“New Zealand’s response to increasing corruption pressures over several years has been lacklustre and complacent,” she said.
She told the Herald concerns about New Zealand – and its declining score – were a worry and international reviews largely focused on accountability and transparency measures, or a lack thereof.
“It’s not so much individual corruption crimes, but it’s the transparency of government,” she said.
“They were saying some good things about New Zealand in terms of well-functioning accountability bodies and quite a good civil society, but a lack of transparency about lobbying, a revolving door between government and lobbyists, use of urgency, issues of party financing, and limitations on the scope of the Official Information Act.”
In February last year, Speaker Gerry Brownlee cited privacy concerns when he ended the practice of making public which lobbyists were allocated Parliamentary swipe-cards.
During each term of government, several ministers have moved to their next job as lobbyists, with the most recent examples being Kiri Allen and Stuart Nash.
Haggie said the governments’ slow-walking of long-discussed transparency measures, like a register of beneficial ownership which would unmask who really stood behind companies and trusts, was also a concern.
Tinz said New Zealand was seeing – in the courts and elsewhere – corruption in public procurement and contracting, immigration cases including migrant exploitation, and financial institutions were not adequately identifying risks around transacting with politically exposed persons.
In 2016, the Serious Fraud Office secured its largest bribery conviction - over $1m paid by a roading contractor to various council staff – and a trickle of similar cases, largely involving local-body procurement, have followed since.
The increased use of urgency in Parliament also came in for criticism in Tinz reports: “Where legislation is passed under urgency or where it is poorly considered, this can undermine both public participation and judicial oversight.”
Tinz chairwoman Anne Tolley said in a statement accompanying the release of New Zealand’s worst ranking: “We need a zeitgeist shift in thinking about anti-corruption in New Zealand towards positive prevention.”
The lack of a single agency tasked with and empowered to tackle corruption, a theme of a recent review into New Zealand’s compliance with anti-bribery conventions, was also flagged by Tinz as a point of concern and where improvements might be made.
In the Pacific both New Zealand (fourth) and the Solomon Islands (76th) were the only countries to drop ranks, with Fiji (50th), Vanuatu (57th), Papua New Guinea (127th) and Australia (10th) improving.
The United States dropped three places to 28th.
The Corruption Perception Index is a composite ranking drawn from 13 international surveys of expert, not public, opinion, which Transparency International said it analysed in a peer-reviewed process to ensure results were comparable both between countries and over time.
Matt Nippert is an Auckland-based investigations reporter covering white-collar and transnational crimes and the intersection of politics and business. He has won more than a dozen awards for his journalism – including twice being named Reporter of the Year – and joined the Herald in 2014 after having spent the decade prior reporting from business newspapers and national magazines.
