Wood MichaelMICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): I am very happy to take a call at this Committee of the whole House stage of the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Amendment Bill. The bill is finally starting to make some speedy progress through the House. Of course we had the second reading yesterday which a number of us participated in. We are now moving on to the Committee stage. But of course the point that my colleague the Hon Ruth Dyson made is a very very valid one which is that the main concern of the Opposition is that we have been so tardy in actually progressing this bill. The reason that is of import is because this goes to the reputation of our country.There was a major media investigation into this area last year by Matt Nippert of the New Zealand Herald which revealed that there is approximately $1.6 billion of illicit funds flowing through some of the entities that we are finally catching up with and including in this legislation. So the Labour Party's view on this legislation is not so much that there is anything wrong with it but that we should really have been progressing with this much much faster. When John Shewan produced his report which came out—members of the House will no doubt remember the Panama Papers landing in New Zealand in early 2016 where we learnt through the efforts of investigative journalists that billions of dollars of dark money is floating around our world stemming from the drug trade from criminal enterprises and sometimes from arms dealing. They look for places to hide this money.One of the things that Mr Shewan found is that one of the chief areas that the money goes into is the real estate sector in New Zealand. If members get the opportunity to read the very excellent piece by Matt Nippert in the Herald last year he points out that the real estate sector is such a target for it is because of course we initially acted on trusts but when you do that you effectively shift the incentive to put the dark money into the areas that you have not acted upon. Real estate is one of those areas and of course there is a double whammy with real estate in New Zealand in that you can hide the dark money but you are also potentially in line for a big fat capital gain coming out of that.We absolutely support the intent of this legislation. It is about bringing those sectors that were left out of the stage one reforms into the ambit. What it means is that there will be an obligation on people in those sectors to ensure that there is a level of reporting of suspicious transactions and also that there will be a level of protection for those people who might make disclosures about suspicious transactions that are happening in this sector. So we are looking at real estate we are looking at the New Zealand Racing Board and we are looking at certain other high-value sectors—places where this money can be put.If we want to look at some of the specifics there was some reasonably good work that was done by the Law and Order Committee just in response to some of the submissions and also through the process of working through the legislation and making sure that it is as effective as possible. One item I just want to touch on briefly are the changes made in Part 1 of the bill on page 6 here to clause 5(1) where there was just a bit of clarification in terms of the definition of accounting practice" where it was pointed out in a number of the submissions that we needed to make sure that we were including accountants who were in a partnership with one another as well. There are a number of these changes that the Labour Party supports. They were just very pragmatic very sensible about tightening up the legislation.The point I want to make on that is that when Matt Nippert did his report early last year he pointed out that when the police gave advice about this issue they found that in 26 percent of the cases that they cracked open where there were assets coming out of organised crime there were complex arrangements put together by lawyers or accountants. So we are talking about huge values of money every year coming out of illicit enterprises and the criminals the people who are bringing this money in through illicit means—these are not guys who just stuff a bit of money under the mattress; these are people who go and get smart lawyers and smart accountants to tuck their money away.That small change in clause 5(1) is a good example of the select committee doing its work and just making sure that we are tightening the legislation as much as possible to make sure that we are not leaving it open for it to be exploited by those lawyers and accountants who will no doubt in some cases still be looking for ways to get through the legislative net that we are trying to knit here. I will leave it at that. I am sure there will be many other calls taken by the Labour Party on this bill. We support it but it has come later than it should have."