. 
I ask this Government to reflect on the quality of men and women that it trains and ask itself seriously whether it believes that suddenly overnight those men and women who take private contracts leave the shores of New Zealand and go to work for private British companies based out of Hong Kong or the Isle of Man have suddenly had a brain change. Have they suddenly become nasty horrible immoral people who only soldier for money? The truth is that no they have not. They go out to do something they know they can do to make the world a better place for other people and they do a jolly good job of it. That is why they are so widely sought after. 
We are throwing out a net with this legislation and its poorly defined clauses that will take in all these people. All it needs is for some malicious person to lodge charges or to lay a complaint and suddenly we will have people out there who have been doing very good work for the past 5 years—maybe in Iraq Kosovo Cambodia or Sierra Leone—suddenly facing criminal charges and a possible 14-year sentence. It does not matter where I look through this legislation it is impossible to enforce easy to circumvent and so ambiguous that it should not be passed. 
The question was put that the following amendment in the name of the Hon Phil Goff to clause 7 be agreed to: 
to insert in paragraph (a) of subclause (2) after the words “a party to the” the word “armed”. 
A party vote was called for on the question That the amendment be agreed to. 
Ayes 70 
New Zealand Labour 51; Green Party 9; United Future 8; Progressive 2. 
Noes 48 
New Zealand National 27; New Zealand First 13; ACT New Zealand 8. 
Amendment agreed to.