Guest Post: Conflicts of Interest

A guest post by a reader on Kiwiblog:

This opinion is expressed without intimate knowledge of Cabinet rules or the rules around conflicts pertaining to electoral donations if such exist. It is a “pub-test” analysis which goes looking for and finds what the average bloke might consider hypocrisy and bias.

The Opposition (by which I mean the Media) and the parliamentary parties not in government (Labour and the Greens) have been agitated much about conflicts of interest they perceive in the current Government. Many stirring words have been written about:

1. Hon Nicola McKee and her links to the gun lobby.

2. Hon Casey Costello and her links to tobacco (with Chris Bishop an honourable mention).

3. Hon Shane Jones and apparent links to mining.

4. The possibility that donors and/or associates of Ministers will be advantaged by the fast-track process and will (or have already) reciprocate(d) appropriately.

The logic goes something like this: Person X used to be involved in business, advocacy or NGO activity around Function Y (perhaps by way of donation), and now Person X is a Minister, perhaps even appointed to oversee that very Function Y, and therefore is conflicted, incapable of acting for the greater good, and indeed their efforts should be dismissed as inherently attempts to favour parties outside Parliament.

The trouble with this is that in Parliament we have three parties not in government whose purposes in part at least are to advance the interests of Unions, Greens and Maori respectively.

So if it is unacceptable today for Person X who was once involved in Function Y, to oversee Function Y while in Government then on the same logic so too was it unacceptable for Ministers in the previous government to oversee functions with which they had prior connections. Tinetti the school principal, Little and Wood the Unionists, and Ginny Andersen the Police policy wonk immediately spring to mind. So too one of the most virulent groups of ideologues around at present is the public health physicians and one of their number Dr Ayesha Verrall is a past Minister of Health and remains Labour spokesperson on the subject.

But the Media has never pursued the angle of inherent conflict and ostensible corruption (i.e working for the benefit of external parties) arising from it with these individuals.

So clearly it’s not the fact of having a past which is related to present Ministerial responsibilities which is actually the problem for them. Or to put it another way it’s not the process issue which is challenging. It’s actually the underlying area of interest which the Media perceives to be abhorrent and which in their mind must, without a shadow of a doubt, unquestionably, always, result in people acting corruptly for external parties. Their concern is thus ideological.

In summary, for them a Minister with a Green or Union background can act with the interests of all his or her countrymen in mind, but a Minister with a firearms interest never can. Indeed they might even go so far as to laud the former by calling them “conviction” politicians.

I have struck this kind of nonsense before. In the eighties local government was restructured. Regional councils were established to provide regulatory/environmental oversight of many things including district and city councils. I always wondered who was watching the watchers, and why it was not considered possible that regional councils could go feral in advancing environmental objectives while district and city councils were perceived highly likely to go feral in favour of development. There never was an answer…

To the extent there is an answer today, it is this. In the minds of the Media, and many others in our country there is an ideological bias against commerce, and also against those activities which reflect an emphasis on individual freedoms (smoking, shooting etc) in favour of warm and pleasant Leftish values such as wealth redistribution, safety and sustainability. This extends to bias supportive of all activity where such values lurk and against activity where they don’t. It embraces implicit views of moral turpitude on the part of non-believers.

Now I am not in a position to comment authoritatively on either Costello’s or McKee’s motivations and whether they are seeking to advance narrow sectional interests at the expense of the rest of us. But I do ask that when you see the Media Opposition and antagonistic parliamentarians frothing about corrupt Ministerial links to external parties, you ask yourself why it was that members of the last government were not assessed by the same standards and whether in any future government, say, a Green Minister will be treated as untrustworthy because of a strong history of advocacy in that sphere. And when you hear some special-interest group (we see you public health physicians) telling us to join the dots between a Minister’s stance and the views of external parties, just laugh cynically and have another chocolate.

Labour in particular is arguably a stalking horse for the Union movement. This is reflected in the membership of the Parliamentary Party and in the legislation it passes which always extends the power of Unions and ensures other folks’ money is passed to them. The Unions in turn support the Labour Party with parallel campaigns to ensure the “right” election result.

If the same pub logic is applied to this relationship as to current Ministers then no Unionist would ever be involved in developing employment legislation, and no discrete project with collateral advantages to Unions would be decided with Unionists involved. Does this seem likely to any of us…?