Two bills that could end New Zealand’s dirty politics era — if politicians have the courage to pass them
- Grant McLachlan
- 1 day ago
- 9 min read
I have documented corruption and abuse of electoral systems. These two bills provide the tools to fix it.
A history of 'Kiwi Conman Culture'
New Zealand was settled by conmen. That is not a provocation — it is a thesis I have spent years documenting, from the fraudulent land transactions of the New Zealand Company in the 1840s through to the modern machinery of coordinated political attack campaigns, astroturfed advocacy, and the revolving door between Parliament, the press gallery, and lobbying firms. The colonial corruption that I trace in New Zealand’s entrenched culture of corruption did not disappear with the frontier. It evolved, professionalised, and found new institutional homes.
For more than a decade, across dozens of investigations and columns, I have been trying to articulate what is wrong with New Zealand’s integrity framework and what a functional alternative would look like. In November 2025, writing about the McSkimming scandal, I argued that the crisis should be New Zealand’s ICAC moment — the catalyst for genuine structural reform. A month later, in Would they go to jail? Comparing New Zealand’s corruption gap with Australia’s integrity framework, I documented specific cases where conduct that attracted no accountability in New Zealand was investigated, prosecuted, or publicly condemned in Australia — including Rodger Kerr-Newell, a serial council chief executive found by the Western Australian Corruption and Crime Commission to be “the very embodiment of corruption.” He was held to account in Perth. Not in Auckland, where the Auditor-General could identify the problem but not compel repayment.
That gap — between knowing that corruption has occurred and having the tools to do anything about it — is the central failure of New Zealand’s current integrity architecture. We have agencies with overlapping mandates and none with comprehensive authority. We have prosecutors constrained by guidelines that have functioned as shields for the powerful. We have a police force that in certain politically charged cases has been remarkably reluctant to investigate itself or its political allies. And we have an electoral system whose structural features — specifically the five percent party vote threshold — create powerful incentives for the kind of precisely timed, strategically deployed political attacks that I documented in The clandestine campaign to dismantle Jacindamania.
Today I am attaching two draft government bills that, together, represent the most comprehensive attempt I have seen to address these systemic failures. I want to explain what they do, why they matter, and why they should be read not as abstract legislative exercises but as direct responses to things that have actually happened in New Zealand politics.
The ICACC bill: a body with actual teeth
The Independent Crime and Corruption Commission Bill 2026 establishes New Zealand’s first dedicated, comprehensive anti-corruption body — the ICACC — modelled primarily on the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption, with significant modifications drawn from Victoria’s IBAC, Queensland’s Crime and Corruption Commission, and the Commonwealth’s National Anti-Corruption Commission.
The bill’s explanatory note is unusually frank about the failures it is designed to remedy. The Serious Fraud Office had to abandon investigations into Auckland Transport and Rodney District Council because it simply did not have the resources to continue. This is not an allegation — the SFO’s then-director Julie Read publicly acknowledged that resource constraints forced her office to draw a line on certain investigations rather than use up too much of the court’s time.
The Auditor-General identified that Rodney District Council officials had improperly paid themselves from public funds — but could only write a report about it.
The IPCA, despite its mandate to provide oversight of police, conducts approximately 85% of its investigations using seconded police officers. That is not independence. That is a structural conflict of interest with a letterhead. And when a government responds to a scandal of the magnitude of McSkimming by appointing an Inspector-General of Police — another layer of oversight that still lacks the independence and teeth required — it is confirming rather than remedying the problem.
As I wrote in New Zealand’s corruption illusion, the response bordered on farce: an anti-corruption taskforce overseen by the Police Commissioner and the Serious Fraud Office — the very institutions implicated in failing to prevent the conduct in the first place. The ICACC bill is the first serious legislative attempt to break that cycle.
