A very natural progression
- Grant McLachlan - Column
- 2 hours ago
- 23 min read
A real estate empire’s fundraiser, its donations, its former chief executive and a friendly columnist all point the same way. The pattern is the story.
On 15 May, the New Zealand Herald’s Society Insider column introduced the country to Lloyd Budd, National’s newly selected candidate for Whangarei. It was filed by Ricardo Simich, behind the Premium paywall, in the masthead’s lifestyle section, and it carried the warm register that section specialises in: the rugby-playing brother who captained Italy at a World Cup, the grandfather who delivered some 5,000 babies, the wife’s wellness label, and the recent family holiday at the Bayley family’s multimillion-dollar Queenstown compound.
In form, it was a candidate profile. In function, it was an endorsement notice. The headline did the work before a reader reached the first sentence: Budd “has the backing of Sir John Key and Paula Bennett.” Key is quoted calling the move into politics “a very natural progression.” Bennett’s role is described, gently, as mentorship. Strip the society-page varnish off, though, and what is being reported is remarkable — and it is all on the record.
The loop
Lloyd Budd was, until the end of last year, the chief executive of Bayleys’ Auckland business — the commercial heart of New Zealand’s largest real estate firm. He has been inside the Bayleys network for most of his working life; the same Herald profile notes that in 2005 he bought nearly half the Bayleys Northland franchise. He is not a man who happened to work in property. He is a man who part-owned, and then ran, a substantial piece of one of the country’s most powerful property businesses.
His two named political sponsors are a former Prime Minister and a former Deputy Prime Minister. That alone is unusual for a first-time electorate candidate. What makes it worth a column is who Paula Bennett is now. Since leaving Parliament in 2020, Bennett has worked for Bayleys. She joined as a strategic advisory director for the commercial and industrial division, and has since been promoted to the firm’s national director of customer engagement and advisory — the role Bayleys describes as leading its engagement with select corporate, government and large-developer clients. She and Budd were colleagues from the day she arrived.
Bennett did not stop being a National Party figure when she became a Bayleys one. In 2022, describing herself as a volunteer, she ran a fundraising drive that collected $1.8 million for National’s 2023 campaign. She was, in plain terms, National’s bagman. Now follow the money the other way. Among the larger declared donations to National’s 2023 campaign was $164,000 from Bayley Corporation, a company of which Bayleys founder John Bayley is a director. The same John Bayley personally gave $50,000 to NZ First.
None of this is exotic. It is the national pattern. RNZ’s analysis of donation returns found that since 2021, property-aligned donors have given more than $2.5 million to political parties, and 53 percent of it went to National — more than from any other industry. A Victoria University researcher quoted in the same analysis described the property sector as an area ripe for conflicts of interest, and said donors enjoy a level of ministerial access ordinary citizens can only dream of. Property wealth, more than any other kind, is created by government decisions — zoning, consents, the speed of a council planner. The industry that depends most on the state is also the industry that funds it most.
Bayleys is not an outlier in that picture. It is a particularly well-connected example of it.
So here is the documented architecture. A real estate group whose founder’s company was among National’s bigger declared donors. A firm whose national director of customer engagement was, at the same time, National’s lead campaign fundraiser. A former Auckland chief executive of that firm, now National’s candidate for Whangarei. And an endorsement, on the record, from that same fundraiser and from the former Prime Minister.
Not one of those facts is a crime. Declared donations are legal. Fundraising is legal. Mentoring a colleague is legal. Standing for Parliament is the thing we are meant to want people to do, and Lloyd Budd is entitled to seek the seat — nothing in the public record suggests he has done anything improper to win the selection.
That is precisely the point.
New Zealand recognises corruption only in its crudest form — the brown envelope, the suitcase of cash. We have no vocabulary for the structural version: the slow, lawful conversion of commercial proximity into political access. The Budd profile is that structural version, and it has been published as a lifestyle feature.
The firm gave to the party. The party’s fundraiser worked for the firm. The firm’s former chief executive is now the party’s candidate. Not one step in that sequence is against the law.
This has happened before
If the Budd selection feels familiar, it should. The property industry has run this play before — and the last time, I watched it up close.
