Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. I want to begin by noticing acknowledging and remembering that there are victims that we're talking about here and that this bill comes before this House of Representatives because there were victims of harm. They lived in Afghanistan and they experienced some grave grave harm to the extent of torture and death at the hand of militaries that we were allies with and perhaps our military. We never quite got to the bottom of that but that's the kind of harm that we hope—Joseph Mooney: Come on.GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: —to avoid. There are members of the Opposition yelling Oh come on." So to the people of Afghanistan I say to ignore them because we do care. We do care that your babies and that your civilian men and women experienced harm. We do care and we do want our military to be held to account. To the people of Aotearoa New Zealand I say that we care. We're not here to hide things because we know that you deserve trust and respect in your military and actually our New Zealand defence forces deserve to be trusted and respected by our people. So to have our House of Representatives with members willing to hide that harm is doing harm to our people and our Defence Force (NZDF) and it is cutting deep within the international community especially those communities with which our Defence Force interacts. As a child who lived in war in the Middle East I tell you that this bill matters. To have Western powers—and we have so much power—say that we will have independent oversight mechanisms and that we will have transparency and accountability because we have the privilege of democracy matters. It's shameful to say that we will exercise that power and that we will use our freedom in a way that's undemocratic and that's not transparent and that we will skirt accountability for our pride's sake. So this is a good bill. It's good to see a Minister respond to a report like that that came out of the Operation Burnham inquiry with actual legislation with a systems shift by way of the creation of the role of the Inspector-General of Defence and also the deputy inspector-general. It's inspiring to see that we will have oversight—including full access to information that's held by the defence forces—and that we say that the defence forces even in war are accountable to the people of New Zealand and that they will be responsible and will not act with impunity if things do go wrong. In fact this incentivises respect for the rule of law—the rule of law in the international arena by way of humanitarian law and the laws of war and also our own domestic human rights obligations. Those are important. Now we do also know that in terms of Operation Burnham there were systems in place already that were breached. We know that under three different heads of the New Zealand Defence Force information was hidden from successive Ministers so we know that there also needs to be a systems shift by way of the culture of our New Zealand defence forces. We know that more junior members of the NZDF were reporting things from on the ground and we know that sometimes intermediate-level members of the Defence Force were also recording these things but that they weren't making it all the way up to the existing oversight mechanism that we have by way of our civilian Ministers of Defence as elected by the people of New Zealand and that was the really scary thing that came out of the Operation Burnham report. So that culture shift is something that the New Zealand Defence Force is responsible for and the hope is that the creation of an independent body like this will create that culture shift but that's not guaranteed. It's sending a signal that we don't want our military to act with impunity. It's sending a signal that we will hold them to account. But that doesn't always work and we learnt that with Operation Burnham. We needed investigative journalists to get in there and investigate and make these reports. That shouldn't be the way that it works. That isn't the kind of democracy in which our defence forces operate.Now that's not to say that we have something to be suspicious of all the time. We do respect our defence forces. They're actually responsible for monitoring a fifth of the world's oceans. They mostly do environmental monitoring and disaster relief—incredibly important work for the gravest of security risks in the modern age which is the climate crisis. But we do want them sometimes to also be deployed with the full trust of the New Zealand public into war zones where things go wrong where things get mixed up and where they interact with and are influenced by the culture of other defence forces. Whether that's in this case the US defence force and the UK who were responsible for an illegal war in the Middle East and where impunity is rife—we know that and we want them to lead with the kind for respect for the rule of law for international human rights law for the dignity of the people in whose nations they are deployed that New Zealanders should always be able to expect from our people when they're deployed elsewhere in the world. We want them to act with mana and with integrity.So this is the point of this bill and we do support it. I do say that this is a system shift that this is a real change in the way that we treat the work of our defence forces and bring them into our democracy. But it's also just one step and it's that culture shift that respect for democracy that's maybe a two-way street that we need to instil in our defence forces so that we do avoid what we saw come out of the Operation Burnham inquiry that might be scary for some people to read.Before I finish I do just want to bring us back to the people in those faraway lands who are already suffering in war where our people are deployed where there is fear and there is need and then there's that harm. They are the people that we need to protect because actually that is what international human rights that is what the rule of law and that's what New Zealand's values stand for. So I commend this bill and I commend the Minister for bringing it in. I look forward to seeing the next steps of the Operation Burnham inquiry recommendations come into effect under this Government."