The Commission would have jurisdiction over corrupt conduct by all public officials — including, crucially, police — serious misconduct, and, under the bill’s genuinely innovative astroturfing provisions, conduct by third parties engaged in concealed political advocacy. Commissioners would be appointed by a 75% supermajority of Parliament, insulating them from the patronage of any single government. Investigators would hold constable powers, meaning the Commission would not depend on the very police force it might need to investigate.
Historical conduct up to ten years old could be examined, which matters enormously given the long tail of allegations that have circulated for years without finding any institutional home willing to take them seriously. As I wrote in New Zealand’s property-industrial complex, New Zealand’s democratic institutions have been comprehensively captured by the interests they were supposed to regulate. The ICACC is the structural response.
The bill also creates seven new Crimes Act offences, including misconduct in public office, illicit enrichment, misuse of public money, and the world’s first legislative criminal offence of astroturfing. That last one matters to me personally. Since I wrote Astroturfs: Act Three of ‘Dirty Politics’ in 2020, the use of manufactured grassroots campaigns to deceive government decision-makers and the public has only intensified. The bill defines astroturfing with precision — fraudulently misrepresenting the funding, organisation, or true sponsors of advocacy directed at influencing government — and makes it punishable by up to seven years’ imprisonment. Defences for genuine grassroots activity and properly disclosed lobbying are preserved. The target is concealment, not advocacy.
On the question of whether all of this might be used against ordinary political activity, the bill is careful. The Commission cannot make findings that a person has committed a criminal offence — it can only refer matters for prosecution. Public hearings require exceptional circumstances. Affected persons have rights of reply. An independent Inspector audits the Commission’s own conduct. The architecture is designed to avoid the reputational destruction-without-due-process that plagued NSW ICAC in its early years and that gave ammunition to those who feared an anti-corruption body would be more dangerous than the corruption it was meant to catch.
That fear, I should note, is not entirely unreasonable. When I raised the idea of an ICAC-style body with a senior New Zealand politician some time ago, his response was instructive. He was supportive in principle, he said — but worried he might be the first person prosecuted under it. He had a specific historical example in mind: Nick Greiner, the New South Wales Premier who introduced the NSW ICAC legislation in 1988, only to become one of its earliest high-profile targets four years later when ICAC found he had used his position as Premier to benefit himself politically in the appointment of a minister. Greiner eventually survived — the Court of Appeal later found the ICAC finding was wrong in law — but he resigned under the political pressure, and the irony that the institution’s architect became its most prominent early subject was not lost on anyone.
My politician contact was, I suspect, less worried about his own conduct than about the unpredictability of any powerful new institution. That instinct is not disqualifying — it is actually the correct instinct, and it is why the bill’s procedural safeguards matter so much. A genuinely independent anti-corruption commission that operates within proper constraints is not a threat to honest politicians. It is a guarantee that the dishonest ones cannot hide behind the institutional fragmentation that has protected them for so long.
The electoral integrity bill: fixing the structural incentive for dirty politics
The Electoral (Integrity of Polling, Media, and Elections) Amendment Bill 2026 addresses something I have been writing about since at least 2013. In a Stuff column published that year, I argued that politicians were abusing the flaws of MMP: that the five percent threshold was not a neutral administrative feature of the system but a structural mechanism that allowed major parties to gain disproportionate advantage whenever minor parties failed to clear it. More than twelve years on, the problem is worse, better understood, and still entirely unaddressed.
The bill’s explanatory note lays out the mathematics with uncomfortable clarity. In 2020, Labour achieved 65 seats on 50% of the party vote — a working majority that MMP was specifically designed to prevent any single party from achieving without genuine coalition support. That majority was a mathematical artefact of 225,190 votes, cast for parties that failed to reach the threshold, being redistributed under the Sainte-Lagué formula to parties that had already qualified.
As I noted before the 2023 election, writing about the unknowns that would decide that election, the wasted vote at the previous election had been 9 percent — 257,835 voters whose preferences simply disappeared from the calculation, with their votes redistributed to inflate the representation of parties that had already qualified. That is not a proportional system. That is a system with a proportional veneer over a fundamentally distorting mechanism.
