August 17, 2024 • 13 mins
The Helen Clark Foundation is calling for tougher rules against corruption after a report outlined the levels of transparency in the Government.
The report's author, Philippa Yasbek, says Kiwis should be reassessing the level of threat corruption has in New Zealand to avoid the need for a "too little, too late" reaction.
Political commentator Dr Bryce Edwards joins Tim Beveridge on The Weekend Collective to discuss the report.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
You're listening to the Weekend Collective podcast from News Talk SEDB.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
You no, yes, Welcome back to the Weekend Collective. This
is Politics Central at twenty two past three and we'll
take by the way anytime during the course of the hour.
You can text us your feedback on nine two nine
until we're taking your calls in just a moment. But first,
(00:32):
The Helen Clark Foundation is calling for tougher rules against
corruption after a report authored by Philip Yasbeck outlined the
levels of transparency in our government. The report says that
kiwis and naive and thinking New Zealand is safe from
corruption scene overseas. And to discuss the report, doctor Bryce Edwards,
he's political commentator from Victoria University, joins me. Now, Bryce,
(00:54):
good afternoon.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Hi Tim.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Have you read the report?
Speaker 3 (00:58):
I have, And you know I'm pretty intericipied this. There's
nothing part cleanly new in it. This isn't new research,
but it's bringing together a lot of the existing materials
and putting a really compelling case for why the system
isn't working very well at the moment and what we
could do to improve it and bring about more transparency,
to be specific.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
And it's about the perception of corruption, isn't it rather
than the reality.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Yeah, well, that's because it's hard to witch and measure
corruption by its very nature, corruption is you know, what
happens behind the scenes and people are trying to hide it.
So I mean, you can in some countries measure it
by how many people get convicted or charged with corruption,
but that is, you know, is kind of problematic because
most people get away with it.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
It is quite a dramatic sort of headline. But I
looked at the international sort of rankings and we're ranked
number third for sort of cleanliness out of one hundred
and eighty countries. We've got Denmark, Finland, Norway and Singapore.
Is this report and danger of over egging it?
Speaker 3 (02:02):
I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
No.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
I mean, if you look at the annual Corruption Perception
Index that you're just talking about, it's shown New Zealand slipping,
and not just in the rankings, but in our score
that we get each year. And so we're headed in
the wrong direction. And you know, this is a challenge
around the world at the moment. There's growing concerns around
the influence of wealthy interests, etc. So you know, and
(02:27):
one of the problems is that you can be complacent.
So those countries that have the good scores sometimes end
up resting on their laurels and they start believing their
own publicity that you know, nothing can be done wrong
in this country. You know, politicians are all trustworthy, but
we start to see, you know, across the board, all
(02:48):
sides of politics, there are some bending of the rules,
there are some untoward things that get done, and so yeah,
I think it's important to have a reminder from this
report that you need to have a keep a close
watch on.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
This sort of keep ahead of the game. What is
the what time period does the report cover because we've
got a obviously we have a national New Zealand first
at coalition. Does it cover any of that or is
it the last few years or the last ten or
twenty years? Does it sort of.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
It's really looking at contemporary as in the last few decades,
so it's not pointing the finger at any particular government.
It's certainly not about the current administration. It's and in
some ways the report is very moderate and it doesn't
rarely say there's any particular politicians that you know it
(03:39):
tails off or anything. It's saying, it's about the rules.
It's about the laws that it's critiquing, So I think
they've been over backwards to try not to esteem any politicians.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Is there any difference between corruption within political institutions and
people who are in political positions like ministers, et cetera
versus the public service? Is it?
Speaker 3 (04:00):
How?
Speaker 2 (04:00):
You know, how broadly does the does the idea of
political correction correction comenta.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Look, that's a great question, and scholars don't rarely succeed
it as a different type of corruption because they're all
part of public life and they all hold authority that
is mandated by the public. Essentially, regardless of whether you
are heading a government department or you're an elected member
of the government, it's you know, it's in the public
(04:27):
sphere and you're you know, if you're misusing resources, you're
misusing resources, regardless of of your position.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
The report talks about five areas of risk political lobbying,
donations and funding for elections, access to official information, foreign bribery,
and beneficial beneficial ownership of corporate entities. What's the one that, intuitively,
I for you, stands out the most or even just
based on what your your observations of the political establishments are.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Look, I've spent a lot of time over the last
couple of decades looking at donations and lobbying, and I
think donations don't give enough scrutiny in this country. But
I've become much more concerned about lobbying. I think that's
where those with what we interests, if you like what
(05:18):
the individual's businesses, or even here in go's or trade unions,
that's where the influencers. The size of money is a problem,
but it's not certainly not by comparison with other countries.
