Coates BarryBARRY COATES (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. Thank you for calling me in this short call on the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Amendment Bill. I would echo the question that my Labour colleagues have asked which is why it has taken so long for the bill to get to this stage. In 2009 we had phase one of this legislation. It has been known for quite some time that the financial institutions captured under phase one were not the only parts of the economy that were engaging in money-laundering. I refer to the report of the Financial Action Task Force which really brought New Zealand's reputation into disrepute. We were struck off the EU's white list of countries which imposed additional costs on our business and sullied our international reputation. We have had the foreign trusts scandal investigated by Mr Shewan. In his report he called for far greater transparency. We think there is still a missed opportunity in that that transparency has not been included in this legislation around the beneficial ownership of foreign trusts which would have been a great improvement. However that being said and even given the delays in this legislation the Green Party is strongly behind it. We are strong supporters of cleaning up this dirty money that has flowed into our economy and of cleaning up particularly the incidence of money-laundering in real estate which we believe is complicit in the run-up of house price speculation in Auckland and other cities. We have supported this bill through the committee process. We have asked many questions. We have I think made some improvements together with officials and committee members. We are broadly satisfied with the direction that the bill has gone in. We however have a number of specific questions. One of those questions relates particularly to the issue of privacy. We heard from the Privacy Commissioner that there were particular concerns in the draft legislation about a broad concept of privacy. We had in response a tightening of the provisions related to privacy. We still have some concerns that privacy provisions do not go far enough in terms of protecting private individuals under this legislation and we will come back to pointing out exactly where that is concerned. We indicate that we also have some concerns about the clarification of procedures for client privileged information and we will be raising some questions on that. As I have said we have some concerns about the non-inclusion of a registry of beneficial ownership. With that said we will be supporting the bill. We hope that these questions will be answered and particularly that we will end up with legislation that provides a basis for action. I think the lesson that has been learnt from the UK in its implementation of anti - money-laundering legislation is that the legislation provides the basis for countering money-laundering but far more than that is required. It is a culture change that is required and it is the proper resourcing of policing services and intelligence services which would actually complement the legislation itself. We hope that the Minister will give us assurances that those pieces will be put into place as well as the legislation. Thank you.