McKelvie Ian: Organised Crime and Anti-corruption Legislation Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMcKelvie Ian: Organised Crime and Anti-corruption Legislation Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 20 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3527. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): It gives me pleasure to take a call on the Organised Crime and Anti-corruption Legislation Bill. The Government produced this bill as a result of a report on strengthening New Zealand’sresistance I guess to organised crime. It was an all-Government department report and it encompassed the whole of our legal fraternity and you can tell by the number of bills that it touches on—a dozen of them I think—that it was quite a complicated bit of legislation for someone like me to understand. I could understand the need to deal with some of the facts we are dealing with but it was pretty hard to understand how it all worked. Linking it together was quite a task; it took a while. Primarily the bill deals with the law enforcement agencies that deal with instances of organised crime and corruption not only in New Zealand but internationally. As I said I found it interesting but quite complicated and I will endeavour to explain that during the contribution I am going to make to this bill.We heard from some 20 submitters almost all of them in support in one form or another. Many of them related to the banks’ role in this bill. The banks’ role in this bill although it seems minor is actually quite important in that the banks give the law enforcement agencies the ability to track financial transactions. There was a lot of discussion about how those financial transactions would be managed who would manage them and at what point they would be reported to the law enforcement agencies. The law enforcement agencies needed this information as quickly as they could get it and the banks needed time to be able compile it and put it together and so there were some changes made to the bill in respect of the amount of time the banks had. I think the bill talked about 10 days and the bill now talks about 10 working days which satisfied the banks’ request in that respect.A number of the submissions raised an issue that I have found to be very interesting and of course it has been talked about by almost every speaker tonight though not all with the same view. I really quite enjoyed the contribution that the last speaker Rino Tirikatene made to this because he touched on the fact that around the world things are quite challenging. In fact Jonathan Young touched on the fact a little earlier too that trade is what makes the world go round and in every part of the world trade is dealt with in a different manner. So the issue of facilitation payments—or bribes as David Clendon called them and they could well be called bribes as well—is quite a complex one and I think that we have probably arrived at the right situation on this and I will explain why in a moment. But there is a very fine line between a bribe and a legitimate payment being made to someone for I guess services rendered or as the bill words it a “routine government action”.I remember when I was much younger I spent a lot of time on a fairly large continent and I remember one night pulling up in quite a large passenger plane in the middle of a runway. A fellow ran up the stairs of the plane when they dropped the stairs he paid the pilot off and everyone walked off the plane and out through the back door. We did not have to go through customs. It had nothing to do with me I might add but that is the sort of thing that I guess this bill is attempting to manage. Obviously in some parts of the world a lot of that sort of stuff happens.Although these facilitation payments are legal in New Zealand and Australia—and I think it was pointed out earlier that the law is worded slightly differently certainly in Australia than it is in New Zealand and consequently could have a different interpretation made of it—they are illegal in the UK. Surprisingly the Director of the Serious Fraud Office and the Director of Public Prosecutions have issued a joint statement in the UK saying that they are very unlikely to prosecute in the case of small facilitation payments being made.I do find this a really interesting topic because I think that when you look all around the world trade varies so much and there are so many different ways of dealing with this issue that I would be very reluctant for us to support I guess the Supplementary Order Paper that David Clendon is putting up for that reason. I think it would preclude us from some courses of action particularly with our trade relationships that we may well want to make.The types of crime talked about in this bill frankly make one’s hair stand on end. One of them is human trafficking. The penalties for human trafficking in this bill are 20 years in jail or a $500000 fine. I was kind of likening human trafficking—and I realise it is a little different—to a topic that I am very interested in and that is stock rustling. I wonder whether there is a great deal of difference between stealing someone’s person and someone’s sheep. I guess I would definitely struggle to get penalties of that order for stock rustling but in fact it is a similar sort of thing when you think about it. [Interruption] Well hopefully—I do not know whether they do. I am not sure whether more sheep do get stolen than people actually. But bribery of course is a very large topic in the course of this bill.The other topic that came to the fore in its many forms was money-laundering. I go back to the days of the bookie in the local pub. They are outlawed now of course. They were then too but they still operated. But I do go back to those days and I am pretty sure a lot of the money that went through those bookmakers’ hands was far from legitimate. Humans have been I guess in the money-laundering business almost for ever. Of course the money-laundering business also impacts largely on a worldwide scale on the gambling business. For many of us gambling is—I was going to say it is a way of life; I should not say that. Gambling is kind of I guess a hobby that is undertaken by people but at the same time gambling is also undertaken by a large sector of the criminal fraternity with a view to laundering the ill-gotten gains from some form of crime or other.The other issue that looms very large in the course of this bill is the matter of drug-smuggling and the worldwide drug markets how that money changes hands and how it is used once it has changed hands. This bill will go a long way to making sure that New Zealand sits with the rest of the world in enabling the handling of these things in a very strong and sensible manner.It really strengthens the law enforcement agencies’ ability to track a whole lot of stuff that we currently have the law in place to deal with but not in the form that will be put in place once this bill goes through Parliament and once the amendments are made to those 12 different Acts that need to be amended to get us to the point we need to be at. The bill ensures we are able to cooperate with agencies worldwide. It encourages better cooperation and understanding with our friends around the world. It will enable us as a country as has been referred to a number of times tonight to stand with the United Nations and manage our way through a lot of these issues as we need to.The bill was put through the Law and Order Committee under the leadership of Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi. I think he did a pretty good job of getting this bill through there. As I said I thought it was a little complicated. It was also under the stewardship of Minister Amy Adams. In the course of the discussion on this bill by the select committee there were some nine or 10 changesin all I think made to the original bill that was put to the committee. Those changes I think will ensure that this bill moves smoothly through the next phase of the House. Obviously there is a Supplementary Order Paper coming from the Greens. I am also very pleased to note that the whole House supports this bill pretty much in its entirety. I think that is a pretty good feat as well. So I have no problem supporting this bill going to the next step and I thank you for the opportunity to speak on it.