Dalziel Lianne: Search and Surveillance Bill — In Committee 
Dalziel Lianne: Search and Surveillance Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:678;Page:949] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 When the Minister in the chair the Minister of Justice spoke before she talked about the powers of the Serious Fraud Office producing a result because of the guilty plea in relation to South Canterbury Finance. But my reading of that and I have had to look it up on my mobile phone says that it is not the South Canterbury Finance case that has led to a guilty plea. It has an impact on the South Canterbury Finance case in that the director of a company called Datasouth Group pleaded guilty to charges brought by the Serious Fraud Office in relation to a $103 million fraud involving a Ponzi-style scheme. It had an impact of about $23 million on South Canterbury Finance but the point that we were making was that the pursuit of  
National Business Review 
 by the Serious Fraud Office for the production of evidence that it had was in relation to the South Canterbury Finance allegations of fraud. So that has not produced any guilty pleas. There is obviously a lot of water to go under the bridge yet on that particular issue. 
But because the Minister is not the Minister of Commerce as well as the Minister of Justice as her predecessor was I just thought I would give her a little bit of history in relation to where my thinking developed on where the Serious Fraud Office powers should sit in relation to the changes that have been made under the Financial Markets Authority legislation. In fact the Commerce Committee did an inquiry into the finance company failures and one of the suggestions to look at was the question of whether these particular powers of the Serious Fraud Office which the Minister sort of says require this very special set of powers to be continued sit better within the framework of the Financial Markets Authority. The Financial Markets Authority process is actually a really good one. It has brought together a range of different agencies that all have a different function and often one takes precedence over the others. But by not bringing the Serious Fraud Office function into that firstly the Financial Markets Authority is deprived really of the enormous investigative background and ability that the Serious Fraud Office function would bring to the agency and would give it real teeth but secondly it has not resolved the precedence problem. That is that the Financial Markets Authority like the Securities Commission before it could not act until after the Serious Fraud Office had investigated and completed all that work. I know they work alongside each other with a degree of cooperation but the truth is that there is a hamstring effect on both the now Financial Markets Authority and previously the Securities Commission. 
I know that the Government campaigned on retaining the separate status of the Serious Fraud Office— 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: And we won. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: OK well that is fine. You can say that you won. We know that. That is not the point. We are trying to actually have an intelligent debate about matters that really— 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: No you’re not. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: If you are suggesting that I am not trying to contribute to this debate in a genuine way then I think that reflects more on the Minister than on me because I am actually trying to contribute to this debate in a serious way. We all on this side of the Chamber would like to reach a point where we would get such a degree of support for such a major measure as this as we could easily achieve. There is only an element of difference between us and I believe that with some goodwill and some contribution to the debate that would take into account these views we could get there. 
It is not unreasonable for us to use the Committee stage of the debate in the Chamber to actually try to persuade the Government to finally reach that point of view. I have stood in this Chamber with a Minister of Justice from that side of the Chamber and pleaded a case in a particular matter and the Minister of Justice has listened and overnight had his officials draft the instructions and the amendment still stands today. The record will show that except that in those days the Committee stage was not included in the  
Hansard 
 recordings which had only the votes on them. But the record speaks for itself and the amendments that we achieved in the Births Deaths and Marriages Registration Bill all those years ago when I was a brand new member of Parliament. It was the Rt Hon Doug Graham who was sitting in the chair as the Minister does today.