NZ Defence Force undertakes rescues in Hawkes Bay. Video / Supplied
Lack of data makes database challenge ‘too complex’;
Veterans group says it can’t wait and will crowdsource data;
Australian veteran suicide numbers soared with Royal Commission inquiry.
The agency charged with military veterans’ wellbeing says its current work programme is not going to build a database of suicides because it’s too complex and could produce “deeply flawed outcomes”.
The position of Veterans’ Affairs follows the launch of a plan by a veterans’ welfare group,No Duff, to crowdsource information about suicides and self-harm.
Veterans’ Affairs and its parent agency, the NZ Defence Force, have no data around the rate of veteran suicide which – in comparative countries – is shown to be significantly higher than civilian populations.
There is also no data around the actual number of veterans with estimates of contemporary veterans - those who served abroad in the last 30 years – is believed to be between 25,000 and 45,000 people.
No data hurts planning – veterans
Veterans’ groups say the lack of data makes it difficult to understand the needs of the population and develop effective responses. It also adds a $1 billion skew into government accounts because it is not possible to estimate the level of veterans’ entitlements owed into the future.
In Australia, a Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide cut through similar issues to find military culture played a huge role with those who had not deployed overseas at greater risk of suicide than those sent to foreign disaster and war zones.
An Australian Army special operations soldier after a mission in Helmand province, southern Afghanistan, in 2012.
The Royal Commission’s work found there were 1677 confirmed suicides by serving and ex-serving members between 1997 and 2021, rather than the 300 people believed to have taken their lives.
An NZDF spokesperson said the current Veterans’ Affairs work plan, “Te Arataki” – the Veteran, Family and Whānau Mental Health and Wellbeing Policy Framework, “did not propose to establish a database of veteran suicides”.
It said doing so “would be a very complex job” and “any attempt to do so at the moment would be incomplete, and possibly result in some deeply flawed outcomes”.
The spokesperson said suicide data was reported by both the Ministry of Health and the Coronial Services of New Zealand with the coroner, by law, the only person able to rule a death as self-inflicted.
The spokesperson said veterans were not identified as a specific group in data which “makes it difficult to conduct any rigorous research or draw any firm conclusions about veteran suicide rates in this country”.
The NZDF on patrol in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. Photo / Supplied
The lack of information about suicide underscored the need – highlighted in Te Arataki’s work plan – about getting better data to understand the veteran population in New Zealand, the spokesperson said.
Efforts to bridge that gap led to Veterans’ Affairs working with the Suicide Prevention Office to better understand what occupational data existed.
The spokesperson said the work continued even though the Suicide Prevention Office was now part of the Ministry of Health’s mental health and addictions team, including consulting on the new suicide prevention strategy.
In that strategy, veterans were identified as a “priority population” and the lack of quality data was highlighted.
Veterans’ Affairs also planned to provide data to Statistics NZ’s Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) database in a way that did not identify individuals but could help research in future.
The spokesperson said Te Arataki’s work programme was reviewed in December 2024 and Minister for Veterans Chris Penk had asked for an updated action plan and key priority areas out to 2027.
The spokesperson said the recent deaths of those in service were under the jurisdiction of the Coroner although NZDF was carrying out initial inquiries ahead of a potential Court of Inquiry. Such inquiries are often accepted by the coroner as the required “lessons learned” finding.
No Duff co-founder Aaron Wood acknowledged the work by Veterans’ Affairs but said “the lack of decisive action has created an urgent situation that No Duff Charitable Trust can no longer ignore”.
He said that it was recognised identifying veteran suicides “presents complex challenges within current systems” but “the reality the New Zealand veteran’s community faces is stark and immediate”.
Minister for Veterans Chris Penk.
Wood said seven years had passed since the inquiry by Professor Ron Paterson into the new veterans’ law that highlighted the lack of data – and seven years since an aborted NZDF study into suicide numbers had shown rates higher than the New Zealand civilian population.
NZDF has said it considered the 2018 study flawed and recommendations to review health and coronial records were not pursued.
Wood: “Over the past seven years, we have lost too many New Zealand veterans while waiting for systematic data collection to begin.
“Each loss represents not just a statistic but a person who served our country faithfully and whose deaths leave behind countless traumatised mates and whanau.”
He said the No Duff plan to crowdsource suicide information would “capture critical data that might otherwise be lost”.
“The cost of waiting is simply too high in terms of lives lost.”
David Fisher is based in Northland and has worked as a journalist for more than 30 years, winning multiple journalism awards including being twice named Reporter of the Year and being selected as one of a small number of Wolfson Press Fellows to Wolfson College, Cambridge. He first joined the Herald in 2004.
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