Harawira Hone: Serious Fraud Office (Abolition and Transitional Provisions) Bill — First Reading 
Harawira Hone: Serious Fraud Office (Abolition and Transitional Provisions) Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:647;Page:16104] 
HONE HARAWIRA (Maori Party—Te Tai Tokerau) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tena tatou katoa e te Whare. Tena koe Anikaaro. Yesterday the whole context of fraud corruption and serious crime took an interesting and I have to say a bloody pleasing turn— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: Order! 
HONE HARAWIRA 
: —with the announcement that victims of South Africa’s apartheid regime could finally sue the corporate world for all the help that it gave South African police and military intelligence squads during the murderous years of apartheid. Many of those victims are now represented by an organisation called Khulumani which means “to speak out”. Khulumani is suing the really big boys like BP Barclays Fujitsu Daimler-Benz Deutsche Bank and others for their corporate investment in a system of racial domination a system known the world over for harassment intimidation torture violence and murder. That corporate investment was in the form of finance oil weapons and corporate technology. So although it is sad to be reminded of the horrors of apartheid it really is pleasing to see that those big companies that profited from the oppression and repression of the blacks of South Africa are finally being dragged kicking and screaming before the courts to answer for their complicity in the deaths of the thousands of people whose lives were destroyed under apartheid. 
Meanwhile back here in good old Aotearoa are we going after the big criminals the corporate raiders the big thieves who have blighted the lives of tens of thousands of ordinary New Zealanders? Like hell we are. Although our Serious Fraud Office is supposed to have been going after the big crooks charged with defrauding the public of amounts greater than $500000 complex fraud and fraud of major public concern in fact it has been spending most of its time chasing the little boys like the $25000 worth of improper expenditure by a school in Hamilton. Yes the office has averaged something like 13000 fraud investigations a year but while it has been doing all that the big bandits like Blue Chip and Bridgecorp get away scot-free. 
I shall give a bit of background on these guys. Last year the property finance company Bridgecorp went into receivership owing $500 million to 18000 investors and this year 22 Blue Chip property investment companies collapsed with 2000 investors being owed some $80 million. Guess what? To no one’s surprise although the Serious Fraud Office is currently investigating Bridgecorp and Blue Chip it would appear that a prosecution might not necessarily follow. The fraud was so bad in fact that the Serious Fraud Office actually called it a “deliberate dishonest presentation of records so as to give investors a false position of the company’s financial position”. Yet for all that the pathetic conclusions at the end of last week were that no matter how explicit the corruption appears to be how blatant the theft or how improper the activity apparently the Serious Fraud Office reckons that a prosecution might not necessarily follow. 
It is this kind of rank hypocrisy this racist protection of the corporate world that really really upsets me. The sum of $58 million was stolen from mum and dad investors and we are expected to just sit back and watch while the thieves simply change their jackets go back out and do it all over again and while Maori and Pasifika get thrown in jail for pinching mum’s handbag and stealing dad’s car. Blue Chip steals millions and millions of dollars of investor money then goes belly up dragging down 19 other companies and the “UFO”—the “U can’t be serious” Fraud Office—lets them get away with it. Sure the Commerce Commission is looking into breaches of the Fair Trading Act and whether investors have been conned by misleading representations but these guys are not going to jail any time soon and everybody in this House knows that. In fact when I heard Blue Chip founder Mark Byers say he wanted to put some of his own money into a compensation fund the first thing I thought of was a Tui ad: “Honest I’m gonna give it all back. … Yeah right!”. 
While the Blue Chip crooks get away with doing far far more damage to far more people far more often instead of the “UFO” being beefed up and given some serious grunt the Serious Fraud Office is being disestablished and its functions are to be transferred to the Organised and Financial Crime Agency which will have increased search and surveillance powers and which will be targeting money-laundering and large-scale drug-trafficking money with a central focus on countering the billion-dollar methamphetamine market. That is cool; let us do everything we can to nail the meth gangs and cut off their supplies of finance ingredients cooks and the dumb and desperate fools who are sucked into selling P to their own relations. But given how quickly the Taser got used to zap all the wrong people—like the way that a cop slipped and zapped the wrong person the way that another cop ended up zapping himself or the way that those lazy buggers zapped that poor guy lying face down on the footpath with his hands handcuffed behind his back—let us not get so gung-ho that we do not keep a very careful eye on the new search and surveillance powers included in this bill. 
The Law Commission’s 500-page report on search and surveillance laws which was released last year noted huge inconsistencies in the powers of the police and non-police agencies and it called for a wide-ranging review to bring search and surveillance laws together into one comprehensive statute. Given that we have not even seen the proposed new search and surveillance bill yet the Maori Party members are naturally very concerned about the granting of new powers to the police and about the way that those powers will be independently monitored to guard against their excessive use against Maori communities. 
I note that this new Organised and Financial Crime Agency will also be charged with going after cyber-criminals—the crooks of the new age; the Internet fraudsters. And no offence to the group of officials that is stitching this whole thing together but given the way that the Inland Revenue Department lost $60 million recently and the fact that a few agencies have just been conned by a fraudster from within I struggle to see how a hotchpotch of the Ministry of Social Development the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet the Department of Internal Affairs Te Puni Kokiri the Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs the Department of Corrections the Customs Service the Department of Labour the Inland Revenue Department the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Fisheries will be able to put together the infrastructure the expertise and the information technology intelligence needed to respond to the highly intricate nature of Internet crime. It took the FBI and the Dutch police to track down that kid in Whitianga who crashed the entire computer network of the University of Pennsylvania. We now know that he has earned more than $40000 as a professional hacker making software especially to crash networks. And we are supposed to be getting Work and Income to do the investigations over here? I can just see another Tui ad coming on. 
Organised crime is significant it is pervasive and its reach is global but the pain it causes is very very local and beating it will take skill and cooperation. The Maori Party will support this bill going to a select committee to ensure that these issues are given the serious consideration they deserve. But we challenge this House not just to focus on the crimes of the poor but also to target the rampant and criminal activities of the financial classes the big boys who do not steal just from families but who as the multibillion-dollar bail-out of Bear Stearns in America proved can bring down whole countries. Tena koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tena tatou e te Whare. Tena koe Anikaaro.