Asian Education and Development Studies

Success in combating corruption in New Zealand

Daniel Zirker,
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Daniel Zirker, (2017) "Success in combating corruption in New Zealand", Asian Education and Development Studies, Vol. 6
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 Success in combating corruption in New Zealand
Abstract

Purpose - New Zealand has had success in combating corruption. It has been ranked consistently as
one of the five least corrupt countries in the world. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on this
accomplishment.
Design/methodology/approach - An analysis of the policies, socio-cultural attributes and historical
and geographical elements that have contributed to New Zealand’s success in combating corruption.
Findings - New Zealand’s long-term geographical isolation, egalitarian socio-economic and cultural
traditions, its close legal and cultural affinity with Britain, and its unique regulatory civil service
largely explain its success in combating corruption. Nevertheless, global influences, the absence of a
single anti-corruption agency, and changing values may be eroding New Zealand’s record of success.
Originality/value - This paper will be useful to policy-makers and those concerned with New
Zealand’s recent decline in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.
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Keywords - New Zealand, combating corruption, Corruption Perceptions Index, egalitarianism,

income inequality
Paper type - Research paper

Introduction
New Zealand’s success in combating corruption is reflected in its superior performance on

Transparency International’s (TI) Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) from 1995-2015. Civil service

reforms began in 1912 and created a strict protocol and a bureaucratic culture that precluded corrupt

practices and emphasised equality, fairness and fair dealing as desirable social tenets (Lipson, 1948,

2011; Fischer, 2012). However, New Zealand is unique because it does not have a single anti-

corruption agency (ACA) but relies instead on law enforcement agencies like the Serious Fraud

Office (SFO) and the New Zealand Police, with its Independent Police Conduct Authority, to combat

bribery and corruption (TI New Zealand, 2015, pp. 172-174).

It is surprising that New Zealand is the penultimate developed country to ratify the United

Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) in December 2015 (as Japan has not done so yet)

and to enact the anti-money laundering legislation required by the UNCAC. However, by December

2016, New Zealand has not banned facilitation payments in overseas contracts (although the paying

of bribes as part of foreign contracts is prohibited), and the Government was involved in a scandal

with a private Saudi businessman who received NZ$11 million in cash, sheep and farming equipment,
 ostensibly to facilitate a trade agreement with Saudi Arabia (Heron, 2016). New Zealand has also not

prohibited, and may have encouraged, foreign parties to establish anonymous tax-free trust funds in

the country, leading to references that it is a “tax haven” when the “Panama Papers” scandal broke in

2016 (e.g., Sachdeva, 2016).

Review of literature

The pioneering study by Lipson (1948, 2011) focused on the importance of economic and social

equality in New Zealand during the first half of the 20th Century, the citizens’ sense that they “led

the world” in their new society (p. 459), and that the “eyes of the world were upon them.”

Transparency was common and attenuated until 1983 by the Official Secrets Act. According to
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Lipson, the government initiated important administrative measures in 1912 to create a professional

and transparent public service. Siegfried’s 1914 work, based on his pre-World War I travels in New

Zealand, represented a detailed interpretation of its Westminster government and administrative

culture. Webb’s 1940 book was a broad philosophical analysis of the tension between equality,

mediocrity and creativity born of geographical isolation, the largely pastoral agricultural economy,

and the gradual emergence of a welfare and industrializing state.

The works of Gregory (1984, 1995, 1999, 2002, 2003, 2006), Gregory, Zirker and

Scrimgeour (2012), and Gregory and Zirker (2013) have re-examined the breakdown of

egalitarianism during the 1980s and 1990s and the transformation in the public service’s emphasis

on “responsibility” to “accountability” (Gregory, 1995). However, the two major studies on the

Ombudsman by Hill (1976) and Gilling (1998) did not analyse its indirect role in combating

corruption. Fischer (2012) argued that the driving national motives of United States and New

Zealand culture differ fundamentally, evincing freedom and fairness respectively, and pointed to

New Zealand’s unique egalitarian heritage, a condition that appears to be rapidly fading.

Newbold’s work (2000) clarified some of the problems in defining corruption in a New Zealand

context. An increasingly growing field of specialists, including Macaulay and Gregory (2016), are
 tackling this difficult problem in the complex context of growing global trade with arguably more

corrupt trading nations, while examining the nature of the inevitable scandals that result. TI New

Zealand has actively reported on New Zealand’s changing circumstances, and published its national

integrity project, Integrity Plus, in 2013, and Exporting Corruption (Heimann, Foldes and Coles,

2015).

