Adams AmyHon AMY ADAMS (Minister of Justice): I will take a call at this stage just to address one of the recurrent themes that has come up to date which has been the timing of the legislation and bringing it to the House.Firstly before I do that can I just acknowledge the work that has gone into the bill to this point both from the officials—who have worked incredibly hard over what I am going to explain to you is a very short period of time—and also the Law and Order Committee. I know we set you a very short turn-around time to get the bill back to the House. I think you did do a very good job. I know from talking to the chairperson of that committee that it was a very collegial and constructive committee and I appreciate you for that work.This is important legislation. I think the fact that the House as far as I can tell has roundly indicated that it supports the legislation suggests that there are no agendas at play here. There is a genuine desire to ensure that we get the bill in the right place. I am grateful for that. I think the committee has made some very useful changes particularly around the information-sharing provisions that the member who has just resumed his seat Barry Coates mentioned which I will come back to.But one other point I wanted to make just as we talk about the timing is that while the original legislation is of course dated 2009 in fact the bulk of that Act came into effect in June 2013. So it is a little bit disingenuous to say it has actually been in place since 2009. It has not at all. It has been in operation since June of 2013. I think actually that tells us a lot about the complexity of this legislation and the time it takes to work through exactly how we give effect to these sorts of very detailed rules in some complex sectors.I think the thing that really drove the thinking in the development of this legislation was that this is absolutely a very critical and invidious part of criminal behaviour—the laundering of money. We know they use a number of mechanisms to hide criminal behaviour and to cleanse the money of criminal behaviour and hide it from detection. It is important that we can follow that money trail if we are to disrupt that behaviour. Also of course there is the financing of terrorism. I do not think I need in this House to emphasise the criticality of disrupting that money flow.So there is not anyone I think who is arguing against the absolute importance of doing this work and addressing it. But equally we have to acknowledge that the bulk of the transactions that this legislation will apply to—far more than the bulk actually: the vast majority of the transactions that this legislation will apply to will be law-abiding New Zealanders going about their law-abiding business in a normal way and not committing any crime. We have to strike that balance between picking up their legal behaviour absolutely but without making it so burdensome that—look this is a made-up percentage I am free to admit but let us say 99 percent which I think is probably not unreasonable—the 99 percent of transactions that are not money-laundering are not unreasonably impeded or slowed down or a big cost burden lands on them.That is the tension. That is the nature of the complexity that absolutely takes a lot of very detailed consideration. When you have been in the role of having to devise a policy framework for something of this nature you realise how complex it is to get that right. I have been very open in this House that the first reports of the compliance costs—over 10 years of the framework—were in the order of $1.6 billion on New Zealand citizens. That is a bill that I proceed with great caution in respect of and trying to get that balance right between enough rigour and oversight and process to catch their legal behaviour but equally not imposing that sort of cost on the businesses and households of New Zealand I think is absolutely critical.It may seem like an easy enough thing to say in passing: Well we should just bring these sectors into the regime." I can tell the Committee it is not. It is very very complex. As you will have seen—and I know the committee heard a number of submissions from the sectors pleading to be given longer because they could not possibly organise themselves in this period of time—the committee held the line. I think that is appropriate but we should not be under any illusion that this is some sort of simple thing that could have been done more quickly.The legislation obviously came to the House in March; it has been off to the select committee which as I said I think did a very good job. It came back to the House and was available for debate last week. So the suggestion that it has been "repeatedly pushed down the Order Paper" is quite wrong. It was available last week it is being passed this week and with the consent of this House it will be law by the end of this week. So we have moved at pace to bring the legislation together to bring it into the House and to pass it.I do want to make reference to the Shewan report which suggested that somehow we could just remove an exemption in the phase 1 legislation and lawyers and conveyancers would come in. While I understood the intention the advice I had very very clearly was that it could not be done that simply and I would have thought the committee that worked on the legislation would be very well aware that it is a much more complex exercise than simply saying they are no longer exempt and the complexity with which we work through issues like information sharing and legal professional privilege and the issue of conveyancers and non-legal people employed in law firms tells us that there is much more to it than simply doing a quick repeal and removing a line out of the exemptions. So I think it is a little disingenuous to pretend that that could have happened that simply."