It's not that much out of control, whereas it's the
lobby and that New Zealand has actually no rules about it,
(05:39):
and so we're out of step with the rest of
the world. And that if you are working for the beehives,
you can leave your job and become a lobbyist the
next day and there's no rules about it. And in fact,
four out of the last five chiefs of staff in
the last Labor government where either lobbyists before or after
they were running the beehives. And it does produce a
(06:01):
lot of conflicts of interest, and there's no rules about that.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
I guess it doesn't sound flash on the surface, but
then again, minister's diaries are readily accessible, aren't they in
terms of who's meeting with home isn't Isn't that a
big Isn't that a big, a big deal in terms
of mitigating that stuff?
Speaker 3 (06:18):
Yeah, I think so, and it's it's one of the
best things that the last government did in this area
is start to publish the meetings that the ministers are having.
This in my view, there's all some questions about how
robust that mechanism is, but yeah, it's definitely been helpful.
But in other countries it's a lot more detailed, especially
(06:41):
when it comes to when they're meet with lobbyists. We
don't really get a lot of detail. And as we saw,
you know, a couple of months ago, with Shane Jones
being found out to have you know, dinners on the
West Coast with mining bosses. You know, that was missed
out from the ministeri or diaries. So I think we
have to be careful not to rest on our lirels
with those ministerial diaries. Either.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Do you think in particular is this do you think
the report just look, let's just keep an eye on this,
or do you think that there's I mean it does
suggest that there's been opportunities for governments to do something
legislatively with this, which is probably easier said than done,
but that hasn't been done. What do you think, what
action do you think should be taken?
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Well, there's like twenty seven big recommendations from this report,
and you know we all have our own views on
the correctness of those individual ones. I just think there
should be a debate about we need to have not
just politicians but the public looking at those things and
weighing them up, because all those recommendations have proms and
(07:41):
cons But the problem is that the politicians, I think
will want to ignore this report. I want to avoid
it because you know, politicians are like two keys. They
don't want to vote for an early Christmas.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Well because their next job could be as a lobbyist.
I guess because Christopher fin Lesson wants a stand down period,
what would you suggest, I mean a stand down period
of what a year? Six months?
Speaker 3 (08:02):
There is in different countries, but yeah, I think a
year would be the minimum that you'd want that you
shouldn't be able to go from being prime minister or
running the beehive. There's a chief of staff to then
working for lobbyists dealing with the exact same policy issues,
but for a vested interest on the other side of
the fence. So yeah, I agree with Chris from Mason
(08:24):
that's an urgent one.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Which country do you think is nailing it when it
comes to really doing a brilliant job and where we
could just go for the easy answer and say it's
the one who's number one in the corruption index for
sort of transparency and all that. But who do you
think we should take a leaf out of.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
I think Ireland's doing some really important reforms in this area,
and I think they probably lead the way in terms
of at least tightening up on lobbying and having some registers,
because I mean, if the country is different and they
have different sort of mix, whereas Ireland. Now, look it's
a similar size country to US, it has a relatively
similar sort of party system and political system. But I
(09:03):
mean you look at somewhere like the United States, and
what's quite interesting that the United States is they have
some of the tightest regulations in this regard. So I'm
not saying we should follow their lead, but it's of
assumed sometimes that the US is all unregulated and laissez fear,
but no, they actually have extreme regulations on lobbying, on
(09:25):
called money, etc.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
How come they rank so poorly though they're twenty fourth
with a score of sixty nine verses US on three
on a score of eighty five.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
I think there's different answers to that. And often what
happens is you have the perceptions of corruption first, and
then you have lots of rules that are made to
try and fix this. So I think the US has
had some big problems with this in the past, and
so they've tried to tidy it up and they're tightening
up things.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Just one last question, in the terms of perception, I
mean social media and conspiracy theories and all that sort
of stuff are certainly more prevalent. Do they play a
role at all in people's in this pecon in the
Perception Index and ratings?
Speaker 3 (10:08):
Not really No, because Transparence International puts US together each
year and they're mostly sururveying people in business, and so
it's not the general public. It's business people, and it's
overseas business people that are dealing with New Zealand, like
trading with this country and things like that, and it's
a lot of other I don't know reports and surveys
(10:32):
of our our local systems working that feeds into that
that index.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Yeah, good stuff. Hey, Bryce, I really appreciate your time
this afternoon. Enjoy the rest of the day.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Cheers.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
There we go. There's Bryce Edwards, political commentator from Victoria University.
