Government’s Expectations
Government has recognised veterans as a group and it provides specific entitlements for veterans. Government’s expectation is that these entitlements will be delivered as a seamless service across all agencies involved.
Government has established clear priorities around ensuring that families, young and old, have the support they need and that they are able to make choices, and around the strengthening of national identity.
The support provided to veterans is designed to ensure that the support they need to make choices is available to them. In addition, veterans play a critical role in this process of strengthening of national identity through the telling of their stories and the recognition of their contribution to the establishment of the world view of our national identity.
Veteran’s Expectations
The veteran community is not homogeneous. There are a number of different groups of veterans with differing perspectives.
Veterans are bound by the war or emergency they served in, as well as the country they served for. This gives them worldwide connectivity and, as a result, they are aware of research into veterans’ issues and responses made internationally to those issues. This leads to comparisons being made between the response to veterans made by the New Zealand Government and the response to veterans made by other countries. This comparison of service provision leads to judgements being made about the form that New Zealand Government’s approach to the provision of services should take.
The types of deployments that New Zealand Service personnel have been involved in have changed since World War ll. The most significant change is the fact that there have been no deployments of an entire generation, as was the case in the World Wars. The deployments that have taken place have been of individuals within each generation who have made a conscious choice of the military as a career.
The decline in the number of veterans in the population does not make a parallel social assistance framework for veterans viable. Therefore, the focus must be on working within, and maximising the potential of, the broader health and social assistance framework to deliver in a way that meets the needs of veterans.
The duration of deployments has also changed. Service personnel are not deployed for years to one conflict, as was the case with the World Wars. Over the course of their military careers, Service personnel may be deployed for short tours of duty to different war and emergency situations. The experience of younger veterans is of a number of deployments to different locations for a variety of different reasons.
In the long term the care of veterans will be a recruitment and retention issue as the onus shifts from that of societal debt generated in a time of war, to government as an employer, taking responsibility for the impact of its decisions on personnel.
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