In Groundhog Day at New Zealand’s worst intersection I set out how the upgrade of Warkworth’s Hill Street intersection — a notorious bottleneck flagged for fix after fix across forty years — was repeatedly deferred while money was steered instead into the Matakana Link Road, a four-lane arterial whose own business case forecast it would divert just four percent of Hill Street’s traffic. The link road opened access to developments carrying more than 1,200 lots. Ordinarily, when a development generates the overwhelming majority of traffic on a road, the developer builds the road. Here, the public paid roughly $63 million for it, the land included.
At the centre of that diversion was Mark Macky. Macky built and owned Bayleys in the North — the franchise network that today runs from Silverdale to the Far North, Whangarei included — and he is now the chief executive of the entire Bayleys Real Estate Group. As I reported at the time, Macky earned commission on the developments the link road opened up. He chaired the One Warkworth business association, and in that capacity steered a public meeting in defence of the four-lane road — without, as I reported at the time, declaring the conflict. The local MP, Mark Mitchell, ‘mediated’ to keep the link-road appeals out of court. Two years later, Mitchell became the minister responsible for the Serious Fraud Office — the agency that, on paper, polices exactly this kind of conduct — whose budget then stayed flat despite a pre-election promise to double it — then steered a pilot program that window dressed it. The fuller account is in my book, Unleashed.
The two stories share more than a shape; they share a cast. Lloyd Budd built his early career inside that same northern Bayleys world: he bought into the Bayleys Northland franchise in 2005, when Macky was Bayleys’ group franchise services manager, and sold in the region for years before heading offshore. Today the relationship is formalised — Budd ran Bayleys Auckland as a chief executive answering to Macky, the group chief executive — and the Whangarei seat he is contesting sits inside the Bayleys in the North territory Macky built. A property figure at the junction where public money meets private development; a National MP smoothing the path; a watchdog kept on a short leash. Hill Street was the version of the play that decided where a road went; Whangarei is the version that decides who sits in Parliament. The names recur because the pool is tiny.
The road north
The pool is tiny because the map is small. Trace one road. For three decades the property pattern of the upper North Island has followed a single piece of infrastructure as it has been pushed steadily north — the Northern Motorway — and Unleashed, the book referred to above, is in essence the anatomy of that road.
Each time the motorway advanced, the same sequence ran. When it reached Greville Road in 1994, Albany became a hive of development; as the Albany-to-Pūhoi realignment carried it on to Silverdale, the Hibiscus Coast — Orewa, Silverdale, Whangaparaoa — filled with subdivisions and lifestyle blocks. The engine was never only the road. It was the anticipation of the road. A confirmed extension generates, years before a shovel is in the ground, a wave of land banking and speculation, and a local promise that the coming bypass will turn a country town into a thriving city. In Unleashed I called it the false hope effect. Warkworth was sold precisely that dream — a population of 25,000-plus within a decade.
The councils meant to govern that growth could not keep pace with it. Rodney District Council — seated at Orewa, with a thin rural rating base, unstable geology and the highest proportion of unsealed roads in the region — became, in the account of one of its own councillors, John Watson, a place where big money changed hands in contracting and consultancy, and bigger money still was made through council decisions on the rezoning and sale of land. Watson described rigged tenders and bullied contractors. The council’s last chief executive left Rodney after taking a $42,000 payment the council conceded was not contractually required and the Auditor-General found had breached the Transitional Provisions Act, then moved to run a shire in Western Australia, where a Corruption and Crime Commission inquiry concluded he had a “disregard for the rules” and was “the very embodiment of corruption.”
Rodney District Council itself no longer exists: it was dissolved into the Auckland “Super City” in 2010 — where the corruption metastasized.
