It’s not Hosking’s wealth and sportscar that alienate him
Do John Key and Andrew Little think we are all stupid? Don’t answer that. But from their actions in the wake of the Shewan report into foreign trusts, you would not be forgiven for coming to any other conclusion.
OK, it is no surprise that many of our elected representatives can be ‘‘economical with the truth’’. Thus it was in the beginning . . .
But you would think there was enough evidence from around the world of how tired voters are getting with the insider games and rhetoric – of fudging, dissembling and ‘‘politics as usual’’.
We had our own version in the MMP vote. Dumping first-past-the-post was not just about replacing an unrepresentative electoral system, but also about disciplining politicians from both sides of the aisle – over the head of their objections – for promising one thing and delivering another.
Insider-allergy was a key element in the rise of Donald Trump and the success of Bernie Sanders in the United States (though as evidence of the dangers of being economical with the truth? Maybe less compelling).
It also seems to have been a factor in the Brexit vote; an outcome that has delivered a result neither main party wanted but which they must now put in place for the United Kingdom – even as the backlash against the lies and exaggerations of both sides are coming back to haunt them.
Back home, Key and Little’s transgressions are less dramatic, but of the same ilk. Little first. At the Labour leader’s media stand-up on Tuesday he defended the cynical lateSaturday, pre-All Black test, timing of a press release in which accepted he was wrong in allegations he made against tax expert John Shewan.
He also insisted he had not been asked for an apology by Shewan – referencing his memory of their first face-to-face meeting. True as far as it went in relation to the first meeting, but ignoring Shewan’s later letter specifically seeking an apology. Misleading at best, as Shewan later pointed out.
But if Little was fudging, the prime minister was blatantly claiming black was lily-white with his continued insistence – against all the facts – that the current rules for foreign trusts are a ‘‘full disclosure’’ regime.
His argument runs that the current rules may only require minimal up front disclosure – the name of the trust, its New Zealand-based trustee and whether a settlor is based in Australia – but greater details must be held and provided to IRD if it seeks them . . . and that they have always been passed on to countries that ask.
Shewan’s recommendations would, he argued, simply move the information flow up to a level where it was held by IRD and searchable, so the information was far more likely to go to countries that wanted it.
But back on the more familiar Planet Shewan, that was not how he saw it. The current disclosure rules were ‘‘inadequate’’ and he considered ‘‘a significant expansion of the rules’’ was indicated.
Right now, the information provided to IRD – or any other governmental agency – when a trust was established was ‘‘minimal’’.
And then he rattled through what was missing from Key’s current ‘‘full disclosure’’ regime: No obligation to report distributions to beneficiaries (or disclose beneficiaries), no annual returns of any kind, a low likelihood IRD would request records, no information under anti-money laundering rules likely to be disclosed to any government agency, and no mandatory verification of the source of funds.
It was a light-handed disclosure regime ‘‘without any material likelihood of information being requested by a New Zealand government agency and provided to a tax or other authority offshore’’.
After all, an overseas tax authority can hardly ask for what it doesn’t know even exists – so no wonder our secrecy was a selling point for firms spruiking New Zealand as a home base for foreign trust-mongers.
Shewan also notes that while there was no direct evidence they were being used to evade taxes in other countries or for money-laundering, it did not follow they had not been used that way.
‘‘That argument is akin to saying that no speeding tickets have been issued on a particular road, so speeding in that area is not a problem,’’ as Shewan wryly put it.
So he plunges into some recommended changes.
Foreign trusts should reveal to IRD up front their beneficiaries, settlors, trustees, who has effective control, and their country of tax residence. They should also file annual returns including financial statements and a register should be set up, though sadly he would have it searchable by regulatory agencies only, not the public or the media.
That clearly amounts to a robust and major revamp, not a recognition the previous regime was one of ‘‘full disclosure’’.
Little should admit he was asked to apologise by Shewan – and then match the action to the request.
