Mark Ron: Ministerial Statements — Iraq—Deployment of Military PersonnelText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMark Ron: Ministerial Statements — Iraq—Deployment of Military Personnel[Sitting date: 24 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1831. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]RON MARK (NZ First): In rising to take this call on behalf of New Zealand First I want to start by talking about some people who have not gained even one mention from the Government to this point and they are the Defence Force personnel who will be deploying the Defence Force personnel who will lay their lives on the line to do what this Government has told them they must do.Let us be very clear our Defence Force personnel will be just typical Kiwis—soldiers air force personnel and sailors—the likes of whom we have come to know love and honour. They will be champing at the bit to get to grips with this mission. That is their nature. That is the way we are. If either I or Darroch Ball were back in uniform again I would say without a doubt should we have been asked to do this mission that it would have been an emphatic “Yes sir when do we go?”.But it is not their job to determine whether or not this deployment is appropriate. That is the job of this Government. Ideally it would have been the job of this Parliament. Ideally this Government would have gone out of its way to consult with all political parties to get as wide a level of consensus as possible behind the Defence Force personnel that it might deploy—who in the worst case might not come home—and they would know that the job and the duty that they will perform had the support of the majority of this House.This Government has instead chosen to embark on a misinformation campaign a spin campaign the like of which I cannot recall in this country’s history. Prior to the election it was politically inconvenient to have the question put; there was an assurance we were not going into combat. During the election campaign there were more such assurances and in December we had the Minister of Defence denying that troops were undergoing training.Well look at the facts as revealed here today. When New Zealand First said that there were 130 to 140 personnel training and preparing to go the Minister denied it. Today we are told that 130 personnel are likely to go. When we said that the deployment was likely to occur and that decisions would be made in February or at the start of March guess what? It is late February and we are heading into March.When we said that there are troops going from the 2nd/1st Battalion from 1st Battalion and from Queen Alexandra’s Mounted Rifles the Minister scoffed made light of it and joked. What do we now know? The 2nd/1st Battalion 1st Battalion and Queen Alexandra’s Mounted Rifles are going. It begs the question: who knows more about defence than the Minister of Defence? Clearly everybody. And he made jokes about it. This is the Minister of Defence whose biggest whine and bitch was that he could not understand the acronyms and that the Defence Force really needed to stop using them because he could not understand them.We need to think about these personnel and privates who are earning—what? They are earning $44000 a year—$44000 a year. There are second lieutenants who are likely to be platoon commanders—what are they on $50000 to $60000 a year? We need to think about the large numbers of troops coming back from Afghanistan and other deployments who will be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and the trials and the rigours that they have gone through to try to get assistance and help. Think about that now Government Prime Minister Minister of Defence and Minister of Veterans’ Affairs because one thing that I know from my past military experience—and Darroch Ball knows—is that as an army officer you certainly do not think about it when help is being asked for. Think about what they are being paid and what they are being asked to do.Let us not have any more of this illusionary rhetoric and gloss about the safety of the mission. What do we know about Taji? We know that it was the centre and hub of death squad killings by al-Qaeda and that it still seems to be that way. We know that there is a mix of Shi’a and Sunni there and if that mix exists in the training base there will be inherent risks of green on blue. We know that they are poorly paid in the Iraqi defence force and therefore—and Mark Mitchell knows this—they are open to and subject to threats bribery and all of those other things that occur inside corrupt organisations where you have the very wealthy and the very poor and disempowered.We know that these people the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) are very well trained and we know that they study the responses of forces to ambushes and to other interdictions. We know that they go back and study the tactics and prepare for the next time so that they know precisely what the drills of the battalion or of our soldiers might have been and know how to counter them. They know about secondary ambushes where they seek to make the biggest strike.We know that this mission is high risk. There is no “behind the wire” when you have defence force personnel who will take a bribe who might find that their family has been threatened and just leave the gate open or shoot the guard to allow an entry to happen.All the rhetoric all the chest-thumping and all the carry-on actually does our Defence Force personnel a disservice. They will go loyally where they are sent. They deserve to know that the majority of this House supports them and that this Government has done everything it can—not politicking around the fringes not minimising the risk for the polls and not avoiding having to answer the horrible question at the most awkward of times. They deserve to know that our Government would have actually spent time with other political parties gone through the issues and risks and worked to garner wide consensus and support. That did not happen and that saddens me greatly.We need to know about the training and activities that these people our Defence Force personnel are going to be involved in. We have heard a lot but we have heard nothing. Are we training raw recruits? Are we training Iraqi special forces personnel? Are we training their officer cadets? Are we training them to be leaders? Are we training them not to be corrupt? Are we training them to look after their personnel? And precisely who is training us in how to train them—because we have not been there. Well not quite. Actually there have been a hell of a lot of New Zealanders in Iraq for the last 13 years. Some of them are back home now. Some come and go; they go to other countries all over the world.In fact if you look at what the Prime Minister has talked about today you could have given this work to a contractor to do a contractor that has the sanction of the club members because those club members have many such companies engaged precisely in this work and we as a nation might well have chosen to focus instead on humanitarian aid like sending a Defence Force field hospital. Oops sorry I think we sold that did we not? Yes we probably sold that. Maybe actually if we had maintained the promise that the National Party gave to re-establish our air combat capability we might have been able to send that but oops there goes another promise made by Simon Power and Don Brash supported by half the people who sit in the front bench of this Government. Oops just forgot that one.So we do not have those options but while we are thinking about these personnel who are about to leave while we are thinking about the position that we put them in over Christmas where they could not tell their mum and dad and could not tell their grandparents or their uncles and aunties “Yes I am going to Iraq.”—they could not confide in the detail. Just think about that. Just think about the effect on those young people and those families. I know families who have spoken to me under my guarantee that I would not mention their names obviously. Families are naturally worried as they should be. Our young men and women are ready to go and do the Government’s job as we knew they would be but I want this House to think carefully about the way it has treated Defence Force personnel.Look at what is happening in Linton. We are selling off defence houses that soldiers and their families live in and throwing these very same soldiers from 1st Battalion and Queen Alexandra’s Mounted Rifles out into the free-market forces: “Oh go fend for yourself. This country loves you so much we’re going to send you to Iraq and give you a medal and by the way we’re taking your house off you and you’re going to be subject to some landlord ripping you off for rents that we know you can’t afford because you’re only being paid $44000 a year. Don’t worry; we love you. We’re going to give you an operational deployment.”Well now is the time—now is the time—for this Government to think seriously about some of the things that are happening inside the Defence Force some of the things that the Government is not doing to support our Defence Force personnel. Do not sit there beating your chests and telling me how wonderful you are as a Government because you are taking on these nasty brutal people from Islamic State of Iraq and Syria because the truth of the matter is that your focus as a Government should be on looking after our Defence Force personnel whom you are about to deploy into Iraq to do your job.