North of the old Rodney boundary lies the sharpest warning of all. In the Kaipara district, the seaside town of Mangawhai was given a wastewater scheme — EcoCare — built to service exactly the coastal growth this corridor produces. Ratepayers were first told it would cost no more than $10.8 million; by 2013 the figure had passed $60 million. An Auditor-General’s inquiry later found serious failures in the management of the project. The cost so crippled Kaipara District Council that the Government replaced its elected councillors with appointed commissioners — the longest commissioner tenure in the country’s local-government history. And when the Mangawhai ratepayers’ association established that the rates levied to cover the blowout had been collected unlawfully, Parliament’s response, in December 2013, was to pass legislation validating them retrospectively. The growth was promised, the cost was socialised, the illegality was legislated away — and the residents who fought it were, in the end, ordered to pay the council’s legal costs.
And the road is moving north again. Among the 149 projects the Government has placed on its fast-track list is an extension of the Northern Motorway to Te Hana, together with housing developments in South Warkworth and elsewhere in Rodney. The corridor’s logical terminus is Whangarei. Every component of the pattern is travelling with it: the speculative anticipation, the political positioning, and the property firm whose franchise — Bayleys in the North — already covers the ground. Unleashed was an account of what this road did to one district over thirty years. The Budd candidacy is the same account, one town further on.
The motorway is the constant. Wherever it is pushed next, the land is bought before it arrives, the promises are made before the consents, and the bill falls due long after the people who made the promises have moved on.
Who the firm stands by
The link road was a story about what the property industry does with public money. There is a second story, equally a matter of public record, about who that industry is prepared to vouch for.
Duncan Napier was a salesperson at Mackys Real Estate — the Bayleys franchise in the North that Macky owned. Before real estate, Napier had been the administration manager, and later a director, of a North Shore rest home. In 2015 the High Court found he had misappropriated more than a million dollars of that rest home’s money; Justice Woolford recorded that he had “no doubt” Napier had taken funds he was not entitled to. Napier was ordered to repay about $1.4 million, and the Court of Appeal dismissed his challenge.
In 2017 the Registrar of the Real Estate Agents Authority moved to refuse Napier a licence on the strength of those findings. The Real Estate Agents Disciplinary Tribunal overturned her and renewed it. The decisive factor, the Tribunal said, was the “detailed and comprehensive” assurances of supervision, management and mentoring offered by the agency and its parent group — Mackys Real Estate and Bayleys ([2017] NZREADT 64). The firm volunteered to supervise and mentor a man a High Court judge had found, beyond doubt, to have misappropriated more than a million dollars; on the strength of that offer, he kept his licence. The agency and its parent group also asked the Tribunal to suppress the matter entirely. They were opposed by NZME, and the Tribunal lifted the suppression ([2017] NZREADT 70).
Five years later, the rest home caught up with Napier in a criminal court. In 2022 a jury convicted him of 45 fraud charges for stealing from it, and he was jailed for four years and ten months.
An agency is entitled to give someone a second chance, and Napier had not been criminally charged when Bayleys vouched for him. But the instinct on display is worth naming. Faced with a serious, judicially recorded finding of dishonesty against one of its own people, the firm’s response was to absorb it — to supervise it in-house, to put its own and its founder’s name behind it, and to try to keep it out of the public record. That is a particular way of treating a conflict between a firm’s interests and the public’s: not as something to be disclosed and tested in the open, but as something to be managed quietly. It is worth holding that in mind when reading a candidate profile that treats a web of commercial and political relationships as nothing but good news.
Duncan Napier was the most striking case, but he was not the only one.
Bayleys is the country’s largest agency, and size alone guarantees a long tally of complaints, so no single finding should be over-read. The pattern worth noting is in the response. In 2019 the Real Estate Agents Disciplinary Tribunal upheld findings of unsatisfactory conduct against a Bayleys Remuera salesperson and against Michael “Tony” Bayley — the firm’s own group licensee and compliance manager — over the marketing of a $2.5 million Auckland house: the advertising had described it as built with H5-treated timber when the framing was untreated, and the Tribunal found that Bayley had failed to properly supervise the salesperson ([2019] NZREADT 26). Over the years other Bayleys licensees have separately been found to have forged a vendor’s signature on a sale and purchase agreement, altered a rent appraisal document, and failed to disclose that a house was contaminated with methamphetamine.
