Robertson GrantGRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): Well this is a long and winding road that we come to with this particular bill and other speakers have outlined elements of it that the Labour Party does support. We always support taxation bills that come to this House that make it easier for taxpayers and that add to the robustness of our taxation system. I want to echo my colleague Stuart Nash's view that after 8 years and a bit of grinding work in the gears of Government it finally said: Yep we'll adopt Labour's policy around flexible tax for business and small businesses." You know all power to the Government for seeing the light in that regard. I do want to focus my contribution however around the matter of foreign trusts because this is the piece of legislation that does finally add a little transparency to the question of the operation of foreign trusts in New Zealand. But that is about as good as it gets because actually what today marks is yet another marker post in the tawdry display that we have seen from this Government when it comes to New Zealand's reputation around the world for transparency and for doing the right thing. I just want to read to you a couple of paragraphs from a report that came out in January this year called "Trust us—New Zealand can hide your money!" in the Sarawak Report. It says this: "Time and again investigators like Sarawak Report find themselves tracing large businesses linked to for example Malaysian politicians like Taib Mahmud only to find the money disappearing behind New Zealand trusts. This was thrown into glaring perspective by the Panama Papers which revealed how shadowy businessmen the world over were all choosing distant New Zealand to park their money … and one assumes such people are neither attracted by the weather nor the convenience of New Zealand's location." That is what people are writing about New Zealand today. These trusts which we are now seeing being exposed on a weekly basis since the Panama Papers came out are about the super-wealthy hiding their money not meeting their tax obligations in their countries of origin and choosing New Zealand to hide their money. We have just seen the case—which is still going through the New Zealand courts in fact—around 1Malaysia Development Berhad or 1MDB which is the Malaysian development fund case where the Low family are attempting through the court process to make certain arrangements for their trusts. We know on the public record that when that family went looking for somewhere to hide their money of all the places in the world they could choose they chose the Cayman Islands and New Zealand. They went looking for a place that had a lax regime where there was no transparency and they came to New Zealand. We should all reflect on what that means. We should all reflect on the fact that when this was raised when the Panama Papers came out the then Prime Minister's very first reflexive decision was to say: "Oh there's $24 million worth of money coming in to lawyers and accountants here." It was not "What is New Zealand's reputation going to look like?" or "Heaven forbid! What's the right thing to do? What is the right thing morally to do?". No he passed it off. And in fact he said on 4 April last year when this came out: "New Zealand has full disclosure of information when it comes to foreign trusts." That is demonstrably not true because today we are changing the law to create more disclosure on the issue of foreign trusts. But the Prime Minister's reflexive thing was to back Ken Whitney and all those tax accountants and New Zealand trust lawyers who have made their money out of hiding the money of other people and that is just not right. It decreases the confidence of hard-working New Zealand taxpayers in the system let alone our reputation internationally. But this goes further back—and I do want to acknowledge the officials of the IRD who helped the Finance and Expenditure Committee with this bill and who have worked hard on this issue of foreign trusts for some years. But if we go back nearly 3 years we find the Inland Revenue Department saying to its Minister: "We have a problem with foreign trusts. We have a problem with the perception of New Zealand. They are being misused. We need to tighten the rules." And by November that year the IRD officials had gone further and added to their work programme legislation being drafted to tighten the regime. In fact as my colleague Stuart Nash said they were looking at the option of dispensing with the whole regime let alone just tightening it. The IRD was doing that in 2014 in November. By early December Ken Whitney was writing in to Todd McClay who was the new Minister of Revenue saying: "We are very concerned that you're going to be shutting down the foreign trust industry. The Prime Minister has told me to write to you and has told me that's not going to happen." Todd McClay as a good new Minister said "The Prime Minister wants me to jump. I am just going to find out how high." and they ditched that work programme. And here we are in February 2017 finally starting to clean up the mess—finally starting to do something about it. New Zealand's reputation as in the kinds of documents I have just been reading out before has been trashed in the meantime because John Key preferred to protect his mates rather than the reputation of New Zealand and I think that is shameful. Foreign trusts are being misused every day and if you just want to read about it Mr Mossack and Mr Fonseca have finally found themselves being caught up with by authorities. There is a whole heap of New Zealand lawyers and accountants looking very closely at that because they have very close links with those organisations. We should have done better earlier. This bill gets us some of the way so now we will actually be able to see who the trustees are who the settlors are who the beneficiaries are and where they are coming from. At least that information will be available to the police and to the Department of Internal Affairs. But on this side of the House we stand by what we said in the select committee and at other readings which is that we believe we should aim for the highest possible levels of transparency. That means having a searchable public register. We do it for charitable trusts we do it for companies and there is absolutely no reason why we should not shine the light on what is going on here and do that when it comes to foreign trusts. The other thing that is missing from this legislation as we pass it today with regard to the foreign trust issue is that this was the moment for the Government to bring in phase two of the anti - money-laundering rules. This was the occasion to say that we were going to clean it up completely. Lawyers accountants and real estate agents—the people who do the most handling of these issues—are not included under our anti - money-laundering rules. Casinos are and banks are but not the very people involved at this end. The Government knew it could have done it—in fact some Ministers wanted to do it—and Steven Joyce and John Key said: "Oh it's off the front page. Don't worry about it." Morality is for sale one more time on this issue. Today we should be fulfilling our obligations under the anti - money-laundering rules but we are not and that is a huge gap in New Zealand's law. The Government undertook in this House for us to see draft legislation to bring in stage two of the anti - money-laundering rules late last year. It said that we would see it this year. It is the middle of February—still nothing. It is going to be pushed out it will not be implemented before the election and that is very helpful for those who have been lobbying against it to make sure it does not come into force. This Government is being dragged once again kicking and screaming to finally do something and it is not good enough. New Zealand can do so much better than have a Government that grudgingly has to do something—grudgingly has to do the right thing. I am proud to be part of a party that put its hand up straight away when we saw what was happening with the Panama Papers and said: "Let's do something about this now. Let's protect New Zealand's reputation." But on the other side those members had to be dragged kicking and screaming once the focus group had told them just how bad it was getting for them. That is not good enough. New Zealand is a better country than one that allows people to hide their money and avoid their obligations overseas. We now have some changes here. That is a good thing. That will help. It will shed more light but we should be doing more. We should be playing our part on the world stage to stamp out this kind of corruption not stand beside it and say that having $24 million worth of money going to lawyers and accountants justifies New Zealand being caught up in global corruption. People are writing about New Zealand as a place where the mega-wealthy can hide their money and avoid their obligations. That is not the New Zealand I want to be proud of. I want to see us have a regime that is fully transparent and one where we do the right thing on the world stage. You will get that with legislation from a Labour Government. Sadly we have not got it from National."