Woods Megan: Organised Crime and Anti-corruption Legislation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Organised Crime and Anti-corruption Legislation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 04 November 2014. Volume:701;Page:517. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram):It is my pleasure to take a call on this bill for Labour which is supporting it. I wish the member for Rangitīkei good wishes. He is going back to his office where apparently the Melbourne Cup is being run. It is all in the use of a comma which I think could have made quite a difference. So enjoy the race and I hope your horse comes in.It is a pleasure to speak on this bill and to outline Labour’s support for it because I think there are some very serious elements to what is a reasonably comprehensive piece of legislation an omnibus bill that seeks to address a number of measures and has its genesis a long way back. In fact its genesis was in the previous Labour Government.If we have a look at this Government’s work on this in August 2011 Cabinet agreed to an all-of-Government response to organised crime in New Zealand. What we can actually see if we have a look at the legislation that has been put in place around organised crime and anti-corruption in New Zealand is a flurry of this legislation in the relatively recent past. We have seen the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act in 2009 the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009 and the Search and Surveillance Act 2012. This is a piece of legislation that very much fits in with these bills in making its contribution to controlling this matter.So what this legislation seeks to do is to establish an effective tool box for targeting organised crime in New Zealand and enabling the law enforcement that our agencies need to be agile and able to quickly and effectively respond to new challenges as they emerge and I think one of the things that we can see is that new challenges are something that constantly present themselves.Previous speakers in this debate have spoken about New Zealand’s great reputation. The fact is that we consistently rank really highly in Transparency International’s findings and that we are first equal out of 102 countries. We do as a country take a great source of pride—and so we should—about having an open society. But we do have to realise—and this legislation does acknowledge this—that we are not immune to domestic and transnationally generated organised crime.The police’s 2010 assessment Organised Crime in New Zealand documents a wide array of organised criminal markets and activities ranging from drug-use crime to fraud to intellectual property theft to cyber-crime and to environmental crime and these activities significantly impact on our communities our international reputation and our international reputation in international markets. If we take for example New Zealand’s methamphetamine market it is estimated to be worth $1.2 billion per year and contains organised criminal group involvement from production right through to consumption. So these are real issues in our communities that we do need to address.Although I have outlined some of the legislative measures that we have in this country to combat organised crime there is a well-accepted acceptance—if I could say such a phrase—that we have many non-legislative mechanisms as well to target organised crime. But what the regulatory impact statement of this bill really does is identify seven key areas where this needs to be addressed. In her address opening this debate for Labour the Hon Annette King talked about the first case in this country when we had a person on trial for human trafficking.If we look at the regulatory impact statement for this bill which was produced in only 2013 we can see that it says that “While this is not considered to be a considerable risk in New Zealand in recent years New Zealand has come under criticism for perceived gaps in the trafficking in persons offence from the United Nations Human Rights Committee and from the United States in their Trafficking in Persons Report.” So we can see how swiftly we do have to move.As previous speakers have noted we do need to be vigilant. Our excellent international reputation has not occurred by accident. It has occurred because we see a great deal of merit and we have taken a great deal of pride in the mechanisms and the transparency that we have at all levels in our country and that needs to start with our Government. That is where we have to have the utmost levels of transparency and it is fair to say that in recent months and weeks questions have arisen around the level of transparency that this Government is operating in and many of my colleagues have gone through some of those matters.But if we look at some of the mechanisms where we need to have transparency one of the key mechanisms that we have is the Official Information Act and that is there to allow individuals and private citizens to find out what is going on with their Government—to be able to find out what it is that the people who wield power are doing.If we look at the abuse of the Official Information Act system that has been happening under this Government it is something that is cause for alarm. We have the Prime Minister’s office telling blogger Cameron Slater to “OIA” classified SIS documents then have the SIS declassify those documents and quickly release them to this blogger. This is not something that we can tolerate from our Government. We have the Prime Minister’s office and other ministerial offices tipping off bloggers when an Official Information Act request is about to be released to an Opposition party or a media outlet and telling them to put in a request for the information in the Official Information Act request which is then provided.We have this as a means of quelling criticism of a Government and that is one of my major concerns here—that if we are going to have a country where we value transparency where we value anti-corruption and where we value the fact that we can have people who can speak out and be a critic of the Government we cannot have an organised ring in which the Government is implicated in stopping that informed debate and stopping that debate by the denigration of people’s reputations and by seeking to destroy people not by arguing on the merits and the facts.We see this when we have 33 of the top health academics and professionals in this country writing an open letter to the Prime Minister to tell him that they are uncomfortable about the perceived conflict of interest around Katherine Rich’s appointment to the Health Promotion Agency because that very person had been part of an organised attack on nutritional scientists at the University of Otago who had put out information that was counter to what her agency wanted to see.I enjoy debate. I have no problem with any organisation entering into a very robust debate around what is happening and arguing about the facts but is that what happened? No that is not what happened. We had the person putting out the information—the person whose research this was—being attacked. We had her reputation called into question not her science not her finding and not even the quality of the writing in her paper which sometimes academics could be held to account for. No it was her as a person. This is what we simply cannot tolerate in this country and we certainly cannot tolerate it when we have our Government and our Prime Minister’s office implicated in it.So we are very happy to support this legislation going to a select committee. We think there are some really serious issues in here that this legislation will cover off. I agree with a previous speaker who said that at the select committee there do need to be some serious questions and some probing done from all sides of the House around where civil liberties fit in and what protections can be put in place to protect those. But as a House we cannot simply pass legislation around protecting ourselves against corruption and putting in place mechanisms for transparency and think that we are immune from those issues as well because transparency and having an open Government that lives up to the reputation that we as New Zealanders hold dear starts with us in this House. It starts with everybody on both sides of this House and it is not something that we can afford to let go of.We have had it said by this organised racket that the people in the city where I live are scum. We have had the family of people killed on the West Coast called feral. We have had academics attacked. We have had teachers attacked. We have had people who dared to criticise attacked. The question for me is who is next and that is not something that we can tolerate. Thank you very much.