Policy context of fading egalitarianism

New Zealand’s geography and cultural pluralism represent a confusing and unique blend of

compact size, distance, space, unity, and a confusing array of diversity and barriers that have

traditionally required contact among its various settlers. Its small population of 4,595,700 persons
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and land area of 263,310 sq. km in 2015 (World Bank, 2016a, 2016b) enable the communities to

develop and connect frequently for material and educational support and enhance their

interdependence. Its pastoral-based agrarian and egalitarian social and economic structures have

constrained the lure of individual advantage, which was further reinforced by state regulations after

1935. Pragmatism and practicality are also important: the “Number 8 Wire syndrome,” cobbling

together make-do solutions because parts or products simply could not be purchased, became

normal and expected behaviour in New Zealand. In this context, a small, largely peaceful,

egalitarian and relatively homogeneous, if traditionally bi-cultural, population with a practical bent

could have been expected to have reached some agreement as to what constituted fair public policy

(Fischer, 2012).

Nevertheless, geographical and cultural barriers, profound even in the context of the limited

space afforded by two remote islands, had created a mosaic of solitudes, urban to rural, island to

island, culture to culture, such that New Zealanders’ uniformly low perceptions of corruption is

remarkable. It points to a wholly unexpected, pervasive and salutary cultural policy context, one

that apparently stemmed from a blend of mythologized English political heritage, Westminster

tradition and colonial isolation, tempered with a slowly evolving inclusiveness, the latter likely a
 product of the very gradual acceptance of Māori cultural markers, growing competition in the

global marketplace, and a sense of national pride, if not nationalism per se. However, the very

unfair treatment of the Māori should be noted, especially during the 19th Century, when illegal and

clearly corrupt land grabs by European settlers triggered the land wars of the 1860s. These

developments ultimately involved the government in corruption, and have had a lasting negative

influence on the political system as well, as the galvanic and unexpected reaction to the Labour

Government’s Foreshore and Seabed Act of November 2004 graphically demonstrated.

Politics in New Zealand, as in most places, is primarily local. Economic and physical

survival, at least during the early colonial years, meant that politics was also largely rural. Internal
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geographical barriers demanded the development of technical expertise, creating problems around

transportation and communication, and placing “a premium on the technical ability of its

engineers” (Lipson, 1948, 2011, p. 396). Consequently, many public servants held advanced

educational degrees. New Zealand was largely a frontier, and while there were extensive

landholdings, and growing fortunes, European and Māori egalitarian rural values, including hard

work, strong families, Calvinist, Roman Catholic, and Māori religiosity tended to trump

individualism and personal achievement as respectable goals well into the 20th Century.

The danger in communitarian settings, particularly in frontiers with low population densities,

is the development of “us” and “them” mentalities, the cultural apartheid that may ultimately lead

to mutual perceptions of mistrust and, ultimately, corrupt practices. This pattern of mistrust, for

whatever reasons, did not fully develop in New Zealand. The policy context that developed in New

Zealand prior to the 1980s, rather, was primarily one that stressed fairness (Fischer, 2012), and

discouraging “over-achievers,” the so-called “tall poppy syndrome,” and including making

embarrassing exceptions of those who stepped outside the strict legal and cultural norms to gain a

material edge over their peers. Following Malinowski (1944) who argued that culture ultimately

becomes a practical and functional support of society, New Zealand’s policy context was reinforced
 by those egalitarian and collectivist aspects of culture that strengthened the values of fairness and

honesty, the natural antitheses of corruption.

New Zealand’s success in combating corruption

New Zealand’s success in combating corruption can be attributed to these factors: the significant

residue of an egalitarian culture that included a ready popular acceptance of regulation and policing

in the interest of fairness; a highly professional public bureaucracy with an ethos built around

secure careers and communitarian expectations, even after neo-liberal reforms introduced

potentially damaging changes; and a British-origin legal and political structure that has maintained

strict, if narrow, definitions and protocols regarding corrupt practices, engaged in social
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engineering where necessary to provide order in times of potential chaos, and enacted a criminal

code buttressed periodically by strong anti-corruption legislation.