In those cases the firm’s reflex was to distance itself — terminate the agent, tell the press the conduct was unauthorised, promise to do better. That is a defensible response to a rogue employee. But set it beside the Napier file and a sharper picture forms. When the misconduct belonged to an individual and admitting it cost the firm nothing, the firm disowned it. When vouching for a man a judge had found dishonest served the firm’s commercial interest, the firm vouched — and asked for suppression.
One instinct is not the opposite of the other. They are the same instinct: protect the brand.
The revolving door as a career
Bennett’s own trajectory is the template, and it is worth saying out loud.
Deputy Prime Minister.
Then a senior role at a major real estate firm, specifically engaging government and large developers.
Then chief fundraiser for her old party. Then — in 2024 — chair of Pharmac, a Crown agency, appointed by the very government she had raised millions to elect, while keeping her Bayleys job.
And, throughout, a weekly column in the New Zealand Herald.
No New Zealand law breaks at any point on that path. There is no lobbying register that would have logged it. There is no statutory cooling-off period that would have slowed it. A senior politician can move from regulating an economy, to representing an industry within it, to raising money for the party that writes the rules, to chairing a government agency — in one unbroken arc — and the only formal record of the journey is the warmth of the press coverage.
And now the arc extends.
Bennett does not merely sit inside the property-political complex; she reproduces it.
The Herald profile describes the arrangement without embarrassment: she would teach Budd politics, he would teach her real estate. The deal worked. He is the candidate.
The trader in chief
The Budd profile treats property wealth as the backdrop to a political story. It is worth turning the camera on the central figure’s own relationship with property — because the man quoted in that profile calling the move into politics “a very natural progression” is himself a study in how the property economy and public life interleave.
John Key’s Parnell mansion was not bought so much as assembled: three separate Parnell titles, acquired and merged into a single estate. When the Keys sold the house in 2017 — a sale that took two years to settle and was finally recorded at $23.5 million — they did not sell all of it. They retained a slice, the former tennis court, and built a new house on it. Acquire, amalgamate, subdivide, develop: none of it improper, all of it simply what fluency in the property system looks like.
The sale itself, though, has not aged into a footnote. The buyer on the public record was a Chinese businessman, Lianzhong Chen, who paid $23.5 million for a property the Auckland Council had valued at $16 million — $7.5 million above council valuation, and the highest price ever paid for a house in Parnell. By the listing agent’s account, Chen never moved in; he visited once and Covid arrived. In November 2022 he resold the mansion for $16.3 million — a $7.2 million loss that, on OneRoof–Valocity data, was the single biggest residential resale loss anywhere in New Zealand over the previous five years. China specialist Professor Anne-Marie Brady FRSNZ publicly described the transactions, and the media coverage of them, as “weird.” Nick Rockel, looking at the same numbers, was more direct: the most charitable explanation he could land on for the overpayment, he wrote, was a “donation.”
On the public record, $7.5 million above council valuation flowed from a Chinese buyer into a former Prime Minister’s bank account in a transaction the market then re-priced downward by almost exactly that figure — and two reputable observers have asked the obvious question.
The Omaha sale is the one that repays a closer look. The Key family had owned their beachfront bach for around 25 years. In early 2018 they sold it, privately, for $3.1 million — below its council valuation of $3.65 million — to David Hisco, then chief executive of ANZ, together with Hisco’s wife and another ANZ executive. The price, Key said, rested on an independent valuation the family had commissioned from Bayleys. The sale settled as Key was joining the ANZ board and taking up its chairmanship, while Hisco was both a director of the bank and its chief executive. Key has said he agreed the deal before joining the board and disclosed it to the parent group’s Australian leadership.
Be precise about what that is and is not. The Financial Markets Authority did not treat the Omaha house as a related-party transaction. It is a description: a former Prime Minister, about to chair a major bank, sold his holiday home — on a Bayleys valuation, under CV — to the chief executive of that bank. The regulator’s harder finding fell elsewhere in the same orbit. The FMA determined that ANZ should have disclosed, as a related-party transaction, the sale of a separate Auckland house to Hisco’s wife, at a price well below its rateable value.
The point is not that a law was broken at Omaha. The point is the smallness of the room.
