Nickie Muir
I was not surprised that New Zealand has moved down the rankings to second least corrupt country in the world.
That New Zealand rates so highly for our general lack of corruption and rot, however, does make me ask whether the people collecting the data may be asking all the wrong people all the wrong questions.
Despite the police's reputation taking a hiding with a cop being in court for selling drugs this year, I don't believe many would accept bribes. I say that as someone who has bribed a policeman. Well, someone did on my behalf, which is almost as bad. Transporting half-a-dozen horses on the back of an old truck in Argentina, having paid a month's wages to get them vaccinated and the paperwork in order, a slow, gum-chewing provincial policeman had decided that legal paperwork was not going to be enough. I had complied with the rules because foot and mouth was a real threat and I didn't want some farmer suffering for my blase attitude.
I refused to pay the bribe. He pulled down a typewriter which looked like it had come from the set of a Sherlock Holmes movie, blew clouds of powdery dust over everything, lit a cigar and began to compose a lengthy report on my general naughtiness as a way of explaining it would be a very long night if I didn't cough some cash. My perception of the Argentine police force was already less than optimal. I was tired. I stormed out saying that once he'd written his romance novel or whatever he was going to do that night, he could find me sleeping in the horse truck outside. The truck driver shrugged, told me to leave it to him and was out in 15 minutes. "What did it cost?" I asked, still really peeved. "Two bottles of coke and a meal at the grill next door."
In other words, the cost of avoiding the screening that would protect thousands of farmers' livelihoods came down to a cheap meal on the rough side of town. So if someone had asked me how I perceived the level of corruption in Argentina, I would have said it was stratospheric because it was in your face and it was every day.
The rankings are perceptual and, in New Zealand, I don't believe we really see corruption because we don't recognise it for what it is. Largely it comes in the soft form, such as conflicts of interest, which are disclosed but for reasons of living in small towns and the Pakeha aversion to overt conflict, never really get called on. Auditors who sign local government books without really checking. The developers who do quid pro quo deals to get around development contributions or gain subsidies for infrastructure that is not necessarily in the public interest. Or high ranking ministers being closely aligned with the attack dogs of smear campaigns against people in organisations designed to fight corruption, such as the SFO. If it's not a matter of illegality, they are still the vanguard of the real thing which, once out of hand, is so damaging to business and the community.