Egalitarianism and regulation

The residue of egalitarian culture before the neo-liberal reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s

provided a broad context for New Zealand’s effective resistance to, and combating of, corruption

from the 1990s onwards. An emphasis on freedom as an independent virtue, something that has

characterised other systems afflicted by much higher levels of corruption, was noticeably absent in

New Zealand’s egalitarian past (Fischer, 2012). Regulation, rather, and limitations on individual

gain in the interests of fairness, which has puzzled narrow advocates of unrestricted individual

profit, remained cultural norms in New Zealand. During the Great Depression, New Zealand’s

egalitarian penchant for regulation was commonly mistaken for authoritarianism by more

“freedom-oriented” cultures, as reported in the New York Times in 1932:

The nooks and corners that [New Zealand] has explored in its Fascist rule may
be seen from the fact that it has forbidden the building of any more movie
theatres without permission, on the ground that there are already more than
enough, has refused to issue any more leases to coal operators to mine on State
lands because of over-production of coal, and has even determined to register
and control all persons who own ten hens or more and sell eggs…. Slowly this
democracy is turning into a Fascist State (New York Times, 1932, p. E4).
 Fairness and regulation to ensure fairness were cultural concerns (Fischer, 2012; Lipson,

1948, 2011), perhaps leitmotifs of New Zealand’s mild nationalism, such as it existed. However,

corruption was not absent because agrarian egalitarianism was offset by some aspects of urban

commerce, and with it evidence of fraud and corruption, and while small-scale mining tended to fit

the egalitarian mode, mines could occasionally become conglomerates, engaged in the global

practices of the day. Economic inequality was part of the growing global capitalist economies, and

New Zealand could not remain wholly exempt.

Professional public bureaucracy

An ethos of fairness and honesty, derived from the colony’s and Dominion’s reliance upon the
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British foreign service, was apparently largely adopted by New Zealand. The Department of Public

Works, for example, established in 1876 and later renamed the Ministry of Works, had high ethical

standards from its inception, and these were said to have been common in the wider state sector at

the time. By 1912, and the fall of the Liberal Government after 21 years in office, the new Reform

Government under William Massey actively ended the “spoils system” that had existed in some

areas of the New Zealand public service (Lipson, 1948, 2011, p. 398). A royal commission that

was appointed at the end of the Liberal Government’s tenure, the Hunt Commission, investigated

the “favouritism” that had grown up over the previous decades and, despite its rush for time,

reportedly produced a “good report.” According to Lipson (1948, 2011, p. 399):

Its principal recommendations can be reduced to four heads: Block all “back doors” of entrance
to the public service. Promote from within the service. Appoint and promote on the basis of
merit. Provide for free transfers of officers between departments. With an enlightened and
modern point of view, it defined the objects of personnel administration to include “entry by
competitive examination, probation before final admission, promotion by merit, and pensions
on retirement”.

The Hunt Commission’s report, submitted after the Liberal Government had fallen, led Massey,

who for years had argued that the Liberals had interfered in civil service appointments, almost

immediately to propose a Public Service Bill that was replete with reforms, but that, curiously,

omitted a key recommendation of the Hunt Commission: instead of a three-member, co-equal

 Board of Management to oversee the public service, a single Public Service Commissioner,

responsible to the Cabinet, directed the new civil service.

The introduction for the first time in a British dominion of the Scandinavian institution of the

Ombudsman in 1962 (Hill, 1976; Gilling, 1998), and the provision of official information to the

public in the early 1980s (Gregory, 1984), reinforced expectations of egalitarian fair dealing.

Although always thoroughly controlled, careers in public service now provided secure and

generously paid employment as long as the public servants remained totally honest, and even if

they were only moderately competent. Such careers were well remunerated and competitive with

those in the private sector (Roberts, 1978).

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British legal, bureaucratic, and political heritage

The Secret Commissions Act of 1910, the Public Service Act of 1912 and New Zealand’s

Westminster parliamentary system (except that it was unicameral after 1950, and the election cycle

was three rather than five-years), were conspicuously patterned after British law. For historical

reasons, New Zealand, unlike Australia and Canada, clung to its British legal and bureaucratic

heritage, retaining the dependent aspect of its Dominion status until 1947, well after the other

dominions had assumed nearly full independence under the Statute of Westminster. While the

Labour government of 1935 further expanded New Zealand’s welfare state through the Social

Security Act of 1938, the structure of its laws remained British. The foci of the New Zealand

expansion, universal free education and the creation of a system of progressive taxation, along with

an increasingly merit-based civil service and high levels of gender equality, have been identified

elsewhere as key factors in low levels of corruption, for example in European countries (Charron,