Should I say doctor Bryce Edwards? And look, we're going
to do some talkback after this. We've got a bit
of time up as sleep, so time for you to
jump in on e one hundred and eighty ten eighty
in text on nine two nine two. Based on those
two interviews, first, let's just talk about the one we've
just had with Bryce. So the Hell and Clark Foundation
report calling for tougher rules against corruption after a report
(11:04):
claim lobbying and do nation rules needed and overhaul? Simple question,
are you actually worried about corruption in New Zealand? Because
maybe I've got my sort of blinkers on and it's interesting.
I think it's always interesting to keep having these discussions.
But still New Zealand is third in the third and
the Corruption Perceptions Index, and the company we're keeping is Denmark, Finland,
(11:28):
Norway and Singapore and Sweden. We often tal bang on
about we always seem to have look at the Scan
Andavian states and go, well, if we're up with them,
when then we're rocking and rolling, well we are up
with them? Or do you think this masks as Bryce's
Bryce Edwards mentioned that our points are slipping a little
bit and so it's something that we should keep an
eye on. And let's be honest, who would be comfortable with,
(11:49):
say a former prime minister who's just resigned or deputy
prime minister or Minister of something suddenly walking straight back
in the office where they've been inhabiting as a lobbyist.
Do you think that there is some argument there that
we should have stand down periods with Ben And more
broadly speaking, if you are worried about corruption, what's your
biggest worrying worry? Is it donations? Is it just the
(12:13):
way the OIA is handled, or is it foreign bribery
and influence? Because instinctively, for me, my biggest one would
be foreign influence because that's probably the one where I
don't know it'd be harder to detect. Give us a
call on eight hundred and eighty ten eighty, but also
on the on the drug and the announcement around more
drink and drugged driver is going to be tested, a
(12:33):
goal of three point three million tests a year announced
by Simeon Brown. I don't know if you can really
argue against that. I just guess the question is when
it comes to druged drivers, the screening for that is
more involved. How would you screen if someone's drugged or not?
That might invite some interesting comment. Actually, oh, eight one
hundred eighty ten eighty text nine two ninety two, and
(12:55):
let's not worry about the email. It's twenty five minutes
to four. News Talk Said B.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
For more from the weekend collective, listen live to News
Talk Said B weekends from three, or follow the podcast
on iHeartRadio
You're listening to the Weekend Collective podcast from News Talk SEDB.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
You no, yes, Welcome back to the Weekend Collective. This
is Politics Central at twenty two past three and we'll
take by the way anytime during the course of the hour.
You can text us your feedback on nine two nine
until we're taking your calls in just a moment. But first,
(00:32):
The Helen Clark Foundation is calling for tougher rules against
corruption after a report authored by Philip Yasbeck outlined the
levels of transparency in our government. The report says that
kiwis and naive and thinking New Zealand is safe from
corruption scene overseas. And to discuss the report, doctor Bryce Edwards,
he's political commentator from Victoria University, joins me. Now, Bryce,
(00:54):
good afternoon.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Hi Tim.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Have you read the report?
Speaker 3 (00:58):
I have, And you know I'm pretty intericipied this. There's
nothing part cleanly new in it. This isn't new research,
but it's bringing together a lot of the existing materials
and putting a really compelling case for why the system
isn't working very well at the moment and what we
could do to improve it and bring about more transparency,
to be specific.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
And it's about the perception of corruption, isn't it rather
than the reality.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Yeah, well, that's because it's hard to witch and measure
corruption by its very nature, corruption is you know, what
happens behind the scenes and people are trying to hide it.
So I mean, you can in some countries measure it
by how many people get convicted or charged with corruption,
but that is, you know, is kind of problematic because
most people get away with it.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
It is quite a dramatic sort of headline. But I
looked at the international sort of rankings and we're ranked
number third for sort of cleanliness out of one hundred
and eighty countries. We've got Denmark, Finland, Norway and Singapore.
Is this report and danger of over egging it?
Speaker 3 (02:02):
I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
No.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
I mean, if you look at the annual Corruption Perception
Index that you're just talking about, it's shown New Zealand slipping,
and not just in the rankings, but in our score
that we get each year. And so we're headed in
the wrong direction. And you know, this is a challenge
around the world at the moment. There's growing concerns around
the influence of wealthy interests, etc. So you know, and
(02:27):
one of the problems is that you can be complacent.