The same handful of names, the same firm’s valuation, the same unbothered proximity between those who hold public office, those who run the banks, and those who price the land — and a transaction that, examined, turns out to be entirely legal.
The name as collateral
The arc does not stop with the father. Max Key — DJ, influencer, the son whose poolside videos once toured the Parnell mansion to the internet — is now a property developer.
His company is called MTK Capital. The initials stand for Max Timothy Key. The name is not merely on the business; the name is the business.
MTK’s own developments are modest — a handful of houses in Massey, a dozen or so across suburban Auckland. What is not modest is the coverage. New-build townhouse projects of a kind that would not earn an anonymous developer a paragraph arrive in the national business press with supplied photographs and approving copy. It is the Budd dynamic one rung down: the name converts the ordinary into the newsworthy.
In 2022 it converted something harder. The Keys, through MTK Capital, went into partnership with John and Michael Chow, forming Stonewood Key Capital — a venture aiming to raise $100 million from wholesale investors to fund hundreds of new houses a year.
Before the Chows were house-builders, they were the country’s most prominent operators of strip clubs and brothels. Their road into property ran past the demolition of a 124-year-old heritage hotel they were converting into a brothel, an abandoned plan for a fifteen-storey “super-brothel” opposite SkyCity, and years of bruising liquor-licence litigation in which a commercial rival’s witnesses made allegations about conditions in their clubs — allegations the Chows denied, and which produced no finding against them. What it produced was a reputation, and reputations carry a market value.
What the Key partnership offered was not only capital. It was respectability.
Watch how the press told the story: the standard account traced the journey from “J&M Fast Foods to J and M Key” — as though the Key name were the natural, redeeming destination of the story. Men who had spent years as the subject of “turf war” headlines shook hands with a former Prime Minister and his son, and the framing reset to a feel-good business item. The Chows had not changed. The name attached to them had.
That is the asset. Not influence over a consent, not a donation, nothing illegal — simply a surname that, applied to a project or a partner, lifts it out of the category of things the press interrogates and into the category of things the press celebrates.
The Key name is not just capital. It is a reputation that can be lent — and the lending, like everything else in this story, is entirely legal.
The rules are the product
Step back from the personalities, because the personalities are not the point. The Victoria University researcher quoted earlier said the thing plainly: property wealth, more than any other kind, is created by government decisions.
A zoning line, a consent granted or withheld, the speed of a council planner — these are what turn land into money. Which means the most valuable thing a government can do for the property industry is not a favour in return for a donation. It is to remove the friction between a developer’s plan and a finished, sold house. That is not a hidden agenda. It is the stated economic programme of the current government, and it is worth reading it as the industry reads it.
Consider who now holds the building portfolio. Chris Penk entered Parliament in 2017 as the National candidate chosen to succeed John Key in his Helensville seat. He is today the Minister for Building and Construction. There is nothing improper in that — it is an ordinary political career — but it is a tidy illustration of how small the relevant world is: the man who inherited Key’s electorate now runs the rules that govern how the country builds.
And those rules are being loosened, fast. Granny flats up to 70 square metres, and sheds and garages within size limits, can now be built without a building consent. Remote inspections are being pushed as the default, a private consenting authority has been introduced to take pressure off councils, and the centrepiece is a plan to scrap “joint and several liability” and replace it with “proportionate liability” — the most significant change to the building consent system since 2004, in Penk’s own words.
Pause on that last one.
Joint and several liability is the doctrine under which a council — the last solvent party standing — can be made to pay the full cost of a defective building when the developer or builder has gone bust. It is, in large part, the doctrine through which the leaky-homes catastrophe was paid for.
Recall the Bayleys case described earlier in this column: a salesperson marketed a $2.5 million house as built with treated timber when the framing was untreated. Untreated timber, plaster cladding, a flat roof — that is the textbook leaky-home profile. The regime now being unwound is the one that, however clumsily, made someone pay when that profile turned out to be real.
Legal commentators have been blunt that the trade-off of proportionate liability is a homeowner left with a shortfall when other parties cannot pay — and that the Law Commission, back in 2014, recommended keeping joint and several liability for precisely that reason.