Lapuente and Rothstein, 2013). Again, size, and the omnipresent British administrative and legal

practices and ethos, may have explained as much of the corruption-free environment as did the

relative absence of commercial competition in the capital city, Wellington. Furthermore, public

employment in New Zealand never developed an institutionalized administrative elite as it did in

 Britain. There was little if any scope or even temptation for corruption in procurement, for

example, one of its most commonplace origins elsewhere, if only because of the healthy

employment structure of the civil service prior to the 1980s (Roberts, 1987). The SFO, established

in 1990, became very instrumental in combating procurement fraud when it began to arise after the

neo-liberalisation of government in the late 1980s.

The drastic redirection and expansion of the public service to meet the needs of the

government’s economic programme during World War II was described as “an elaborate piece of

social engineering” as “Ministers were attempting to construct a wartime economy that would treat

all sections as fairly as possible” (Bassett and King, 2000, p. 201). Another commentator
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remembered New Zealand then as “a society of fair shares” (Roberts, 1978, p. 73). This strong

normative ethos reinforced during the years of World War II by a serendipitous convergence into

top leadership positions in the New Zealand public service of a group of several highly capable

men, all able practitioners of “the profession of statecraft” (Martin, 1988), in effect eventually

replicated to some extent the British pattern of bureaucratic “mandarins.” An observer has

described 1940 to 1951 as “the age of mandarins” (Martin, 2010), but by most accounts these elite

public servants evinced an ethos of honesty, impartiality in public office, and through their own

behaviour, set standards that became deeply embedded in the culture of New Zealand’s public

service (Gregory, 1999).

The Crimes Act 1961 represented a major updating and revision of New Zealand law, based

as it was on British law and, as regards corrupt practices, on New Zealand’s Secret Commissions

Act of 1910. Part 6 of the 1961 Crimes Act, which involved “Crimes affecting the administration of

law and justice – Bribery and Corruption,” provides for lengthy prison sentences for corruption and

bribery (the two tend to be conflated in the Act, as in Britain) by judicial officers, ministers of the

crown, Members of Parliament, law enforcement officers, and public officials of any sort. The

Crimes Act 1961 was updated in 1993 to stipulate punishment for misuse of official information,
 and use or disclosure of personal information for personal gain; and again in 2001, to criminalize

anyone seeking a bribe from or bribes a foreign official, including bribery outside of New Zealand

involving a foreign official. The Secret Commissions Act, which is sometimes thought to include

“private sector” corruption, defines the secret acceptance of “valuable considerations”

(commissions) by agents unknown to their principals, including such commissions received in the

procuring of contracts. New Zealanders conducting business overseas are now covered by Britain’s

Bribery Act, which came into force in 2011, and is part of an international anti-corruption campaign

by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asia Development Bank, and the

Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). As New Zealand companies
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have close ties with businesses in countries where corruption levels are apparently high, and even

though there are the penalties under the Secret Commissions Act, New Zealand has recently enacted

a key piece of legislation to bring it in line with current standards.

It is important to note that by 2015, New Zealand had apparently begun a slide in its self-

perception as a corruption-free country. Even before the world financial crisis of 2008, financial

fraud had become a common occurrence in New Zealand. A former head of New Zealand’s SFO

criticized corporate directors for doing so little about “financial crime and corruption” in their

organisations following a number of major convictions of finance company executives for Ponzi-

schemes linked to the international financial crisis of the late 2000s, and involving the loss to

private investors of hundreds of millions of dollars. He pointed to the growing gap between the rich

and poor, and the way in which global patterns were now affecting domestic culture (Birchfield,

2012). He noted the results of a survey in which only 37 per cent of the respondents believed that

the country was “largely free” of serious fraud and corruption. Before the October 1987 stock

market crash, Jesson (1999, p. 126) observed that illegal and dodgy commercial practices had

become very common because business ethical standards collapsed during the share market boom

as well as the notion that such standards should exist.

 New Zealand was well behind the curve in its need to update its anti-corruption legislation as

it only ratified the UNCAC in December 2015 and did not have an organized crime act. In 2014,

Justice Minister Judith Collins argued that an organized crime bill had to be passed before ratifying

the UNCAC. Moreover, there were growing rumblings at the time that legislation was needed to

restrict and regulate the formation and taxation of foreign-owned trust funds, which appeared to

render New Zealand vulnerable to charges that it was setting itself up as a “tax haven.”