So those countries that have the good scores sometimes end
up resting on their laurels and they start believing their
own publicity that you know, nothing can be done wrong
in this country. You know, politicians are all trustworthy, but
we start to see, you know, across the board, all
(02:48):
sides of politics, there are some bending of the rules,
there are some untoward things that get done, and so yeah,
I think it's important to have a reminder from this
report that you need to have a keep a close
watch on.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
This sort of keep ahead of the game. What is
the what time period does the report cover because we've
got a obviously we have a national New Zealand first
at coalition. Does it cover any of that or is
it the last few years or the last ten or
twenty years? Does it sort of.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
It's really looking at contemporary as in the last few decades,
so it's not pointing the finger at any particular government.
It's certainly not about the current administration. It's and in
some ways the report is very moderate and it doesn't
rarely say there's any particular politicians that you know it
(03:39):
tails off or anything. It's saying, it's about the rules.
It's about the laws that it's critiquing, So I think
they've been over backwards to try not to esteem any politicians.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Is there any difference between corruption within political institutions and
people who are in political positions like ministers, et cetera
versus the public service? Is it?
Speaker 3 (04:00):
How?
Speaker 2 (04:00):
You know, how broadly does the does the idea of
political correction correction comenta.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Look, that's a great question, and scholars don't rarely succeed
it as a different type of corruption because they're all
part of public life and they all hold authority that
is mandated by the public. Essentially, regardless of whether you
are heading a government department or you're an elected member
of the government, it's you know, it's in the public
(04:27):
sphere and you're you know, if you're misusing resources, you're
misusing resources, regardless of of your position.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
The report talks about five areas of risk political lobbying,
donations and funding for elections, access to official information, foreign bribery,
and beneficial beneficial ownership of corporate entities. What's the one that, intuitively,
I for you, stands out the most or even just
based on what your your observations of the political establishments are.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Look, I've spent a lot of time over the last
couple of decades looking at donations and lobbying, and I
think donations don't give enough scrutiny in this country. But
I've become much more concerned about lobbying. I think that's
where those with what we interests, if you like what
(05:18):
the individual's businesses, or even here in go's or trade unions,
that's where the influencers. The size of money is a problem,
but it's not certainly not by comparison with other countries.
It's not that much out of control, whereas it's the
lobby and that New Zealand has actually no rules about it,
(05:39):
and so we're out of step with the rest of
the world. And that if you are working for the beehives,
you can leave your job and become a lobbyist the
next day and there's no rules about it. And in fact,
four out of the last five chiefs of staff in
the last Labor government where either lobbyists before or after
they were running the beehives. And it does produce a
(06:01):
lot of conflicts of interest, and there's no rules about that.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
I guess it doesn't sound flash on the surface, but
then again, minister's diaries are readily accessible, aren't they in
terms of who's meeting with home isn't Isn't that a
big Isn't that a big, a big deal in terms
of mitigating that stuff?
Speaker 3 (06:18):
Yeah, I think so, and it's it's one of the
best things that the last government did in this area
is start to publish the meetings that the ministers are having.
This in my view, there's all some questions about how
robust that mechanism is, but yeah, it's definitely been helpful.
But in other countries it's a lot more detailed, especially
(06:41):
when it comes to when they're meet with lobbyists. We
don't really get a lot of detail. And as we saw,
you know, a couple of months ago, with Shane Jones
being found out to have you know, dinners on the
West Coast with mining bosses. You know, that was missed
out from the ministeri or diaries. So I think we
have to be careful not to rest on our lirels
with those ministerial diaries. Either.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Do you think in particular is this do you think
the report just look, let's just keep an eye on this,
or do you think that there's I mean it does
suggest that there's been opportunities for governments to do something
legislatively with this, which is probably easier said than done,
but that hasn't been done. What do you think, what
action do you think should be taken?
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Well, there's like twenty seven big recommendations from this report,
and you know we all have our own views on
the correctness of those individual ones. I just think there
should be a debate about we need to have not
just politicians but the public looking at those things and
weighing them up, because all those recommendations have proms and
(07:41):
cons But the problem is that the politicians, I think
will want to ignore this report. I want to avoid
it because you know, politicians are like two keys. They
don't want to vote for an early Christmas.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Well because their next job could be as a lobbyist.
I guess because Christopher fin Lesson wants a stand down period,
what would you suggest, I mean a stand down period
of what a year? Six months?
