Coleman Jonathan: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeColeman Jonathan: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19164. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Minister of Defence):Looking to what we have just heard from both the New Zealand First member Richard Prosser and Phil Goff you would not believe that there has actually been so much great progress in the Defence Force. We are talking about the Appropriation (2014/15 Estimates) Bill here: $535 million over the next 4 years going into Vote Defence Force.Chris Auchinvole: How much?Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: It is $535 million. That is something to really celebrate quite frankly.Hon Phil Goff: That’s less than I spent on the NH90s for God’s sake.Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: I am very disappointed with Phil Goff because no matter how nice I am to him I cannot get him to take a bipartisan approach and support our serving men and women. It is very very sad.Look what I can say to him is that he really has been misleading—I would like to say—there around the PKO the peacekeeping operations paper. He knows that the reason we have got relatively few people out on deployment at the moment is that we have people who have come back from Afghanistan from East Timor and from the Solomon Islands. The situation is very different from when he was the Minister. On 8 September 2008 there was a headline in the New Zealand Herald relating to Phil Goff’s tenure as Minister which said: “Can’t fight can’t sail can’t fly”. We have had to turn that round.What we had in 2010 was the first defence white paper in 13 years. What that did was set the policy for defence. We said: “Look it’s fiscally pretty constrained times. We’ve got to be very clear about what we need the Defence Force to do. Primarily it obviously has to maintain the integrity of New Zealand’s borders and be able to operate in our exclusive economic zone. It has to be able to deploy into the south-west Pacific in cases where there may be security emergencies or where there may be humanitarian assistance and disaster relief issues they have to deal with and it has to be able to make a contribution further afield.” So the policy was set but what we knew was that there was a funding gap there. We knew what capabilities were needed to deliver on that policy and we followed it up with the release of a capability plan which we have just refreshed recently and released just 2 weeks ago. But we had this hole of well over half a billion dollars which was going to roll up into the 2020s to a massive deficit of money needed to fund the sort of capital equipment that the Defence Force needs.So we went away and the officials from the Ministry of Defence and the New Zealand Defence Force did an excellent job at looking at all the capabilities that the Defence Force has—about 220 of them. They costed them all. They arranged them into 11 capability sets to deliver on the policy. At the end of that we had a very clear view of what capabilities were needed for the Defence Force to actually deliver the effects that the Government needs it to. We went to Cabinet and said: “Look this is the policy this is the strategy this is the capability we need and now we need this funding.” As a result of that in this Budget we have got this over half a billion dollars’ worth over 4 years. That is something that Phil Goff really should be celebrating. He is being disingenuous to say that we cannot deploy a defence force on a continuous rotation. We can; we can do two at once just like he could when he was Minister. The same problems that have been there around you know critical trades sustaining these deployments have always been there. They were there when Phil Goff was there. The key point is that we are able to sustain these deployments.As for the New Zealand First member he wants eight frigates for the navy. What he did not mention was that it was actually his leader Winston Peters who cancelled the third frigate. I know he would be very eager to go and attack any country ending in “stan” but actually that is not realistic in the current world. So when you look at it we have got a situation where we had no new money in defence for many many years. We had to make the best of what we had at the time. We redeployed resources from the back of the office to the front.Hon Phil Goff: Who paid for the NH90s?Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: Ah! Phil Goff has mentioned the NH90s—$770 million. He has forgotten though that you do not just buy the helicopter; you need to be able to afford to run it and you need to have people to go in it. Phil Goff ignored that completely. He has now left us to carry the slack.He talks about morale and attrition. Attrition in the Defence Force is now lower than when he was Minister. It is now 11.6 percent. Morale is now at 85 percent. So 85 percent of personnel in the New Zealand Defence Force rate their morale as good or better. I can tell you that that is a damned sight higher than the Labour caucus’ morale.Hon Phil Goff: No no no not true—satisfactory.Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: Yes it absolutely is. That is 85 percent. So actually what we have done is turned round a lot of the damage that Phil Goff caused when he was Minister.But the one thing I really do wish is this. You know Phil Goff is always welcome to come along to any defence event; I always acknowledge him. But I wish he would just behave the same way in the Chamber as he does at those events.Vote agreed to.