Goff Phil: Organised Crime and Anti-corruption Legislation Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Organised Crime and Anti-corruption Legislation Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 20 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3514. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): The Labour Party will be supporting this piece of legislation but we are not entirely happy with every aspect of it and I want to differ with the chair of our Law and Order Committee in terms of the view of the Labour Party on facilitation payments.I raised a number of questions particularly when Transparency International was appearing before the select committee because I believed that Transparency International the Human Rights Commission and the Victoria University of Wellington School of Government all made a very valid point when they said that it is impossible to distinguish where a facilitation payment ends and a bribe begins. A bribe does not have to be a big bribe to be a bribe. A small bribe is still a bribe. If I was to offer a Customs Service official in New Zealand money to speed up the transaction that I was trying to get into the country I would be committing a crime in this country. Why is it a crime in this country to do that but if I am working overseas somewhere in South-east Asia and I offer that payment somehow it is not a crime? If it is a crime in New Zealand then it is a crime internationally.I think that what Transparency International said made a lot of sense. It pointed out that there are countries that have banned facilitation payments outright. The United Kingdom you will remember is one such country that says that facilitation payments are illegal. The officials came back to us and said: “Oh but they aren’t prosecuting small facilitation payments.” They might not be but they are still illegal. The Canadians have moved to make facilitation payments illegal. Transparency International said that the United States and Australia are also moving in that direction. My question to the National Party is: if we are really proud of our reputation of being the least corrupt country in the world why are we not leading on this aspect of facilitation payments? We ought to be. We ought to be leading on that to maintain our reputation for the highest possible standards of integrity and transparency.It is also true that other organisations that we are proudly part of have spoken out against facilitation payments. APEC—the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation—has opposed facilitation payments. The OECD which we are a member of has opposed facilitation payments. In New Zealand the Serious Fraud Office and Business New Zealand working in conjunction with Transparency International put together a programme where they recommend that facilitation payments are not paid. Some questions were asked of officials at the select committee about whether this would hugely disadvantage New Zealand if others are acting corruptly and we are not able to do the same. Well I do not think that is a good excuse because if we are encouraging other countries in which we are conducting our business to stamp out corruption why would we then say that it is OK to make a facilitation payment? We would not because that is a double standard.There was a survey done of New Zealand businesses in 2009 a business survey conducted by Trace International. It found that more than three-quarters of the survey respondents believed that it was possible to do business successfully without making facilitation payments if they planned carefully and they did proper management support.So I do not accept that facilitation payments are OK. In fact in the United Nations Convention Against Corruption in article 16 there is nowhere where it says that a bribe has to be a big bribe in order to be a bribe. In fact it defines that form of corruption—bribery of foreign public officials—as when you promise or offer or give to a foreign official or person in an international organisation directly or indirectly any undue advantage for the official themselves. That is a payment. That is surely an undue advantage. You are not paying customs officially to make the transaction; you are paying the officials to grease their palms to get something that gives you an advantage.The other part of the definition is that it needs to be an act that does create undue advantage and if you are prepared to pay a facilitation payment or rather if a business is prepared to—I know you would notpersonally do any such thing Mr Assistant Speaker—make a facilitation payment it isto get an advantage. They do not want to queue up. They do not want it to take time. They want it now and it gives them an advantage. So I cannot see how anyone can read article 16 of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption as allowing facilitation paymentsbecause they are small and they are perhaps not that important. If you believe in the process of having a clear line then you do not make a payment that is not an official payment and a payment that goes into the pocket of an official to get anadvantage. Yet in this piece of legislation here we are saying that that is OK. I do not believe that it is OK.The other criticism—in so far as I have a criticism of this bill—is the length of time that it has taken to get here. The matters that this bill deals with are important matters. They are matters of large-scale criminal activities. It is designed to make sure that our law against organised crime is as tough as it needs to be. It needs to be a lot tougher because we know that if we take one aspect of organised crime and that is the manufacture and sale of methamphetamine that is a business infiltrated by organised crime that makes more than a billion New Zealand dollars a year in this country. That is a billion dollars going into the pockets of organised crime to promote drugs and we have taken a long time to bring our legislation up to the standard that makes it easier for us to crack down on that sort of organised criminal activity.The bill also provides for further action to be taken against the crime of money-laundering. Money-laundering is when you convert the proceeds of crime into a legitimate payment by cleansing that money and making it a payment on property or some such thing that makes it look legitimate. Money-laundering in this country in the Government’s own regulatory impact statement is estimated to be at a value of over $1.5 billion a year—$1.5 billion a year in criminal activity being laundered. So why is it that we had to first be criticised by international organisations about the inadequacy of our money-laundering legislation before we acted? Those criticisms date back to 2009. It is now 2015 and I ask the Government why it took 6 years to bring back to the House this necessary piece of legislation dealing with criminal activity to the value of $1.5 billion a year.Of course what this legislation also does is it enables us to ratify the United Nations Convention Against Corruption. We were one of the first countries to sign it 11 years ago and we will be one of the last countries to actually ratify it. We will be one of the last countries that signed the convention to ratify it and bring it into force. I want to know why if we are so proud of our role of being a good international citizen it took all of that time—the whole 7 years of this Government—to actually act on something that needed to occur. It is not good enough that we turned a blind eye to these things. We lowered the priority we did all sorts of other legislation but we did not crack down on criminal activity.There is a range of things that this bill enables us to do. We can not only now ratify the convention against corruption but also improve our compliance with things like the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and the United Nations anti-trafficking protocol. If I take that instance of trafficking again why has it taken so long to crack down on that when we know the appalling human costs and consequences of trafficking?What is finally before the House we support but it took too damn long for it to get here and we need some explanation of that from the Government and some explanation of why a small bribe is OK but we will criminalise a large bribe. Where is the line drawn? Why are facilitation paymentsexempted from being defined as bribery when clearly that is exactly what they are and what they are intended to do?