Veterans Support Amendment Bill – Talk about Fastrack – UPDATE
I cannot and have never heard of anything moving this fast in the Beehive especially anything to do with Veterans. Update in Red as at 20th June 19
The Veterans Support Amendment Bill
Introduced into Parliament 23 May 19
First Reading 28 May 19
Passed to Social Services and Community Select Committee and submissions close 3 Jun (Note the 3rd June is Queens Birthday and submissions close at midnight) Hardly much time for the public to get submissions in. If our MP’s had reacted to our prompts prior to first reading we might not be in this position now.
Second Reading – 19 June 2019 The video of these readings can be viewed HERE
Third Reading – 19 June 2019
The second and third reading of the Bill has been read in parliament. It is apparent that the Select Committee pushed the Bill through with no amendment as the advice they received from supplementary questions was that the Minister will still be able to acknowledge deployments prior to 1974 as Qualifying Operational Service. The Association holds a copy of this documentation.
We now eagerly await notification from CDF of the completion of the review into pre-1974 deployments and also the announcement by the Minister of Veterans Affairs as who is actually a Veteran and how New Zealand is going to recognise these Veterans. Both these announcements are expected to be made on 30th June 2019.
A copy of the RNZN Communicators Assn submission to the Select Committee can be read HERE.
Three other submissions were put forward to the Select Committee which amounted to one-liners in support of the Amendment to the Act. You can read these submissions by clicking HERE (they won’t take you long). These submissions were from the Ranfurly Veterans Trust, NZ Vietnam Veterans Association and Mark Treadgold.
The final report of the Select Committee can be read HERE
A meeting of the Social Services and Community Select Committee was held on 6 June however due to there being no oral submissions the meeting will no longer be open to the public. Two National members of the committee, Louise Upston and Alfred Ngaru will both be absent from the meeting so it is unsure who will be representing the National Party. I guess the National Party Whips will be busy this morning. A further meeting has been scheduled for 11 June 2019 at 0900 – 1000. We have no idea who will be attending this meeting and it is not currently scheduled to be live streamed.