Every year, New Zealand’s headline writers get a chance to clap the country on the back.
There is nothing we love more than being “first in the world” at something – whether it be flat whites or rugby union – and Transparency International’s corruption perception index fits the bill perfectly, generally putting us equal first with other enlightened small democracies like Denmark.
Stories are trotted out about New Zealand being “the least corrupt country in the world”. But that isn’t what the index actually measures. It uses a survey of academics and business types to measure perceptions of corruption – which is a reasonable indicator of corruption, but not an actual direct measure, and one open to accusations of bias towards rich countries.
At the start of this year, New Zealand’s then justice minister Kris Faafoi was one of those quoting the nation’s high standings in the index, issuing a press release that again confused a corruption perception index with an actual corruption index. Now just 10 months later – and only three months since leaving the cabinet table – Faafoi has left parliament and started his own lobbying firm.
This is an appalling situation. A politician who was intimately involved in the conversations that shape our country now has a job trying to influence the way those conversations go, and is armed with the knowledge that only someone involved in those conversations would have – from the individual positions of other ministers to highly sensitive information from public servants.
And it speaks to our overall naivety as a country – a naivety that probably helps us on that corruption index.
I am not accusing Faafoi of corruption – there is no suggestion he is corrupt. He is known across politics as a kind and decent man for a good reason. As commerce minister he was a champion for the poor against predatory lenders. His reasons for leaving politics strike one as fundamentally decent too: the job of a rapidly promoted minister during a pandemic took him away from his young family too much.
Indeed, you can’t really blame him for opening a lobbying firm. He needs some kind of job now he’s left parliament, and this is one he will be extremely qualified for. He’s hardly the first ex-minister or ex-MP to go into some form of government relations – and don’t even get me started on the staff. People exist in the structures you create for them.
Which is where the real problem is: the structure that has allowed Faafoi to do this. The rules should not allow him to be reading cabinet papers in June and then lobbying his former colleagues on the same matters in October. Other countries – ones that aren’t naive as us – have so-called “revolving door” policies to stop this very thing, forcing elected officials to cool down for some period of months or years before engaging in lobbying.
Opinions vary on how long these things should last, but at the very least an MP should not be able to start lobbying until the end of the parliamentary term in which they were elected. That would keep Faafoi off the blocks for a bit longer than a year. It would also allow people to lose their jobs at elections and immediately find new ones as lobbyists, which would be far from ideal, but it would be a start.
Yet the structural problem exists not just in our hard and fast rules. It’s also in Wellington’s culture. People didn’t really blink when Jacinda Ardern temporarily installed a chief of staff who was on leave from his own lobbying firm early in her time in government. As with Faafoi, the man in question didn’t break any rules and is an altogether decent guy who most people in politics would happily sit down for coffee with, even if he wasn’t temporarily chief of staff. Still, he would soon go back to his day job of attempting to influence political outcomes on behalf of those who could pay him to do so, something the vast majority of New Zealanders could never afford.
Fixing the rules is relatively simple; fixing the culture far harder. New Zealand is a small country, especially the New Zealand of public and private boardrooms, which is why we have a reasonably strong and often-used conflict of interest process built into the cabinet manual.
Those who leave politics do have a right to build a new career, and use the skills politics gave them in that new vocation. But the public has every right to be appalled when the turnaround is this quick, and the service on offer is not just the skills and knowledge of a seasoned political operative, but also the connections retained from someone’s time acting as a servant of the public.
I have hope we can do this, because I don’t think those survey results are really that far out. It’s true that you can’t bribe a cop to get out of a speeding ticket in New Zealand, and that you don’t need to pay off a border guard to get your goods into the country. Our big public institutions are generally aware of these kinds of risks and do their best to mitigate them with very clear rules and norms. It’s time parliament itself did the same.
Henry Cooke is former chief political reporter for New Zealand news organisation Stuff