In November 2015, an omnibus organized crime bill was finally assented that amended or

updated at least 15 different areas involving corrupt practices (Macaulay and Gregory, 2016). One

part was now entitled the “Anti-Money Laundering and Counter Financing of Terrorism
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Amendment Act 2015,” ostensibly amending the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2009, and closely

regulating a range of “suspicious” financial transactions by establishing a reporting and, ultimately,

a prosecution protocol. Other parts dealt with such diverse matters as misuse of drugs, secret

commissions, criminal proceeds, body samples in criminal investigations, mutual assistance in

criminal matters and amendments to the crimes acts. Within two months New Zealand ratified the

UNCAC, and is now capable of becoming fully compliant with global anti-corruption measures.

There are two glaring omissions, however, one involving banking and trust fund practices, as will

be discussed briefly below involving the Panama Papers scandal. The second omission, which

explains why New Zealand delayed the UNCAC’s ratification, is the government’s continuing

failure to subject domestic “politically-exposed persons” (PEPs) to financial scrutiny, contrary to

Article 52 of the UNCAC.

The SFO has largely been effective, particularly after the spate of financial institutional

crashes and fraud cases after the 2008 global financial crisis. However, it had some difficulty in

curbing corruption as its director, Adam Feeley, was undermined on charges of petty misuse of state

resources just as he was attempting to expand the SFO’s role to include a greater policing function

in corruption (Vaughan, 2012).

 Lessons and best practices for policy makers

Best practices should stress the following four strategies: first, creation of an independent and well-

provisioned civil service endowed with rewarding career tracks and a firm ethos of honesty and

equality upon which their permanent jobs depend. Second, the establishment of a clear, flexible and

equitable legal structure (as formalized in New Zealand in 1912) that can easily be interpreted and

applied in the interests of equal and fair access to government services, irrespective of social and

economic standing. The third element is perhaps out-of-reach of most policy makers, but

nonetheless vital: some degree of economic equality as a palliative in a global environment that

increasingly stresses greed and special access. Finally, a single ACA with the authority to rely on
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the resources of the country’s other policing agencies does not apply to New Zealand, and now, as

global pressures build, its absence is regarded as a serious national shortcoming. While the single

agency model has been effectively employed by Hong Kong and Singapore as a key response to the

sophistication and determination of organized crime in today’s global environment, New Zealand

has found its archaic, if somewhat quaint, response to rising global corruption to be increasingly

inadequate, as its recent drop in the CPI and its travails with international corruption scandals have

demonstrated. The other important issue is whether the current reliance on the SFO as the de facto

ACA should be continued or replaced by a new ACA. As the intelligence scandal of 2014, 1 and

Adam Feeley’s unceremonious undermining as Director of the SFO, helped along apparently for

political reasons, 2 both indicated political pressures have exercised an undue influence on the

identification and prosecution of serious charges of corruption. Within a year, a series of corruption

scandals, including the Saudi sheep “trade facilitation” scandal, and the “Panama Papers” scandal,

emerged.

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that a cluster of corruption scandals has overtaken New

Zealand over the past five years, and that the advice regarding “best practices” that emerges from

this evolving case study would probably best be focused upon what not to do in this 21st Century
 neo-liberal globalized environment. Highest on a list of this sort would be those actions that create

the perceptions of corruption, given the central prominence of the CPI. As the “Panama Papers”

scandal revealed in 2016, “loose” banking and trust fund practices should be avoided. The scandal

of 2016 revealed two glaring weaknesses in New Zealand’s efforts to combat corruption: first, New

Zealand’s foreign-owned trusts have been virtually unregulated (and, significantly, not taxed) under

New Zealand law, and have been provided with a good deal of banking secrecy (Sachdeva, 2016).

Second, this trust legislation had generated high-level concern years before the 2016 scandal. In

2014, for example, the Prime Minister’s personal attorney, Ken Whitney, was reported to have

successfully “lobbied” Revenue Minister Todd McClay “against a clampdown on the foreign trust
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industry despite concerns raised by the IRD [New Zealand’s Inland Revenue Department] about

damage to New Zealand’s international reputation” (Watkins, 2016a).

In a related matter, relatively uncontrolled lobbying in Parliament, what Johnston (2005, pp.

