Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

As I have indicated, there were two examples that I gave in my speech in the second reading debate on the first tranche of the anti-money-laundering legislation. I will briefly, off the top of my head, outline what they were. There is a record store in Melbourne which is called the Shining Path. They have the same name as a Peruvian group. The store had all of their finances frozen and they were not able to access those finances for many months when they were going through a process of trying to get government agencies to unfreeze them. They were a record store, and I suspect that with some investigation it would become reasonably obvious how they had come about. They had all of their finances frozen, and there was no process for going to government agencies to get them to reopen and unfreeze the finances of the record store so that the small business operator could continue on with his business.

In that instance, it was months later and only when he went to the media that he managed to get the government agencies that he had been dealing with to unfreeze his small business finances so that he could continue on with his record store. That is one example that I am interested in. What are the safeguards, what are the mechanisms in place, for people with legitimate business activities who get caught up in this legislation? As I have raised before, we have concerns about the net being thrown too wide. I want to make sure that there are safeguards for those people with legitimate businesses.

The other example that I gave was in the media. It was in the Sydney Daily Telegraph at the time of the discussion around the first tranche of legislation. It was of a woman who was from Iran and who ran a number of restaurants. She was importing food from Iran, so she had regular payments going to Iran. She went through a similar circumstance with her bank. It is understandable that her bank made the assumption, because the way the legislation is designed is that the risk is put on to the bank so they need to prove that their customers are not financing terrorism. The whole system is designed so that the banks need to make sure that they are covered. They are exempt from antidiscrimination legislation, they can make an assumption and then it is up to the person to prove that it is not the case.

They are two examples of people with legitimate business activities who have been caught up by this legislation because, as the Greens say, the net has been thrown too wide. We are very happy to be involved in stopping the financing of terrorism; everyone is. But if you throw the net too wide and you catch legitimate people, where are the safeguards for them? How do they get through the maze to get their finances unfrozen so that they can continue with their operations?