An independent anti-corruption commission: who keeps blocking it?
- Grant McLachlan
- Jun 13
- 11 min read
Four parties have demanded one for three decades. Journalists and watchdogs back them. So why does an anti-corruption commission never survive a coalition negotiation?
When New Zealand First was founded in 1993, the thirteenth of its fifteen founding principles declared that -
“An independent anti-corruption commission will be established to enable New Zealanders to have confidence that their institutions are working properly.”
It's been on their website since it's foundation. Here's a screenshot:
Thirty-three years and four stints in government later, the commission does not exist.
Nor is New Zealand First alone.
Sir Pita Sharples proposed a corruption commission in 2011 with the power to absorb the Independent Police Conduct Authority, the Ombudsman, and the Auditor-General — a proposal I wrote about in Stuff in 2013.
Sharples was a government minister when he developed that policy. The Maori Party was a coalition support partner to the centre-right National Party between 2008 and 2017. Yet, no anti-corruption commission eventuated.
To provide some perspective, the material that formed the basis for Nicky Hager's 2014 book Dirty Politics occurred between 2008 to 2014.
The Opportunities Party called for an Australian-style commission in the wake of the Stuart Nash affair in 2023.
The Greens have backed independent investigation of corporate capture of the Beehive’s lawmaking.
Outside Parliament, the case has been made:
Transparency International New Zealand, which asks openly whether the country needs a national anti-corruption agency;
Dr Bryce Edwards, who made the case for an independent commission after the Nash scandal; and
New Zealand Herald’s Matt Nippert, who has spent a decade documenting fraud and corruption and called the latest official stocktake “a red-letter day for white-collar-crime watchers”.
The demand is old, broad, and cross-partisan.
Which leaves the real question: if the minor parties want it, the watchdogs want it, and the journalists want it, who keeps blocking it — and why does it vanish every time a government is formed?
Contents
Thirty-three years on the record
The paper trail is unambiguous.
New Zealand First’s commitment is not a remit or a press release — it is a founding principle, adopted in 1993 and republished in the party’s constitution ever since.
Sharples’ 2013 proposal came from a sitting minister in a National-led government, and contemplated a body that could “act independently and access information that the media could only obtain through leaks.”
The Opportunities Party’s 2023 call invoked the Australian model directly, arguing that political donations and corporate lobbying were “murky and poorly regulated”.
And the Greens, confronted with evidence of lobbyists rewriting legislation in backroom meetings, said the facts “inevitably lead to very serious claims of corruption” and demanded independent investigation.
Every one of those parties has, at some point, held the balance of power:
New Zealand First has formed governments with both National and Labour.
The Maori Party sustained the Key government for three terms.
The Greens have signed confidence-and-supply and cooperation agreements.
Yet no coalition document has ever delivered the commission, and the 2023 coalition agreements contained no commitment to one.
The pattern is consistent: the demand survives opposition and dies in negotiation.
That tells us something about where the resistance sits — with the two parties that have led every government since 1935, and with the support parties that keep declining to make integrity a bottom line.
The promise that did not survive government
National has come closest to admitting the problem.
In September 2020, then-Leader of the Opposition Judith Collins pledged that a National government would double the Serious Fraud Office’s budget from $12.7 million to $25 million a year and rename it the “Serious Fraud and Anti-corruption Agency”.
“The SFO takes very few prosecutions, not because there isn’t fraud, bribery and corruption in New Zealand, but because the office doesn’t have the resources to do its job properly,” Collins said.
She went further, questioning the corruption rankings themselves:
“If you aren’t searching for something you’re unlikely to find it.”
Collins has been a senior minister — including Attorney-General — since November 2023. The SFO has not been renamed, its budget remains around $16 million, and the doubling pledge did not survive the journey into government.
I am not surprised. If New Zealand had an independent anti-corruption commission, it would have ended Judith Collin's political career a decade ago, along with many of her colleagues'.
Labour’s record offers no contrast: its answer in 2020 was that it had already increased SFO funding by 25 percent — a response about resourcing, not independence — and in six years of government, including three with an outright parliamentary majority, it established no independent commission.
Meanwhile the external indicators kept moving.
Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index score has fallen ten points since 2015, and the OECD’s December 2024 Phase 4 report placed New Zealand’s anti-bribery enforcement under monitoring.
Marking their own homework
What the public got instead of a commission was a pilot.
In February 2026 the Serious Fraud Office’s Anti-Corruption Taskforce released a report in which six government agencies assessed themselves against 106 internal controls and awarded themselves passing marks.
As I argued in Marking their own homework, self-assessment is the methodology that produced an Auckland Transport chief executive calling his procurement systems “robust” in the same week three of his managers were sentenced in the country’s largest bribery case.
