Logie Jan: Veterans’ Support Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Veterans’ Support Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 22 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19316. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green):Thank you Mr Chair for the call in this Committee stage of the Veterans’ Support Bill. I want to pick up on some of the points that have just been made by Māori Party member Te Ururoa Flavell around negotiation and how hard the Māori Party has had to work to get the concessions from this Government. What a shame that is I think because the evidence that the Social Services Committee heard was pretty compelling and I think that a lot of the advice that the officials gave us actually supported the full extension of these provisions. The feeling I had was that the Government members on the committee were also at least in their hearts supportive of the full extension of these entitlements.So the fact that the Māori Party has apparently had to negotiate so hard to be able to get some gains—to get us almost there but not quite there—to me just leaves the question of why. Why could this Government not go all the way? Why hold out on the one point around the funeral payments on death? I just do not understand it when we have heard that it is only about $7.4 million. I do not understand why that is a point to hold out on in negotiation when most of the people in this Chamber—and in their hearts everyone on the select committee—supported it. I do not understand why the Government is holding out.The point was made that it is not really about the money. One of the arguments brought up by this Government was that it should have been done before. That seems very weak to me. I just want to make the point that in the regulatory impact statement we actually read that 28 percent of our war veterans will pass away in the next 5 years and that will be most of the World War II veterans. This is probably our last opportunity to deliver for those families that full recognition and this entitlement. I just cannot understand why this Government is holding out on that point when it is such a relatively small amount of money. I think it has been mentioned in this Committee that it is 0.00001 percent of total Government spending that it is holding on to. Is it out of meanness? Is it out of political pride not to have caved in to what was seen to then be an Opposition request rather than the fact that it was the Law Commission that recommended it and that it was backed up by the Royal New Zealand Returned and Services’ Association?This is not really about politics. This should not be about politics and I cannot understand how it has become about politics because it is about a just recognition. Although I am on the record around being a pacifist and not wanting to glorify war that for me is all the more reason to be able to offer whatever support we can to our war veterans who have been sent into these horrific environments who have had to do things that none of us would ever want to do and who have seen things that we would never want to see. They have been harmed whether it was physically or emotionally and their families have also often borne the cost. We heard very moving testimonies through the select committee process from veterans as well as the children of veterans who talked about growing up in households where the war was relived in their living rooms.If as a country we cannot afford the cost of acknowledging the harm that Governments have done by sending people then that is a very clear reason not to send people. If we cannot afford to compensate them for that then we should not be doing that. I am not going to spend very much longer on this because it has been 7 years since this was sent to the Law Commission and we definitely need to update the War Pensions Act 1954. We need to do that as quickly as possible and by the end of this Parliament.