Paying for service

Fred Daniels: "We have the responsibility of determining the [country's] burden of care for those veterans". Photos by Linda Robertson.

For a country with a proud history of military involvement over 150 years, we do not know much about our veterans.

We do not know exactly how many there are - we stopped asking that after the 1971 census.

We give them war pensions and allowances based on a system which has remained largely unchanged since 1954.

Until now, we have not had a panel to specifically examine the impact of military service on veterans' health.

The system for measuring veterans' impairment is complicated and clumsy, and, some veterans say, applied inconsistently.

Service people - almost exclusively men - injured before the introduction of ACC in 1974 are financially disadvantaged.

A pre-1974 veteran on a 100% disablement pension receives $182.02 a week, while post-1974 veterans are paid 80% of their wages at the time they were injured.

More than 205,000 people served in World War 2, of whom 135,000 were posted overseas.

Of the estimated 35,000-40,000 who are still alive, only 9350 are receiving a war pension.

The 1954 War Pensions Act does not deal well with the types of injuries or disease post-WW2 veterans are likely to suffer.

It is no wonder it is time for an overhaul.

Former national RSA president John Campbell, of Dunedin, has worked tirelessly over the past eight years to persuade governments to take the nation's responsibilities to veterans more seriously.

The past five years have seen rapid advances, starting with a parliamentary health select committee investigation into health issues suffered by Vietnam veterans.

That resulted in a 2006 memorandum of understanding between the RSA and the Government on agreed health conditions and pension payments to those veterans.

The RSA has also intensified a campaign to encourage veterans, particularly WW2 veterans now in their mid-80s and older, to apply for war pensions and to help them with the form-filling and report-gathering that process requires.

The campaign is working.

Mr Campbell said while the number of WW2 veterans was steadily declining and was expected to drop by as many as 20,000 in the next decade, the number of applications for war pensions was increasing.

In 2007, it was announced the Law Commission would completely rewrite the War Pensions Act to make it simpler, more relevant and more streamlined.

The Law Commission said the rewrite should clarify exactly what health conditions were attributable to war service, thus reducing "unacceptable delays" in processing veterans' pension claims.

The most recent advance was the naming this month of the new expert panel on health.

The advances are supported by Dunedin RSA identity Fred Daniel.

A Vietnam veteran whose army career spanned 32 years, Mr Daniel is chief executive of the Montecillo War Veterans' Home and also one of a number of panellists around the country who make the initial assessments about the eligibility of veterans for disability pensions.