Transcripts from Sunday 21 April Q+A Panel Discussions- Part One

Sundays on TV ONE and one hour later on TV ONE plus 1. Repeated Sunday evening at 11:30pm. Streamed live at www.tvnz.co.nz   

PANEL DISCUSSIONS
HOSTED BY SUSAN WOOD

In response to JONATHAN COLEMAN, MAJOR GENERAL DAVE GAWN and CON THODE interviews

SUSAN WOOD
Welcome back to our panellists, Raymond Miller, Heather Roy and Matt McCarten. Heather, I'm going to get you in on this. We heard from Dave Gawn about the army, about morale. We've heard from the minister. Basically, they are saying morale is OK. What is your experience?

HEATHER ROY - Army Reservist and Former ACT MP
Yeah, I think that morale has certainly taken a hit, certainly over the civilianisation process that came out of the 2010 Defence White Paper around the value for money exercise. I think that that comment about it being OK at the bottom level isn't too bad, but that mid-level, midcareer range, people who have been in for eight to 12 years are the ones who have been hardest hit. Those people often decide to leave defence for whatever reason. Sometimes there’s external family reasons. There are any number of reasons. But we lose then people who have a wealth of skills and experience. And I thought Dave Gawn summed it up particularly well when he said we need to somehow harness those, and the key there is the reserves. The reserves have the ability to take those people, make sure we know where they are and be able to utilise those people if they are still continuing to train. If they are making a contribution and defence knows where they are, they can then be brought in when and as they are needed. Because the defence forces role is to be prepared for whatever government tasks it to do. And so to replace those people with experience is actually very difficult with a new recruit. If we can retain them, we actually retain their skills and experience.

SUSAN Interesting concept, but if you retain those reservists, as you’re talking about, it's not a full-time resource for them, is it? I mean, you've still got to have the middle resource, if you like, in any sort of organisation, don't you?

HEATHER Yes, you do, but if you look at other defence forces around the world, they make much better use of their reserves, and they have a much easier way of moving seamlessly between that full-time position and that part-time position. So it's about keeping people’s skills up to spec. So training them, continuing to train them and utilising them where you can. Many people leave. They think they have had the end of the army or the air force or the navy, but then they have a hankering to come back later on. But by that time it's too late. You know, things have moved on and things of passed them by. And so that seamless movement backwards and forwards. The Australians are very good at that. They bring their reservists in and out of full and part-time capacities all the time.

SUSAN One final question to you before I bring Matt and Raymond in. Peacekeeping - there is a review under way. It is something, I think, we are particularly good at. I think it suits our national personality. Would something you be in favour of is seeing us out on further missions?

HEATHER Yes, and we have a very good reputation. We are very well-regarded for our contribution in places like Afghanistan, Timor, the Solomons most recently. I think that looking forward, the challenges are going to be maintaining those combat roles, those operational focuses. So it might be peacekeeping, but we still need to train people to be able to cope in those combat situations. These aren't safe places in the world. But also there should be a real focus on national security too, making the best of all our security agencies - biosecurity, fisheries, all of those things. So protecting NZ’s EEZ. And Antarctica is a hefty component, I think, of looking to the future where defence does have a role, yeah.

SUSAN Matt, briefly, what does Anzac Day mean to you?

MATT McCARTEN - National Secretary, Unite Union
Well, I don't have anyone I know who has died, so I can't speak as others do. But, by the way, the old digger, [Con Thode] we could have had an hour of him.

SUSAN Oh, he was a lovely chap.

MATT Talk about his reminiscing. But I think we have turned it into an alternative national day. That's what we've done. We actually like to forget that that was the day we thought we were British and we were doing the British’s job and we got our butts kicked by Johnny Turk. We were led by incompetents, and we got beaten by farm boys, and we think we learned some lessons. But there are some similarities to what we do in Afghanistan, and even listening to our general [Major General Dave Gawn] when he was talking about that we hope it will be all right. Well, we know it's not. We know that Taliban. We are propping up a corrupt government. When we go, the Taliban will be back in control. Now, women-

SUSAN Well, we hope not. I liked the way he put that, actually. I thought he said that very nicely. All right. We're out of time.

ENDS

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