The bill repeals the five percent threshold entirely. All parties receiving votes would participate in seat allocation, achieving genuine proportionality. The Sainte-Lagué formula itself is unchanged — only the preliminary filter that currently deletes a substantial minority of the electorate’s preferences before the formula is applied.
The electoral manipulation provisions of the bill speak directly to the documented pattern I examined in Politics101: The art of the false allegation and in The clandestine campaign to dismantle Jacindamania. The bill creates three new criminal offences:
Publishing materially false statements about candidates or parties in the final two weeks of a campaign with intent to influence the result (two years);
Publishing fraudulent or fabricated polling data (three years); and
The most serious offence — coordinating with a campaign to suppress information for strategic release during the restricted period (five years).
The pattern I documented in the false allegation piece — sensational claims surface at precisely the moment they can cause maximum electoral damage with minimum time for response or context — is exactly what the coordinated suppression offence targets. All three offences require Attorney-General consent for prosecution. The defences are broad: substantial truth, good faith verification, fair comment, and privilege all protect journalism operating in good faith.
The polling provisions establish New Zealand’s first regulatory framework for opinion polling — something that, as the bill notes, is an anomaly among established democracies. Currently, anyone can publish invented numbers claiming to be a poll, without disclosing who commissioned it, how it was conducted, or whether any actual research occurred. The bill requires registration, disclosure of methodologies and funding relationships, and a fourteen-day polling blackout before elections. These are not extreme measures. France, Canada, and the United Kingdom all have comparable or stricter requirements. New Zealand’s current position — no regulation whatsoever — is the outlier.
I have written about the way in which fraudulent or strategically timed polls can interact with the threshold to weaponise the cliff effect against minor parties: a poll showing a party at 4.8% rather than 5.2% is not merely a data point, it is a self-fulfilling narrative about wasted votes that can shift the electorate’s strategic calculations in the final days of a campaign. The polling regulation provisions would not eliminate that risk, but they would require that polls be based on actual research and that their funding relationships be disclosed, making it much harder to deploy a fabricated poll as a political weapon. Taken together with the threshold removal, the incentive structure that currently makes minor parties so vulnerable to coordinated attack would be fundamentally changed. As I wrote examining the predictable playbook of such campaigns in When noise drowns out democracy, the problem is not simply the noise — it is that the system is designed to amplify the noise and silence the response. The electoral bill would change the system.
Why these two bills belong together
The ICACC bill and the electoral integrity bill are not independent reforms that happen to have been drafted in the same year. They address the same underlying problem from different angles.
The corruption bill addresses the enforcement failure: the absence of any body with the power, independence, and resources to investigate serious misconduct, bring it to light, and refer it for prosecution without being blocked by prosecution guidelines wielded in the interests of the powerful. As I have documented across years of investigation — from the colonial origins of New Zealand’s culture of corruption through to the McSkimming scandal and its aftermath — this failure is not new. It is structural and historical. The ICACC would be the most significant addition to New Zealand’s accountability architecture since the Ombudsman was established in 1962.
The electoral bill addresses the political economy of dirty politics: the structural features that make coordinated manipulation profitable and the legal vacuum that has made it costless.
New Zealand has been here before, of course. Calls for anti-corruption reform have circulated for years without legislative traction. The OECD has criticised our framework. Transparency International’s rankings, however flattering they remain, have been moving in the wrong direction. The fragmented system has survived because fragmentation suits the interests of those who benefit from it.
What is different this time, if anything, is that both bills are fully drafted and carry explanatory notes that are forensically detailed about the specific, documented failures they are designed to remedy. This is not a discussion document or a select committee inquiry or a working group report. It is legislation. It is ready to be introduced.
The question, as it has always been, is whether New Zealand’s political class has the appetite to pass it.
I suspect the answer, at present, is no. But the conversation needs to start somewhere. I am starting it here, with the bills attached below.
