The Chief of the NZ Defence Force, Lieutenant General Tim Keating, has wholesale rejected Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson’s account of events in their book Hit & Run (read a summary of its contents here), saying NZ troops have never operated in the villages where, according to the book, at least six civilians were killed. Hager and Stephenson have responded in turn, saying the Defence Force claim is ‘incorrect and implausible’. Read both statements below …

NZDF: ‘It is evident there are some major inaccuracies’

The central premise of Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson’s book, Hit and Run, is incorrect, says the Chief of Defence Force, Lieutenant General Tim Keating.

NZDF troops never operated in the two villages identified in the book as having been the scene of combat operations and civilian casualties.

Since the release of the book, the New Zealand Defence Force has spent considerable time reviewing the claims contained in it, despite the allegations of civilian casualties being the subject of a NATO investigation in 2010.

Upon review of Hit and Run, it is evident there are some major inaccuracies  —  the main one being the location and names of the villages where the authors claim civilians were killed and property was destroyed wilfully during a New Zealand-led operation.

The villages are named in the book as Naik and Khak Khuday Dad, but the NZDF can confirm that NZDF personnel have never operated in these villages.

The authors appear to have confused interviews, stories and anecdotes from locals with an operation conducted more than two kilometres to the south, known as Operation Burnham.

The villages in the Hager and Stephenson book and the settlement which was the site of Operation Burnham, called Tirgiran, are separated by mountainous and difficult terrain.

The NZDF has used the geographical references in the book and cross-referenced them with our own material.

During Operation Burnham, New Zealand was supported by coalition partners, which included air support capacity as previously reported.

The ISAF investigation determined that a gun sight malfunction on a coalition helicopter resulted in several rounds falling short, missing the intended target and instead striking two buildings.

This investigation concluded that this may have resulted in civilian casualties but no evidence of this was established.

Hit and Run does not prove civilian casualties were sustained in the village where Operation Burnham took place.

The NZDF reiterates its position that New Zealand personnel acted appropriately during this operation and were not involved in the deaths of civilians or any untoward destruction of property.

The NZDF welcomes anyone with information relevant to Operation Burnham to come forward and be assured that any allegations of offending by NZDF personnel would be taken seriously and investigated in accordance with our domestic and international legal obligations.

Hit and Run authors: ‘The NZDF response is bizarre’

Hit and Run co-authors Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson stand by the facts in their book. They say the NZDF response to the book issued on Sunday night is bizarre and a continuation of seven years of cover up. It seems, they said, to be nothing more than an attempt to squirt ink in the water.

“We are absolutely confident that an SAS raid took place on 22 August 2010 where six civilians were killed and another 15 injured. We know a dozen houses were destroyed as well. We have testimony about these events from members of the SAS, Afghan commandos and people living in the villages that were raided, Naik and Khak Khuday Dad. The SAS and villagers both talked about assaults on the same named people’s houses. It is actually impossible that the story is wrong.”

The NZDF press release is simply incorrect and implausible. To be true, it would require an identical raid by identical forces, using identical helicopters, on identical targets at the same time.

“We are shocked that the NZDF believes this is a legitimate reply to the serious and tragic revelations in the book. It looks like nothing more than people trying to evade responsibility and reinforces the need for a full and independent inquiry.”

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Rent week: a reader shares the story of her struggles to buy a house. She’s done everything you’re supposed to do as an aspirant home-owner – yet the banks won’t lend to her. Here she shares her story.

I’m one of what I presume are many embittered twenty-somethings who feel like Stuff and NZHerald are just taking the piss now, with their ‘relatable’ home-owning stories.

My partner and I have been together for two years now. We realised last year that for us, buying a home is a priority. We’ve got friends who are content to rent for the foreseeable future, but we hated paying someone’s mortgage. So we re-thought our short-term and long-term plans.

I’m from a small town in Northland, but had been living in Auckland for about seven years, going to university, and then working in a Government department. We realised we were never going to be able to afford a house in Auckland, but if we set our sights 180km north-west, we might be more likely to achieve the home owning goal.

I moved up here in August 2016, after scoring a job that was the next step up for me. It’s a role that I couldn’t get in Auckland, because I didn’t have enough experience, but could get here because there was significantly less people interested in relocating to a rural area. My partner followed in October, and we lived with my parents for the rest of the year, paying board.

We started looking for a house to buy, but quickly hit rough waters.

We have a $55,000 deposit (and growing everyday), and were looking at borrowing no more than $250,000. We didn’t want to pay more than $300,000, preferably buying something around the $250,000 tag to keep our mortgage down. Buying a three bedroom home for that is actually achievable here.

For us, however, it’s not – because my partner is only on a six-month fixed term contract at his new job up here. There’s been promises of it turning into a full-time job, but nothing we could get on paper after only being there for a month to satisfy the banks. My income is enough to service mortgage repayments by itself, if the worst came to worst and he was unemployed for a little bit, but that wasn’t enough to turn the tide against us.

We’ve now been rejected from ASB, ANZ, BNZ, Westpac, Kiwibank, TSB, SBS, New Zealand Credit Union, and a variety of weird other banks. If you google ‘mortgage nz’, be positive that every result that comes up has said no to us. Three mortgage brokers tried their best, but got nowhere.

We tried Welcome Home Loans, because we thought, ‘hey if they loan on 10 percent deposit, surely they’ll take more of a risk with our employment background, because we’ve got 20 percent’. No such luck. We were also told that one of us would have had to have been in our current job for 12 months at least.

We upped our Kiwisaver contributions, and put them with a provider that apparently gets the best returns. We started saving our money in a joint account optimistically titled HOUSE DEPOSIT, but that’s not enough to get banks to take a chance on us.

Combine all that rejection with external pressures, like real estate agents who tell you helpful things like ‘you should have brought two years ago, prices were right for you then’ (because buying a house together was our other second date plan, but we just went for going to the movies), and being surrounding by people in their forties and fifties who own at least one rental property on top of their own.

We’ve decided to try and rent up here for a year (we pay $290 for a three bedroom home, which we share with my brother, and after renting in Auckland for so long at exorbitant prices, it feels amazing), but knowing that’s a years worth of mortgage repayments with nothing to show for it at the end of the year sucks.

It’s raised so many questions for me – like how do people who are self-employed get a home? How do mums who are on maternity leave manage to buy a house at the same time? The financial system is simply not geared towards any type of lifestyle other than the extremely conventional (like working the same full-time job for years at a time). This at a time when the rise of the gig economy, which we’re supposed to embrace, means there are fewer jobs like that available.

It sucks that my student loan is seen as a financial liability when I apply for a mortgage. I know it’s something that I’m repaying, but our society needs educated young people, so why am I being penalised so heavily for it? I’m a big fan of the bill which Gareth Hughes introduced that would see me able to defer my student loan repayments to put towards a first-home deposit. As one of the few people I know who finished uni and stayed in New Zealand, some financial advantage from having done that would be bloody nice.

And I wish the articles would freaking stop. I go out for brunch like once a month (and it’s never avocado on toast), I drink the cheap instant coffee at my work, we don’t have Sky, our Netflix is my brother’s account that we’re using because he forgot to log-off when he was at our house once.

We can’t all live rent-free at home (we moved out because other siblings came home, and it was too crowded), and not every parent wants to be a guarantor. These bullshit stories help create this horrible generational tension which makes everyone over the age of forty look down their nose at me whenever I make any type of purchase – with pointed comments like ‘what happened to saving for a house?’

Because what happened was, we saved – but it wasn’t good enough.