Speaker 3 (08:02):
There is in different countries, but yeah, I think a
year would be the minimum that you'd want that you
shouldn't be able to go from being prime minister or
running the beehive. There's a chief of staff to then
working for lobbyists dealing with the exact same policy issues,
but for a vested interest on the other side of
the fence. So yeah, I agree with Chris from Mason
(08:24):
that's an urgent one.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Which country do you think is nailing it when it
comes to really doing a brilliant job and where we
could just go for the easy answer and say it's
the one who's number one in the corruption index for
sort of transparency and all that. But who do you
think we should take a leaf out of.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
I think Ireland's doing some really important reforms in this area,
and I think they probably lead the way in terms
of at least tightening up on lobbying and having some registers,
because I mean, if the country is different and they
have different sort of mix, whereas Ireland. Now, look it's
a similar size country to US, it has a relatively
similar sort of party system and political system. But I
(09:03):
mean you look at somewhere like the United States, and
what's quite interesting that the United States is they have
some of the tightest regulations in this regard. So I'm
not saying we should follow their lead, but it's of
assumed sometimes that the US is all unregulated and laissez fear,
but no, they actually have extreme regulations on lobbying, on
(09:25):
called money, etc.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
How come they rank so poorly though they're twenty fourth
with a score of sixty nine verses US on three
on a score of eighty five.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
I think there's different answers to that. And often what
happens is you have the perceptions of corruption first, and
then you have lots of rules that are made to
try and fix this. So I think the US has
had some big problems with this in the past, and
so they've tried to tidy it up and they're tightening
up things.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Just one last question, in the terms of perception, I
mean social media and conspiracy theories and all that sort
of stuff are certainly more prevalent. Do they play a
role at all in people's in this pecon in the
Perception Index and ratings?
Speaker 3 (10:08):
Not really No, because Transparence International puts US together each
year and they're mostly sururveying people in business, and so
it's not the general public. It's business people, and it's
overseas business people that are dealing with New Zealand, like
trading with this country and things like that, and it's
a lot of other I don't know reports and surveys
(10:32):
of our our local systems working that feeds into that
that index.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Yeah, good stuff. Hey, Bryce, I really appreciate your time
this afternoon. Enjoy the rest of the day.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Cheers.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
There we go. There's Bryce Edwards, political commentator from Victoria University.
Should I say doctor Bryce Edwards? And look, we're going
to do some talkback after this. We've got a bit
of time up as sleep, so time for you to
jump in on e one hundred and eighty ten eighty
in text on nine two nine two. Based on those
two interviews, first, let's just talk about the one we've
just had with Bryce. So the Hell and Clark Foundation
report calling for tougher rules against corruption after a report
(11:04):
claim lobbying and do nation rules needed and overhaul? Simple question,
are you actually worried about corruption in New Zealand? Because
maybe I've got my sort of blinkers on and it's interesting.
I think it's always interesting to keep having these discussions.
But still New Zealand is third in the third and
the Corruption Perceptions Index, and the company we're keeping is Denmark, Finland,
(11:28):
Norway and Singapore and Sweden. We often tal bang on
about we always seem to have look at the Scan
Andavian states and go, well, if we're up with them,
when then we're rocking and rolling, well we are up
with them? Or do you think this masks as Bryce's
Bryce Edwards mentioned that our points are slipping a little
bit and so it's something that we should keep an
eye on. And let's be honest, who would be comfortable with,
(11:49):
say a former prime minister who's just resigned or deputy
prime minister or Minister of something suddenly walking straight back
in the office where they've been inhabiting as a lobbyist.
Do you think that there is some argument there that
we should have stand down periods with Ben And more
broadly speaking, if you are worried about corruption, what's your
biggest worrying worry? Is it donations? Is it just the
(12:13):
way the OIA is handled, or is it foreign bribery
and influence? Because instinctively, for me, my biggest one would
be foreign influence because that's probably the one where I
don't know it'd be harder to detect. Give us a
call on eight hundred and eighty ten eighty, but also
on the on the drug and the announcement around more
drink and drugged driver is going to be tested, a
(12:33):
goal of three point three million tests a year announced
by Simeon Brown. I don't know if you can really
argue against that. I just guess the question is when
it comes to druged drivers, the screening for that is
more involved. How would you screen if someone's drugged or not?
That might invite some interesting comment. Actually, oh, eight one
hundred eighty ten eighty text nine two ninety two, and
(12:55):
let's not worry about the email. It's twenty five minutes
to four. News Talk Said B.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
For more from the weekend collective, listen live to News
Talk Said B weekends from three, or follow the podcast
on iHeartRadio
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