"Public service ” by the armed forces

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32702, 3 September 1971, Page 14

" Public service ” by the armed forces

The implications of a seemingly innocuous clause in the Defence Bill now before Parliament should be fully examined by legislators and public before it goes into the Statute Book. The bill is mainly a consolidation of the present Defence Act and earlier acts concerning the armed forces; the clause noticed concerns the “provision of public services by the “ armed forces ”. An article in “ Recent Law ”, a journal published by the Legal Research Foundation, interprets the clause to mean that the armed forces could be employed in an industrial dispute without the Government’s declaring a state of emergency. The essential part of the clause in the bill says: “ If “the Minister [of Defence] considers that it is in “ the public interest to do so, he may authorise any “part of the armed forces to perform any public “ service . . . either in New Zealand or elsewhere, “ subject to such terms and conditions (including “ payment) as he may specify ”.

This clause is an extension of a section in the Royal New Zealand Air Force Act of 1950; the section enables the Minister to authorise the use of R.N.Z.A.F. aircraft for hire or reward “ in the public “interest”. The extended law is certainly capable of very wide interpretation. Presumably it was included to permit the use of the armed forces or their equipment for purposes ranging from, say, a performance by a military band to the use of military resources for rescue or relief work. The nature of “public service” should be made much clearer in the bill; certainly no room should be left for misinterpreting the term. What a Minister of Defence considers, on his own unchallengeable initiative, to be “the public interest” should obviously not be capable of extension to realms that are properly the responsibility of the Government as a whole and for which other and specific legislation already exists.