The pilot’s participant list was as revealing as its findings: no council took part — not even Auckland Council, the largest government organisation in the country and home, with its council-controlled organisations, to most of the public-sector corruption prosecutions of the past decade.
The judiciary, the IPCA, the Ombudsman, and the Auditor-General were all absent.
Even Nippert, welcoming the fact that the alarm was finally audible, noted the report’s own arithmetic: applying United Kingdom loss rates to the New Zealand public sector implies potential fraud losses of between $823 million and $10.24 billion.
A taskforce overseen by the Police Commissioner and the SFO — institutions an independent commission would itself scrutinise — recommending better internal reporting is not reform. It is the system describing itself.
The Crown warrant conflict
The deeper argument for an Independent Crime and Corruption Commission is not workload — it is conflict of interest.
New Zealand’s prosecution system runs on Crown warrants held by private law firms. RNZ’s investigation $40m of public money for private law firms documented how the warrants operate as monopolies handed down within firms, with former investigator Tim McKinnel asking where the contestability is in a firm that has held a warrant for a century.
Meredith Connell has been the Office of the Crown Solicitor for Auckland for more than one hundred years, and the Auckland warrant alone generated $7.5 million in billings in 2021.
None of that is an allegation of wrongdoing against any firm or solicitor. It is a description of structure.
The same small pool of warranted firms acts for the police, for councils, and for government agencies, decade after decade — and those same institutions are the bodies a complainant must ask to investigate themselves.
I have documented where that structure leads:
A police complaint buried because investigating it would implicate the investigators;
A council too big to care and too complex to control, whose amalgamation absorbed the country’s biggest bribery racket rather than ending it; and
A chief executive whom the Auditor-General could censure but not compel to repay, until Western Australia’s corruption commission branded him “the very embodiment of corruption”.
Independent investigators and independent prosecutors exist precisely so that established relationships — however honestly maintained — are not the filter through which accountability must pass.
No party has ever lost a coalition negotiation over integrity reform — because no party has ever made it a bottom line.
The Law Society’s test case
If one case illustrates why self-regulation cannot command public confidence even when it reaches a defensible result, it is the New Zealand Law Society’s own.
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care’s final report, released in July 2024, revealed that Presbyterian Support Otago had destroyed the records of children and young people in its care in late 2017 and 2018 — destruction its former chief executive, Gillian Bremner, said occurred because the documents were “too much of a risk”, and which the Commission said made its investigation “particularly difficult”.
Bremner told the Inquiry she had obtained advice from Frazer Barton, a Presbyterian Support Otago board member who was, by 2024, the President of the Law Society.
Barton denied advising that the records be destroyed, saying his informal advice was that survivors’ files had to go to their legal representatives and that remaining records could only be destroyed much later, “at an appropriate milestone or anniversary”, and that he did not know a Royal Commission was impending when the advice was sought.
After complaints from within the profession, he took a leave of absence as President. In February 2025 an ‘independent’ Standards Committee cleared him of any breach or unsatisfactory conduct, and he resumed — and was re-elected to — the presidency.
Those findings stand, and nothing here disputes them.
The structural problem stands too. The complaint against the president of the lawyers’ regulator was determined by the standards machinery of the lawyers’ regulator. However independent the committee, however sound the outcome, the public was asked to accept that the profession had marked its own president’s homework — in a matter arising from the destruction of records that a Royal Commission needed.
Sasha Borissenko asked in the Herald whether the reinstatement should have happened at all.
An ICACC does not exist to reach different answers. It exists so that the answer — whatever it is — comes from a body with no stake in it.
The poisoned well
There is a final category of failure that the current architecture cannot handle at all: the malicious false allegation.
In Politics101: The art of the false allegation I documented a recurring pattern across New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Sensational claims surface anonymously and at strategically useful moments, investigations follow, careers end, and prosecutions never come.
The United Kingdom’s Operation Midland showed where it leads: prominent figures investigated on allegations later found to be false, and a police force so compromised by its own credulity that genuine complainants paid the price.
The institutional dynamics that follow are the truly corrosive part. An organisation that has acted on a false allegation acquires an interest in not revisiting it, because revisiting it means admitting complicity.
The well is poisoned twice over: the falsely accused cannot get the original claims properly examined, and the actual victims — of the false complaint itself — cannot get the people who made it investigated or prosecuted, because doing so would expose how readily the agencies were used.
The Crimes Act 1961 already criminalises false allegations and fabricated evidence, but enforcement requires an agency with no embarrassment to protect.
Only a body that stands outside the police, the councils, and the professional regulators — with its own investigators and its own prosecutorial authority — can examine both the allegation and the conduct of those who weaponised it.
