McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): That was quite long that speech. It gives me a great deal of pleasure—Fletcher Tabuteau: This will be longer. IAN McKELVIE: Ha ha! Yes it will be much shorter—longer but shorter. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to take a short call on the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Amendment Bill. This bill brings a range of new entities into play in terms of the ability to monitor what we term the laundering of money. Those new entities include lawyers accountants casinos the Racing Industry board and a number of other entities. As I said the other day in my second reading speech the select committee stage that we went through was very interesting because as the previous speaker said it was quite an interesting bill to have to deal with and to understand how it was going to work. It is introducing some extra cost to business—a considerable amount of extra cost to business actually—but the Law and Order Committee had to balance the amount of extra cost that was being introduced for business and the benefit to the New Zealand economy and the New Zealand reputation because this bill is pretty much about our international reputation. It is about our financial system and it is about ensuring that we have got as much integrity in that financial system as we can get. As has been alluded to in a number of the speeches already this money-laundering occurs in all sorts of forms from the purchase of art to gambling to the acquisition of property. There are all sorts of areas it applies to so it is a very broad challenge for the law to cover all those areas and to then be able to account for it. So the reporting mechanisms and how firms have to account for this stuff was the subject of a large amount of discussion. There are some pretty broad claims of benefit to the New Zealand economy and I will just very quickly quote from this. The proposed reforms could disrupt up to $1.7 billion in fraud over the next 10 years."—that is fraud and drug crime basically over the next 10 years. They may "prevent up to $5 billion in broader criminal activity and reduce about $800 million in social harm". I think those are a pretty broad range of claims and how you would really calculate it I am not quite sure but it does show the significant challenge that we have in this area and if it is international money that is coming into New Zealand and being effectively laundered through our financial system it is certainly not in our best interests. As I said the select committee stage was really interesting. It is a complicated bill and it is going to be complicated for some of the organisations concerned to report on this. The Minister has the ability to provide exemptions to reporting times and things like that if in fact it is found that some of these organisations struggle to get themselves up to speed quickly enough. I imagine it will happen. On the whole whilst the submitters were asking for more time almost unanimously they supported this bill and they also supported the fact that it was necessary for New Zealand's good. So I have got a great deal of pleasure in commending this bill to the House and I look forward to it being put into law. Thank you."