Shaw James: Organised Crime and Anti-corruption Legislation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShaw James: Organised Crime and Anti-corruption Legislation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 04 November 2014. Volume:701;Page:511. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAMES SHAW (Green):I rise to support this bill’s referral to the select committee as well. I would like to start by associating myself with the comments made previously by the Hon Annette King and Chris Hipkins on the possibility of creeping corruption in New Zealand politics and the need to remain vigilant. New Zealand has an excellent reputation and has great standards in this area but that is no reason for us not to continue to raise our standards to modernise them and to keep our eye on the ball.I particularly want to reinforce the comments that the Hon Annette King made in reference to Transparency International. I just want to acknowledge that it has an incredibly important role to play in keeping an eye on corruption around the world and in New Zealand. Many years ago when I was working at PricewaterhouseCoopers looking at what kind of role the assurance industry had in this field I was delighted to be able to interview the late Jeremy Pope who was at that time the executive director of Transparency International based in London. He was a very fine New Zealander.There are three things that I just want to make some brief comments on. I will keep this a fairly short call because many of the comments I was going to make have already been made. I do want to reinforce the point about people-trafficking. It is an absolutely extraordinarily terrible offence and overseas many thousands and tens of thousands of women are trafficked and find themselves at the mercy of gangsters and the mafia. It is vital that New Zealand does all that it can to stamp out this scourge. It is slavery by another name. It is simply a modern form of slavery. We need to do everything we can to play our part in eradicating it.The comment has also been made that the perception of being corruption-free is important for business and it is incredibly important for that. Again—based on my experience internationally—knowing that I came from New Zealand people often remarked that it was a great place to do business because the people were straight up and they were fair you could rely on that kind of a deal and your money was going to be put to the purposes for which it was intended. It is incredibly important that we maintain that.This bill also brings us up to a modern standard and this is a good thing. We originally signed the United Nations Convention Against Corruption in 2003 so it has taken more than 10 years to get us to this point where passing this legislation will enable us to ratify that convention along with many of the other conventions that Annette King referred to. As we do so we have to recognise that the ground is moving underneath us. As we pass this bill through the House we just need to be very mindful that the things we are up against are also continuing to move enabled by technology in a globalising world and that we will need to not stop with this piece of legislation but keep our eye on further developments.The Green Party supports this bill through to the select committee. We do have some things we want to keep an eye on. We have got some practical concerns that we would like to be addressed—notably the requirement under the anti - money-laundering rules to report transactions of $1000 or more. That has to be an absolutely enormous number of transactions. Again through my own business I know being based in New Zealand but having a company based in London and clients based in other parts of the world we are doing transactions all the time. I am a very very small-business man. If you multiply that out across the number of businesses in New Zealand that are trading internationally we just need to keep one eye on the practicalities of how we are going to manage that.Another one is around information sharing. This is an ongoing developing concern in New Zealand that has had some publicity over the course of the last 12 months. I would like to refer to another bill here which is one that was passed last year the Taxation (Annual Rates Employee Allowances and Remedial Matters) Bill. It enabled the United States to look into the bank accounts of New Zealand citizens living in New Zealand if they also happened to be US citizens and were liable to pay US tax. That was an information-sharing agreement that we had with the United States but it is a huge invasion of the privacy of people who are doing absolutely nothing wrong other than living in this country. We are giving a foreign Government the ability to look into the bank accounts of New Zealand citizens in this country and into New Zealand bank accounts as well. We want to keep an eye on that. We understand that information sharing is absolutely critical to being able to stamp out crime but it is one thing we wanted to keep an eye on.We support this bill and will be doing everything we can to ensure that the legislation does not infringe on New Zealanders’ rights. We will be looking forward to seeing how this legislation meshes with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and any other concerns on how it will impinge on civil liberties. Having said that we are very supportive of the aims of this bill.