Unfinished business on corruption and transparency

Over the weekend the Helen Clark Foundation released Shining a Light: Improving transparency in New Zealand's political and governance systems, a report on reducing corruption in Aotearoa. It makes the point that while we have a relatively corruption-free culture, and regularly top the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index, our lack of formal institutional protections gives us a false sense of security, and we are in fact highly vulnerable - a fact that National's corrupt Muldoonist fast-track legislation is ramming home to us. It makes a number of recommendations around lobbying, political donations, the OIA, and anti-corruption laws to strengthen our defences.

One thing which stands out from these recommendations is how many of them have been made before, and simply ignored by successive governments. So the report endorses Health Coalition Aotearoa's recommendations on regulating lobbying, the Independent Electoral Review's recommendations on political party finance (both of which echoed earlier work), Transparency International's recommendations on transparency of online political campaigning and foreign influence, the Ombudsman's recommendations on criminal penalties for the OIA, and (the majority of) the Law Commission's 2012 recommendations on reforming the Official Information Act. Putting it all in one place makes it clear that there is a huge amount of unfinished business around transparency and integrity in Aotearoa, which our political class has simply refused to implement - in some cases for over a decade. And you could draw some very unflattering conclusions about their integrity and their incentives for refusing the longer they do so.

There's also some new recommendations around the OIA which would be an improvement. These are focused on reducing interference by Ministers, and include removing existing transfer and consultation provisions which are abused to enable ministers to stick their oar in, creating statutory independence for OIA decision-makers, creating an offence of attempting to improperly influence an OIA decision (separate from the proposed offences for destroying or concealing information), and making agency chief executives liable for OIA abuses in the same way that they are for failings under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (so, a duty of transparency, similar to the primary dury of care, and an offence of failing to comply with it). All of which sounds like a good idea, and a way of incentivising public servants to resist ministerial fuckery.

The current government being institutionally corrupt, I don't expect them to pay any attention to this report. So the pressure needs to go on the opposition parties to commit to implementing it in its entirety.