The donations blind spot
Nowhere is the resourcing gap clearer than in political money.
The Electoral Commission administers disclosure — it receives parties’ returns and publishes them — but it is not an investigative agency. It has no forensic accountants, no power to compel evidence from third parties, and no prosecutorial authority of its own.
When the New Zealand First Foundation arrangements surfaced, the Commission could do no more than refer the matter on, and the file passed through the Police to the SFO.
The SFO then had to prosecute under the Crimes Act’s obtaining-by-deception provisions because, as electoral-law expert Andrew Geddis explained, the Electoral Act contained no offence provision that fitted the conduct.
Both defendants — who hold permanent name suppression — were acquitted, and the Court of Appeal dismissed the SFO’s appeal in 2024 even while confirming the High Court had been wrong to find the funds were not party donations.
SFO director Karen Chang’s response went to the heart of it: the public’s right to know who funds political parties “should not be as easily circumvented as through depositing funds into a trust.”
Lobbying sits in a still deeper vacuum — no register, no cooling-off periods, no disclosure obligations of any kind — which is why Transparency International New Zealand lists lobbying regulation and donations transparency among its priority reforms. An ICACC changes that arithmetic.
A standing body with forensic accountants, compulsion powers, and a ten-year lookback would be resourced to trace money through the trusts, foundations, and intermediaries that the Electoral Commission was never built — and the SFO was never funded — to pursue.
The point is not that the conduct was lawful; it is that the institutions tasked with policing it were never equipped to.
Two bills already drafted
None of this requires a working group.
As I set out in Two bills that could end New Zealand’s dirty politics era, the legislation is already drafted.
The Independent Crime and Corruption Commission Bill 2026 absorbs the SFO and the IPCA into a single body modelled on the Australian commissions that already exist federally and in every state:
Its commissioners would be appointed by a 75 percent parliamentary supermajority;
Its investigators would hold constable powers;
Its jurisdiction would cover central government, local government, council-controlled organisations, the police, and the judiciary, with a ten-year lookback; and
Its complaint channel would sit outside every agency it investigates.
Crucially, it would hold prosecutorial authority of its own — not dependent on the appetite of Crown Law or a warranted firm.
Its companion, the Electoral (Integrity of Polling, Media, and Elections) Amendment Bill 2026, attacks the political economy that makes dirty politics profitable:
It repeals the five percent threshold whose cliff effect rewards precisely timed attacks on minor parties,
Creates offences for publishing materially false statements and fabricated polls in a campaign’s final fortnight, and
Establishes New Zealand’s first regulatory framework for opinion polling — registration, disclosure of funding relationships, and a pre-election blackout, in line with comparable democracies.
The two bills are one reform: the ICACC polices the conduct, and the electoral bill removes the incentive.
The bottom-line test
Which brings us back to the negotiating table.
Under MMP, minor parties have extracted bottom lines as varied as referendums, ministries, and tax thresholds. An anti-corruption commission has never been one of them — not in 1996, not in 2017, not in 2023 — even though it sits in New Zealand First’s founding principles and in the public positions of the Greens and The Opportunities Party.
The arithmetic of the next negotiation will be the same as the last: a major party will need a minor one, and the minor one will have a list. If an ICACC and the electoral integrity bill are not at the top of it, the omission will be a choice, and it should be read as one.
There is a structural reason the demand keeps dying in negotiation, and it is the same flaw the second bill is designed to fix.
As I argued in Stuff in 2013, the five percent threshold is not a neutral administrative feature — it is an entry barrier that protects the parties already in Parliament and hands the two largest a disproportionate share of seats whenever a minor party falls short.
That cliff edge is precisely what gives the major parties their leverage in coalition talks: a minor party negotiating under the constant threat of being wiped out below five percent is in no position to make an anti-corruption commission a non-negotiable bottom line, because its first priority is survival.
The threshold does not just distort the seat count. It disciplines the minor parties into trading away the very reforms — like an ICACC — that the major parties have least interest in seeing built.
Removing the threshold is therefore not a separate project from the ICACC. It is the precondition for it: only a minor party that no longer fears annihilation can afford to hold the line on integrity reform.
The objection that such a body might be misused deserves an answer, and the bill answers it:
It cannot make findings of criminal guilt,
Public hearings require exceptional circumstances,
Affected persons hold rights of reply, and
An independent Inspector audits the Commission itself.
A properly constrained commission threatens no honest politician. What it ends is the institutional fragmentation — warranted firms, self-assessing agencies, self-regulating professions, and police investigating police — that has protected the dishonest ones for a century.
The voters cannot make this a bottom line. Only the parties they elect can.
A party that trades away an anti-corruption commission at the negotiating table is telling you exactly what it expects the commission to find.
