On patrol in North East Bamyan - one of approximately 30,000 contemporary veterans.
Military veterans are not receiving the service and support they should be getting, says Minister of Veterans Peeni Henare, and there is not enough known about contemporary veterans.
“We’ve clearly got to do better by veterans,” said Henare, who came into the portfolio three months ago to a briefing about a backlog of claims at Veterans’ Affairs New Zealand.
“I acknowledge we’ve got to be far better than this into the future and I’m really open to looking and exploring about how we do that to make sure we meet those needs.
“We can do more without a shadow of a doubt.”
In an interview with the Herald, Henare has now backpedalled on assurances he had given that veterans were getting all the support they needed.
The Herald has reported on NZSAS trooper Gregg Johnson’s efforts to seek help for memory gaps that could be linked to “Operator Syndrome”, a particular blend of injuries common among special forces soldiers across the world who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The reporting highlighted a briefing from Veterans’ Affairs to those needing its help that it could not deal with claims as they came in so were prioritising those involving mental health and terminal illness.
At the same time, emailed statements from Henare’s office said he was “confident” veterans were “receiving the support they need” with a Veterans’ Affairs survey showing 93 per cent were happy with the service they received.
He has now acknowledged that is not the case and that problems run deeper than the immediate backlog
“Wow,” he said, when told there were only 66 interviews with veterans aged under 60 out of the 4843 veterans interviewed over five years to reach the 93 per cent satisfaction rating.
Henare said the survey - paid for by Veterans Affairs - reflected a national misunderstanding that military veterans were those who had served in World War II or conflicts over the following few decades.
“But we’ve got a whole new heap of veterans that are more contemporary and will have different needs and different challenges.”
Henare said he was Minister of Defence at the time Afghanistan returned to the rule of the Taliban and was aware “a considerable number of our people went to Afghanistan to serve our country”.
He said at the time “I expressed a bit of concern that we didn’t know where these people were after they submitted their service”.
As Minister for Veterans, he said the absence of data around the younger veteran population was a problem. “It’s not good enough.”
It was “fair comment”, he said, that it was difficult for Veterans’ Affairs to provide service to veterans when it didn’t know how many veterans it should be serving.
It is believed that conflicts over the last 30 years created around 30,000 Kiwi veterans although the exact number is unknown and could be 20 per cent less or more.
It is an uncertainty that has created a $1 billion buffer in the accounts of NZ Defence Force - Veterans’ Affairs parent body - because it doesn’t know how much to budget for future veterans’ claims.
Henare said it was known there were “significant data gaps” around veterans and “my job is to try to fix those”.
Documents obtained through the Official Information Act by the Herald show the data gaps were flagged as a problem at Veterans’ Affairs in 2015 because it was difficult to gauge the extent and type of need.
It wasn’t until a 2018 review of the Veterans’ Support Act 2014 recommended a register be developed that NZDF carried out work to develop a “preliminary” list of those who had served from 1991 to 2014.
It was a task completed two years ago. NZDF told the Herald a proposal for an up-to-date and complete register “has been developed and is under consideration”.
Asked about a full register, Henare said: “There is an urgency for that.”
Henare said he was “the first one to acknowledge that actually there are significant data gaps in everything that we’ve got with respect to Veterans Affairs”.
“So, there’s lots of work to be done and I’m certainly not shy about saying that.”
The data gaps including not knowing how many veterans had died by suicide - a data point so stark in Australia that it led to a Royal Commission into how veterans were treated.
“I can’t speak directly to why we haven’t captured that with our veterans, but that’s clearly one of those glaringly obvious spaces where we’ve got more work to do.”
It was work, Henare said, he “would have thought that and hoped that we would have done it a lot sooner”.
Work on filling those data gaps was under way this month with the start of an 18-month work programme called Te Arataki which included building links to the Suicide Prevention Office - and other agencies - to try to capture data on veterans.
Henare said there was a paper before Cabinet currently to enable better data sharing between agencies and Veterans’ Affairs. He said he had also worked to support veterans’ needs through other portfolios he held, such as ACC and Whanau Ora.
Henare also said he would back - if veterans wanted it - a move to change the definition of “veteran” to include everyone who had served rather than just those whose service included specific deployments.
It was a move on which Paterson’s report spoke favourably and the Veterans’ Advisory Board endorsed but on which there had been no movement since Labour took over the defence and veterans’ roles after former minister Ron Mark’s departure with the rest of NZ First in 2020.
The cost to Veterans’ Affairs was estimated to rise from about $130m a year to around $580m a year. Henare said “these are tight fiscal times and I’m very realistic about that”.
Henare said his priorities were meeting with veterans and fixing the data gaps. “We’ve clearly got to do better by veterans.”
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