Seymour David: Organised Crime and Anti-corruption Legislation Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSeymour David: Organised Crime and Anti-corruption Legislation Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 21 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7419. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I would like to make a short contribution on the facilitation payment aspects of this bill and the Supplementary Order Paper that has been put on the Table. This is a debate between those who measure public policy by its intentions on the one hand and those who measure it by its outcomes on the other. It is also a debate between those who would like to go and ingratiate themselves in the corridors of international agencies on the one hand and those who represent the interests of New Zealanders and particularly New Zealanders doing business overseas on the other.What an absolute prohibition upon any kind of facilitation payment by New Zealanders to any overseas authority in those overseas countries would do is ensure that something we cannot quite define is illegal. It would ensure that anybody who gives any kind of payment that did not fit into the correct framework—a framework defined by a foreign country—is therefore an illegal payment and therefore a crime has been committed. It is entirely impractical to achieve that. First of all it places an onus on the person making the payment to determine whether or not the payment they have made is truly legitimate.Let me just give you one simple example relayed to me just a few weeks ago by a constituent in my electorate who said: “Look I was travelling overseas. I was told in a very remote location that were I not to purchase an additional visa I could not go any further.” So is it the intention of this Committee by adding this Supplementary Order Paper to the bill to ensure that that person would have to err on the side of caution—that the payment would indeed be considered illegal in the eyes of the jurisdiction they were trying to enter—and return home impractically from a remote location where they were not actually able to get any kind of safe passage or accommodation back? Is that really the intention of this Supplementary Order Paper? Or is it—as has been the experience of New Zealanders overseas doing business in unfamiliar places with different legal frameworks from our own—a necessity to make payments that would maybe not be familiar or acceptable under our legal framework or that may not be legal or familiar under the framework of the host country but none the less are demanded in that circumstance?I put it to the Committee that it is an unfair prohibition to put the onus on New Zealanders in difficult circumstances to make those judgments. But even if we were to believe that it were true—and believe that we as New Zealanders could travel overseas and inspire foreigners to be more like us and it is odd that there is a sort of cultural imperialism coming across here some might say—then of course the New Zealand Government would find the onus would be on itself to make judgments about whether payments made under an unfamiliar legal framework in an unfamiliar land were actually legitimate according to the standards of that country. That again is highly impractical for the New Zealand Government to actually do. So we find ourselves in this conflict between those who believe in public policy intentions—and will sing them from the rooftops because don’t it make you feel good—and those who tend to judge public policy by its outcomes which are much grittier and more filled with practicality than the proponents would make out.It is a conflict as I said between those who would ingratiate themselves in the corridors of international agencies where such high-minded ideas always ring true and those who experience the practicality of actually going about their business and it might be that the British actually understand this a little bit better than other speakers have let on. David Clendon very graciously showed me a letter from Transparency International. I read all of the parts that he had highlighted in his letter including the fact that the British have nominally introduced an absolute prohibition on facilitation payments. What I read under the highlighted part was that the British are not enforcing it because as I have suggested with the proposal before us today it is impossible for a Government such as New Zealand’s or the Government of the United Kingdom to enforce an absolute prohibition on such payments right across the world in a range of unfamiliar environments. That is how I can stand here as a proud New Zealander and a New Zealander—