60 ff.) has included in the “Influence Markets” category of corrupt practices globally, has been

reported in the news media as a growing problem in New Zealand. Efforts to regulate lobbying have

encountered significant resistance (Hartevelt, 2012) and prompted the late Jeremy Pope, a founder

of TI, to warn that the lack of transparency in lobbying in New Zealand was “an accident waiting to

happen” because “no one knows how many [lobbyists] there are and who they’re lobbying for and

who they’re lobbying to” (quoted in Dudding, 2012). Elite lobbyists in New Zealand may represent

a direct threat to the country’s non-corrupt reputation, at least if the provisional outcome of the

“Panama Papers” scandal, which continues to generate fallout, is any indication (Stuff, 2016a;

2016b; Howard, 2016; Lipton and Creswell, 2016; Sachdeva, 2016; Watkins, 2016a; 2016b).

Conclusion

The growth of income inequality, a global pattern that has affected New Zealand dramatically since

its neo-liberalization in the late 1980s and early 1990s, has been reflected repeatedly in news

reports. The wealth gap has increased in New Zealand more than in any other OECD country over
 the past thirty years, and this must be seen as in addition to a widening gap in all other OECD

countries (Johnston, 2011; Campbell, 2011; Cooke, 2012), with as many as 25 per cent of New

Zealand’s children living below the poverty line in 2016 (UNICEF, 2016). While the wealthiest one

per cent of the population controlled more than three times “the combined cash and assets of the

poorest 50 per cent” by 2011 (Nichols, 2011), the most recent national data, it is expected that, with

declining capacity of the system to meet popular expectations, there will be more crime, including

corruption (Francis, 2012), in the years to come.

Apparent low levels of corruption, as indicated by the country’s consistently high ranking on

the CPI, obviously do not tell the whole story, however. New Zealand’s mid-range size and
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geographical location, its egalitarian and welfare state traditions, the strong constraints—legal,

bureaucratic and normative—exercised over official behaviour, and its professional, merit-based

and impartial system of Westminster-style public administration, along with a wise cluster of

decisions made over a century ago that created a healthy and largely bribe-resistant bureaucracy

was bolstered by the creation of a welfare state in the 1930s and a strong and unambiguous criminal

code in 1961, all of these set the stage for New Zealand’s astounding and prolonged success in

combating corruption, and in scoring well on the CPI from 1995 onwards. While the country has

been harshly criticised in the media following the “Panama Papers” scandal for not responding

quickly enough to global corruption challenges (e.g., Reuters, 2016), one must remember that its

deliberate and slow response rate, also implicit to its political structure, has been a factor in its

resistance to corruption. This “virtue,” however, may become a fault as global change accelerates.

As Webb commented in 1948, “the difficulty in New Zealand is not that governments change too

often but that they do not change often enough. The danger is not lack of continuity but lethargy”

(p. 154).

Global change and growing inequality quickly overtook New Zealand’s culture and public

services during the latter half of the 20th Century. At the dawn of the 21st Century, New Zealand’s
 anti-corruption legislation and anti-corruption policies have become archaic, and although the

country has finally begun to emphasise fairness in its treatment of its Māori population, its lobbying

restrictions are minimal, its foreign trust fund provisions, dangerously unsupervised, and its

provisions for foreign business transactions and anti-money laundering practices are weak at best.

Following the passage of anti-organized crime legislation in 2015, the ratification (finally) of the

UNCAC in December 2015, and, hopefully, a government response to the scandals emanating from

the “Panama Papers” of 2016, most of the omissions, except for the divided responsibilities for the

domestic policing of corruption, have been, or likely will be, addressed. A final question remains,

however. Can New Zealand regain its unique moral high ground in an increasingly corrupt global
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environment?

_____________________________________________________________

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Notes

1
The National Government apparently undermined the candidacy of Phil Goff, head of the Labour Party, before the
2014 election, contributing to his narrow defeat (Davison and Bennett, 2014). By pressurising the Security Intelligence
Service to back a fabricated story that made Goff look incompetent, the agency engaged in what appears to have been
election tampering, a category of corruption.
2
Feeley celebrated the successful prosecution of a fraud case with his staff by opening bottles of expensive champagne
that the prosecuted company had kept in their suite. Judith Collins, Justice Minister at the time, used this to launch a
full attack on Feeley, who had successfully prosecuted a number of high-level fraud cases and was beginning to close in
on several serious corruption scandals. Collins’ response was widely seen as an “over reaction”, but it resulted in
ending Feeley’s government service (Davison, 2015).