Bindra Mahesh: Third Readings —Text is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBindra Mahesh: Third Readings —[Sitting date: 04 November 2015. Volume:709;Page:7722. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MAHESH BINDRA (NZ First): It is a privilege to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak on the legislation arising from the Organised Crime and Anti-corruption Legislation Bill. The intent of this legislation is to strengthen the law to combat organised crime and corruption. The intent is also to improve New Zealand’s ability to collaborate with other like-minded countries to interrupt organised crime and work effectively with the other countries’ public officials and law enforcement agencies to respond to future challenges. We like the intent of this legislation. The intent is to improve New Zealand’s compliance with the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions. I will come back to this part later in my presentation.Now touching upon the human-trafficking part of the legislation the legislation has gone to some extent in tidying up the current provisions in terms of simplifying the provisions on human trafficking. The provision has now been added to cover the purpose of human trafficking for prostitution and slavery as well as illegal human organ transplants.Coming back to the bribery part of the legislation there has been a change made in the provision with regard to corruption or bribery by foreign public officials. New Zealand citizens New Zealand permanent residents and those corporates based in New Zealand will come under the purview of this legislation. However the waters have been left muddy—we suspect deliberately—with a view to leaving some space there for New Zealand corporates as well as private businesses to provide for facilitation payments which in plain English is bribery. There is no clarity around how corrupt a foreign public official can be before he or she gets into trouble. Facilitation payments—or in plain language bribery as I have said—have been given a wide scope to thrive in.As pointed out earlier it is a matter of shame that the Minister has conceded that small facilitation payments are OK and at times necessary to get the job done. We think that has been a deliberate attempt to actually weaken this brilliant legislation. Had David Clendon’s Supplementary Order Paper been accepted by the other 61 members of this Parliament this legislation could have been stronger and better. However it was unfortunate that only 60 of us supported that and 61 did not.We have serious issues with this approach. Who decides how much is OK for a bribe? Whether it is small or big a bribe is a bribe. This approach will contribute towards damaging our image as a transparent and relatively corruption-free country. Having travelled in both the larger countries that David Clendon just mentioned—India and China—I say that it will take them a long time to change their old culture but they are working at it. What we are working at is actually damaging our reputation. Our businesses are relatively transparent relatively clean. However this sort of anomaly in our laws will give them a wide scope to indulge in bribery or facilitation payments.Touching on the now infamous Saudi sheep debacle had this legislation been appropriately strengthened in good time a certain Minister could have been answering some serious questions as to whether those millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money were a facilitation payment or were a plain simple bribe. Thank you.