The building consents are the retail end. The wholesale end is the Fast-track Approvals Act, the law that lets favoured infrastructure, housing and development projects bypass the ordinary consent process. Its history is instructive.
The Auditor-General launched an inquiry into how conflicts of interest were handled in choosing which projects made the list. The Infrastructure Minister, Chris Bishop, had to stand aside from a developer’s housing project he had previously advocated for. Companies and shareholders linked to a dozen fast-track projects had given half a million dollars in political donations. Chris Bishop was the National Party Campaign Chair. And when the Government moved to write 149 named projects into the law, the Clerk advised — and a deputy Speaker ruled — that the move had the character of private legislation, the kind Parliament is not supposed to pass for the benefit of private parties; the ruling was overturned by the Speaker, Gerry Brownlee. Brownlee was previously the Minister in charge of the Christchurch rebuild — and his ministerial advisor at the time was Chris Bishop.
None of this is corruption in the brown-envelope sense, and a fair account has to concede the government’s case: New Zealand’s consent system is genuinely slow, a standalone house here genuinely costs far more to build than in Australia, and streamlining is a legitimate aim that many people outside the property industry support. But the structural reading still holds. An entire economic programme has been organised around accelerating the property pipeline — and the same patterns of proximity and donation that surround the people in this column surround the decisions themselves.
The friction being removed is precisely the friction that, as the researcher said, creates property wealth in the first place. Remove enough of it, and you have not merely helped the property industry. You have made the property industry the plan.
The watchdog is a participant
Which raises the question a reader should be asking by now: where is the scrutiny?
Be precise about what Society Insider is. It is not an investigative desk. It is a column in the lifestyle section whose stated purpose — in the Herald’s own words — is to give a glimpse into the worlds of the rich and famous. Its natural subjects are rich-listers, and in New Zealand the rich list is, above all, a property list. A column built to celebrate wealth was always going to celebrate the people who own the country’s land.
Its author is not a neutral observer of the National Party, either. Ricardo Simich is the son of Clem Simich, a former National Cabinet minister — Minister of Police and Corrections — who held the Tamaki electorate that Sir Robert Muldoon vacated in 1992. The Herald’s own profile of Ricardo records that he has ties to the National Party and once hosted a National Party event aimed at recruiting under-40s. None of that disqualifies him from writing. It does mean that a candidate profile flattering to National, written by a man with acknowledged National ties, published by the country’s largest news organisation, passed through no filter that thought any of this warranted a sentence of context.
NZME, the Herald’s owner, is not disinterested in the property economy either. It owns OneRoof, one of the country’s main property-listing portals — visible in the very footer of the Budd article. Real estate advertising is among the most important revenue relationships a New Zealand newsroom has. The institution best placed to ask hard questions about the property-political complex is commercially fused to one side of it. This is what I meant, in the companion piece, about a press that is not merely under-resourced but uninclined.
There is no conspiracy. There is an outlet whose lifestyle section sells aspiration, whose balance sheet leans on property, and whose columnist has a family history in the party being flattered.
The result is not censorship. It is something quieter: a profile that reports a tightly interlocked set of commercial and political relationships and treats every one of them as good news.
Is New Zealand worse than the 1860s?
Put bluntly: no. The 1860s answered the property question with war and raupatu. More than four million acres of Māori land were confiscated under the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863, and the Native Land Court — set up that decade, and soon nicknamed te kōti tango whenua, the land-taking court, individualised collectively held title precisely so it could be detached and sold.
The official history of the period does not euphemise who profited: debt entrapment became a standard technique of land speculators, and fraudulent dealings were common. Whatever else can be said about today’s arrangements, no one is being shot for their land.
But that is the wrong axis of comparison.
The continuity is not the violence. It is the engine. New Zealand’s wealth and power have, since the colony’s first decades, run on the speculative acquisition and trading of land, and on the conversion of that land into political influence.
The conman with a clean collar is not a modern arrival; he is a founding figure.
What has changed is not the business model but the finish on it. The 1860s speculator had, at minimum, to be candid about what he was doing. Today’s version gets a homecoming narrative, a wellness-brand spouse, a rugby pedigree and a flattering photograph.
