Sabin Mike: Organised Crime and Anti-corruption Legislation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSabin Mike: Organised Crime and Anti-corruption Legislation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 04 November 2014. Volume:701;Page:507. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MIKE SABIN (National—Northland):Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker Mallard and I will take this as my first opportunity to officially acknowledge your promotion to the position of Assistant Speaker. I hope that goes very well for you. The Organised Crime and Anti-corruption Legislation Bill is an omnibus bill that seeks to amend 12 Acts. I will pick up on the points that the Hon Annette King has just made about the fact that New Zealand is not immune to some of the most abhorrent organised crimes that we see going on around the world. As the member has rightly pointed out people-trafficking is one of them. Globally organised crime obviously knows no boundaries. As the world moves forward and we become technologically advanced so too do criminal activities organised crime and corruption.This bill really is an important part of New Zealand’s obligations to meet international and United Nations conventions in terms of strengthening our ability as a nation to ensure that organised crime—organised criminal entities corruption money-laundering people-trafficking and so forth—can be fought on the many levels that it needs to be. More and more often New Zealand is being called upon to cooperate and participate in international inquiries and investigations. One of the opportunities that globally organised criminal entities look for in terms of their enterprises is the gap between different jurisdictions. They exploit those gaps. They exploit the fact that some countries do not talk or share information well with one another and where those gaps exist is where there are opportunities. Clearly this is something that this bill and the international conventions that the bill seeks to address will go to the heart of.Organised crime and corruption is increasingly more sophisticated and it is fair to say I think that New Zealand enjoys a reputation for being—as Annette King pointed out—one of the least corrupt countries in the world but that is not going to stop people trying. Certainly we have seen that with drug trafficking where over the course of the last 10 or 15 years New Zealand has become an end-user destination. It has become quite a significant part of drug trafficking in say methamphetamine. There are methamphetamine transactions on a large scale—in multiple millions and billions of dollars in fact—and we also see a lot of money-laundering and so forth going on underneath that. These criminal entities and networks are able to overlap and work with one another in a very very sophisticated way. That is something that I think New Zealand enforcement agencies have to work very very hard to combat and it is very hard to do that without the appropriate legislative framework.I will just run over a couple of the key points in the time that I have left. A couple of the key measures in this bill include requiring banks to report all international wire transactions over $1000 and all physical cash transactions of $10000 or more to the financial intelligence unit within the police. There is the redrafting of the money-laundering offence to specify that the intent to conceal is not required. The bill is introducing new offences to address identity crime including the selling or passing-on of unlawfully obtained identity information something that is certainly increasingly more sophisticated and in common use. There is the amending of people-trafficking offences so that they apply to such activity in New Zealand not just to when victims are moved in or out of this country. It is amending the Policing Act 2008 to expressly provide police with the power to share information with their international counterparts. As I mentioned this is one of the areas that these more sophisticated organised criminal entities absolutely exploit—the gaps that exist between jurisdictions their inability to share information or the lack of the capability to do so and certainly the lack of a sound legal nexus between jurisdictions. There is the revising of the foreign bribery offence including clarifying the circumstances in which a corporation is liable for foreign bribery and the increasing of penalties for bribery and corruption in the private sector to bring them into line with public sector bribery offences.That runs over just a couple of the key points. It is an important piece of legislation I think. It is a big chunk of work that amends 12 Acts as I said. I look forward to hearing submissions as this process proceeds. Thank you.