Key should acknowledge there is a world of difference between holding information, ready to disclose if asked, and actual disclosure; just as there is a gulf between what we have in place for foreign trusts now and what Shewan says we need – which the Government has largely committed to putting in place.
If for no other reason, than that nobody likes being treated as stupid.
Last week’s jailing of an Islamic man for collecting and spreading vile images of Isis killings will have fanned a few fires on the subject of immigration. I include my own kneejerk response, because we’re not all perfect.
That’s how easy it can be to change a country’s course in history, as Britain (is it still ‘‘Great’’?) has just demonstrated. When people are told what they’re not allowed to think it doesn’t just go away – it festers.
The rift between intellectuals, city dwellers, and people in the provinces can be vast here as well as in Britain, and finger-wagging does no good. It’s not just other ethnicities and genders we have to accept, but the point of view of everyone who balks at new ideas, and resents being patronised. You can pass laws, but you can’t make people like them, and now we’ve seen the danger in giving alienated people power they never felt they had. I’m right off plebiscites.
Immigration is a bit scary; it involves people with different languages, beliefs and customs, sometimes arriving in great numbers, and also change, which is scary in itself.
Looking back to the dawn raids on Pacific Island overstayers during the Muldoon era, our record has been every bit as lousy as Australia’s, and that is why Imran Patel, the 26-year-old Isis advocate jailed last week, is dangerous. People like him fan fires that should never be lit.
Brexit has done the same, with racism and xenophobia now unleashed on hapless foreigners in Britain.
I won’t be the only one wondering how Patel got to live in this quiet, safe country, so far from the violence he so admires, whether or not he shared his bloodthirsty beliefs with immigration officers, and why we can’t send him back when he’s served his sentence.
But the buck stops with him and Niroshan Nawarajan, 27, also sentenced on similar terrorism charges last week. Blame falls on them, not an entire Islamic community.
Like Patel, Nawarajan harboured grisly images of people being beheaded, shot and burned alive. What they get out of watching such sick sadism is worrying. Like sexual porn, it seems that violence porn can be addictive and mindaltering, eroding respect for other human beings.
Nawarajan entered the United States consulate in Auckland asking if the building was bomb-proof, and Americans don’t find that sort of thing even mildly amusing, as anyone who has passed through their airport immigration system will know. Neither should we. The world is too complicated.
It must be so much more complicated, though, for immigrants and refugees who arrive here to safety, then have to build new lives from nothing. We have no choice but to engage with them.
Immigration is shaping up as the big issue of our time, with more displaced people – 65 million according to the United Nations – than there were at the end of World War II. That reality, and the fear it generates, is already reshaping the world as we know it.
It’s crazy to imagine you can effectively build a new Hadrian’s Wall between Scotland and England, build a fence to keep Mexicans out, endlessly turn shiploads of desperate people away from your coastline, or that you’re so far away from the rest of the world that nothing bad there will touch you, because it will.
I’d put broadcaster Mike Hosking in the category of people who resent newfangled ideas about ethnicity. I was watching him the night he revealed his unthinking attitude on Maori representation in local government.
That the context was the struggles of New Plymouth’s mayor to make his council more inclusive only made it worse: Taranaki has an especially ugly racial history that shouldn’t be trivialised.
I can’t make Hosking and his admirers sit down quietly and read this country’s history from a Maori perspective, but I wish they would. I can’t be frivolous about the Land Wars we waged against Maori, and the illegal land confiscations that followed their refusal to submit to an influx of foreigners with strange habits and beliefs.
Neither can I accept that the effects of colonisation are all in the past, and Maori should get their act together, as Hosking does. It’s not just his wealth and sportscar that alienate him from understanding the complexities of race issues; it’s a wilful blindness to the evidence that amounts to arrogance – and him an immigrant.
I won’t be signing a petition to get him sacked, though. He performs a valuable public role showing what racism looks like: pale-skinned, privileged, and smug.