The country is not more corrupt than it was. It is better dressed — and it now has a society column to do the dressing.
The signal
Here is the part that should genuinely worry anyone who cares about this. The Budd profile exposes nothing illegal. It advertises something legal. And the advertisement is the message.
Read it as a developer would — as anyone with a consent in a queue, a ruling pending, a procurement panel to get in front of. What the article tells that reader, in the most reassuring possible tone, is that a pathway exists; that it runs through a small number of well-connected people; that it is endorsed at the top of the National Party; and that walking it is not a scandal but an achievement — the kind that earns a fond write-up in the Herald.
I am not alleging that Sir John Key, Max Key, Paula Bennett, Lloyd Budd, Mark Macky, Chris Penk, the Chow brothers or anyone at Bayleys has committed an offence. The point is narrower, and harder to wave away. The arrangement on display is exactly the one a rational buyer of political influence would want normalised: low-cost access, a respectable on-ramp, powerful references, and a friendly press to launder the whole thing into the language of community and homecoming. You would not need to corrupt such a system. You would only need to use it.
Cross the Tasman, however, and the same set of facts would meet a very different reception.
Australia has, between its Commonwealth and state governments, half a dozen standing anti-corruption commissions — NSW ICAC, Victoria’s IBAC, Queensland’s CCC, the South Australian and Northern Territory ICACs, and the federal NACC — each with compulsory powers, public hearings, and an explicit statutory jurisdiction over exactly the kind of conduct this column has been describing: the use of public office for private gain, the failure to declare conflicts, the improper exercise of official functions. The journey from Cabinet to a major real-estate firm to the chair of a Crown agency would not be illegal in Sydney either, but it would have a docket number and a press gallery primed to read the donation returns alongside it. A society-page profile that suppressed the firm’s commercial and political ties would warrant a complaint under the MEAA Journalist Code of Ethics the same day.
Britain has built the same protection by a different route: the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments vetting ministers’ moves into industry for two years after office, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards policing the register of members’ interests, a statutory register of consultant lobbyists, and the press regulator IPSO running an editors’ code that treats undisclosed commercial ties in political reporting as a breach.
Neither system is anywhere near perfect — both have over-reached, both are under-resourced, both have waved through what they should not — but in both countries the architecture exists, and a reporter with the facts on the table knows where to send them.
As I have set out in Two bills that could end New Zealand’s dirty politics era and Marking Their Own Homework, we have built none of this. No ICAC. No ACOBA. No statutory register of lobbyists. No cooling-off period for ministers walking from Cabinet into the industries they regulated. No codified standard for political journalism worth the name. Our Serious Fraud Office has, by its own former director’s account, had to abandon parts of investigations into Auckland Transport and Rodney District Council for want of resources, and the OECD’s December 2024 Phase 4 report placed New Zealand on its monitoring list. The medal Transparency International hands us each year is, in other words, polished by absences: things we have chosen not to build.
Look at the arithmetic underneath. New Zealand’s GDP sits somewhere north of $400 billion. Around two-fifths of that flows directly through government as expenditure; a much larger share again is shaped, rather than spent, by government decisions — zoning lines, consents, procurement panels, regulatory thresholds. As I have argued in The Bullshit Economy, the state is the single largest force in this economy, and much of the country’s most valuable corporate activity is organised around its decisions rather than competing despite them.
Set that beside the cost of acquiring a piece of it.
A national election campaign in New Zealand can be run for a few million dollars; a serious tilt at an electorate seat costs roughly the price of a nice ute. A $100,000 donation — the commission on a single $20 million property sale — is, by international standards, an absurdly small instrument with which to acquire the gratitude of a future minister. If that donation tilted one decision the donor’s way to the tune of $100 million in zoning uplift, consent value or fast-tracked land — a ratio that is unremarkable in property terms — the return on investment runs at a thousand to one.
There are not many asset classes that compete with that.
The 1860s took the land by force, and at least had the candour to call it a war. We have built something more durable — a market in proximity that is legal, openly celebrated, and filed in the lifestyle pages as a feel-good story. The shop has been declared clean. The Budd profile is the window display.
