Treatment of veterans is a disgrace

The treatment of our military veterans is a collective black mark on our national conscience. New Veterans’ Affairs Minister Chris Penk told the Herald this week that veterans were waiting, on average, a year to have their claims processed.

The waitlist, which he admitted was “unacceptable”, has led to some support services being offered under the much-heralded Veterans Independence Programme (VIP) scheme being slashed.

This is no new issue.

Last year, Labour’s Minister of Veterans Peeni Henare, just new to the portfolio, found that the old soldiers, airmen, and navy personnel were not getting the service and support they should have been getting.

“We’ve clearly got to do better by veterans,” Henare said at the time.

There are some 30,000 veterans alive in New Zealand today, although the exact number is, quite inexplicably, not known.

While the word “veteran” often conjures up visions of elderly men who fought Hitler’s Nazis, or in Korea or Vietnam, the majority are relatively young Kiwis who served in Bosnia, East Timor and Afghanistan over the past 30 years.

Of the 6863 veterans signed up to receive home-help services under the VIP initiative — ranging from lawn mowing and gardening to massage and podiatry — more than half don’t qualify for Veterans’ Affairs other support packages because they don’t have illness or injury connected to a particular deployment or mode of military service.

And Veterans’ Affairs data shows that the average time for a disablement pension to be processed has increased from 324 days to 361 days.

Those applying for a permanent impairment lump sum are waiting 197 days, while processing time for those seeking weekly compensation is up from 80 to 111 days.

The problem is compounded, Penk says, by not knowing just how many veterans there are.

Returned Services Associations (RSAS) do great work filling the gap in the support of our veterans.

But just last year, its national office issued a directive for clubs to take a close look at how they align with the founding ethos dating back more than a century.

Clubs were urged to live up to their name and focus on support for their veteran members, rather than just offering cheap alcohol and pokies to an increasingly nonmilitary membership.

It shouldn’t just be left up to the RSAS though. The Government must take the lead.

If we are prepared to send our young men and women overseas to fight conflicts that we support on foreign lands, then we are committing to looking after them for life — no matter the financial cost.

The human after-effects of war are not always visible, and indeed, are often hidden, by pride, shame, mental illness, poverty and loneliness.

It’s up to us to make sure we are here for them in their hour of need — just as they stepped up in ours.