Wood MichaelMICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): Sometimes when speaking in this House your faith in human nature is restored and in the case of this bill it has been restored because we have seen the capacity of people to look at the evidence and change their minds from the fixed positions they held several years ago. I want to commend colleagues on the other side of the House who just a short number of years ago were saying things like New Zealand had a full disclosure regime that was world class". These words in fact were uttered by none other than former National Government Prime Minister John Key at the time that the Panama Papers first landed in the New Zealand media in early 2016.That was the first response of this Government when revelations surfaced of huge volumes of dirty money pouring into our country and being laundered for criminal purposes: to write it off to say that we had a "world-class regime". Those were his words. And extraordinarily we had Minister Amy Adams here talking to us about this very good piece of legislation.Before I go on I will reaffirm Labour's support for this piece of legislation. It is a good piece of legislation that closes up holes that we should have closed up a long time ago. But that is the point—we could have closed them up a long time ago. Let me quote here from a very excellent piece by the journalist Matt Nippert who has done a lot of work in exposing the criminal activity in this area: "In a briefing to Amy Adams in March" which was last year "which included police concerns"—about $1.6 billion of dirty money sloshing around and not being captured by reporting requirements—"officials said the mismatch in coverage" which means the fact that we left big holes in place when we did not advance phase two of the anti-money laundering legislation as proposed by John Shewan as quickly as we should "meant the professional service sector was now more attractive to criminals and potentially provides a 'road map' for would-be money launderers. This noted officials had long-wished to progress work to close this gap but these preferences had been overruled. 'Work was due to commence in 2014 but was deferred to competing priorities'."Amy Adams was at least honest about this; she said that the juggling of priorities was not her responsibility—"I wasn't the Minister at that time so I can't speak to that." So here we have on the record the fact that the National Government has been aware of these problems since at least going back to 2014 when officials warned it and here we are in the closing days of this Parliament in 2017 finally getting around to it. John Shewan in his report said that we should have had this legislation on the books by last year at the latest. This does go to reputation. Members on both sides of the House have spoken passionately and convincingly about this. This goes to our international reputation. We are talking about crooks and drug dealers and arms traders—people who have ripped off their Governments who are evading taxes and who are then pouring their "hot" money into our jurisdiction.One of the ways they have done that—and Matt Nippert's report is very good in this respect—is they reveal that huge amounts of this in particular have gone into the red-hot property sector. Of course if you have this illicit money pouring into the property sector in New Zealand it is a double bonanza. Not only are you laundering your money and making it clean but you are making huge capital gains off the back of it as well. So it is absolutely beyond time that we close down on these rorts.Over the course of this Parliament we have slowly but surely closed down the rort of foreign trusts. What happened when we had disclosure when the new regime came in a couple of months ago—again very delayed by the Government? They crashed from 12000 down to about 3000 because these guys do not want the sunlight of the public gaze and public scrutiny on their dodgy activities. That is why this bill is so important and that is why we should have put it in place several years ago when we had the opportunity. But we are finally getting around to it here.This bill does some very simple things. It helps us to detect these sorts of transactions and it helps us to deter them. It requires the reporting of suspicious activities above certain thresholds—basic stuff that we should have already had in place—and of course importantly it provides protections for those who might be making disclosures as well because there can be significant pressure put on those people.When John Shewan issued his report—when he finally issued it—he said that New Zealand's system was "not fit for purpose" and that it was "open to money-laundering and aggressive tax practices." Well finally we are getting around to closing those loopholes. We on this side of the House are happy about that but it should have been done much much earlier. Thank you."