Mapp Wayne: Armed Forces Law Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMapp Wayne: Armed Forces Law Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 10 October 2007. Volume:642;Page:12239. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr WAYNE MAPP (National—North Shore): Part 1 is the core part of the Armed Forces Law Reform Bill. National is supporting the bill. I want to acknowledge the members of the defence forces. Indeed I think all members of Parliament who spoke yesterday on this bill acknowledged that both Brigadier Riordan and Lieutenant Commander Griggs did sterling work for the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee. I suspect that they may well have thought some of the questions were rather more complex than they had been expecting because after all this legislation is essentially non-contentious in the sense of a political contest. But this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get this legislation right. So it was important that the select committee went through the bill pretty carefully using the legal knowledge of various members plus some experience of the armed forces themselves. We applied that carefully to the situation.I note given that the Minister Phil Goff is in the chair that the process on this bill was bipartisan. My colleague Mr Tim Groser has reflected very carefully on the bipartisan nature of many aspects of foreign affairs and defence. One would think the Minister would take that on board a little more.One would also think the Minister could take just a little bit of time and trouble to understand history. I am certain that this Government has issued medals with the word “Iraq” on them to recognise the service of New Zealand service people in Iraq. I wonder what that was for. Do members think service people were just handing out milk sachets or were they defence personnel? What were those television pictures I saw with heavily armed soldiers I guess going in to nail up schools and things like that? Do they need heavy machine guns for that sort of job? Do they need rocket launchers for that sort of job? That is how the New Zealand Defence Force operated in Iraq. So when the Government pretends we were there only for post-reconstruction—Hon Phil Goff: That is exactly what they were there for and the member knows it.Dr WAYNE MAPP: So why were the soldiers so heavily armed? Why did they have rocket launchers? Why did they have machine guns? The Minister needs to get off his high horse on this thing and recognise that the Government is on a bit of a loser on this one.Bipartisanship is actually quite important in defence and foreign affairs. I am pleased to say that National has taken a rigorous bipartisan approach to this bill. I acknowledge all members of the select committee and its chair Dianne Yates. We had a full opportunity to discuss the issues raised by this bill carefully. I acknowledge the role of the advisers who carefully went through the material.I want to say that this bill was very much initiated within the Defence Force itself. It is not one of those cases where the Government came along and said the bill set out what it wanted to do; this was the other way round. This was a case of the Defence Force saying it needed to update our armed forces law and this was the bill to do that.Nevertheless the bill raises a number of questions. Part 1 is quite complex; it covers many many different provisions. One of the issues that concerned us was the role and nature of the director of military prosecutions as outlined in new Part 4A inserted byclause 36 of the bill. The director is stated in the legislation as being primarily responsible to the Solicitor-General. That is obviously correct in terms of the legal aspects of that role. A bit like the Solicitor-General the director has to have an independent sense. But of course as we can see in this Committee today the director is a senior officer of the New Zealand Defence Force and therefore has all of the obligations in relation to command functions. So we thought it important to separate out those two points in the legislation and to make it crystal clear that the director is not so to speak completely divorced from the chain of command. The legislation had to reflect the dual role that the director necessarily takes.