Last year a group of VTNZ staff were fired after being caught taking bribes to falsify driving test results. This isn't the first time this has happened, and it suggests there's a systematic problem (and there's a big government report on that). But one of the issues is that our anti-corruption laws no longer match the shape of our public service.
In the 2019 case, corrupt VTNZ staff were prosecuted for obtaining by deception, essentially for misleading NZTA about whether people had passed the test. Which got the job done - they went to jail - but the actual offence here is bribery, corruptly using an official position to extort a personal benefit. The two offences have a similar penalty (at least if the amount of money involved is large enough), but very different elements. And one actually recognises what happened and goes on corruption statistics, and one does not.
So why weren't previous offenders prosecuted for bribery? Because they couldn't be. Aotearoa's anti-bribery law applies only to "officials", defined as:
any person in the service of the Sovereign in right of New Zealand [sic](whether that service is honorary or not, and whether it is within or outside New Zealand), or any member or employee of any local authority or public body, or any person employed in the education service within the meaning of section 10(7) of the Education and Training Act 2020.And despite the name, VTNZ is not a public body, and its employees are not public or state servants. They used to be, but Jenny Shipley privatised them in 1999. They're just an ordinary company, providing a service to the government under contract. "Management by contract" was meant to give greater accountability and transparency. But it turns out that when push comes to shove, it means less of both.
Such relations have become pervasive throughout the New Zealand state. Contractors perform all sorts of private functions. But our anti-bribery law was written in 1961, and is still framed in terms of a monolithic state with a clear distinction between public servants and others. It desperately needs to be changed, to cover anyone performing a public function on behalf of the state. That way, when they take bribes, we can at least call the crime by its name, and recognise that we have a corruption problem, rather than pretending that that's something which only happens elsewhere.
