Andrew Coster has finally resigned from the Social Investment Agency, and everyone in officialdom is treating it as if justice has been served. It has not. What we have witnessed is a carefully choreographed exit designed to protect a man who presided over what government ministers themselves called corruption, yet now walks away with his reputation laundered and his pockets lined.
Matthew Hooton put it well in his Patreon column today, describing the whole affair as “sickening Wellington bullshit”. He’s right. Hooton says: “If you thought you couldn’t despise the Wellington culture of entitlement, unaccountability, weasel words, cover-up and general mediocrity more than you already do, I dare you to try to read without throwing up the latest RNZ report about how ultimate Wellington insider Brian Roche has dealt with the Cuddles Coster matter, remembering that Cuddles was at the centre of the original cover-up, even instructing police officers to interfere in the Police Minister’s mail”.
All true, because the messaging from Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche has been an exercise in obfuscation, while Coster’s own resignation statement reads like it was crafted by a PR consultant determined to preserve his future employability.
Let’s be clear about what happened here. The Independent Police Conduct Authority released a 135-page report last month that was utterly damning. It found “significant misconduct” by multiple senior officers and a “massive failure of leadership” at the very top of the New Zealand Police. Under Coster’s leadership, police executives protected one of their own — Deputy Commissioner Jevon McSkimming — at the expense of a young woman who alleged serious misconduct against him. Far from simply failing to act, the police executive actively inverted justice: they ignored or suppressed complaints, misled oversight bodies, and prosecuted the victim for sending emails about her own alleged abuse.
The IPCA found that Coster himself tried to interfere in the investigation, apparently to ensure nothing derailed McSkimming’s shot at promotion. He also instructed staff to hide 36 complaint emails from the Police Minister, effectively blinding the Minister to the scandal brewing under his nose. These are not minor oversights. They are deliberate acts.
The Rehabilitation of Andrew Coster
Consider how the narrative has shifted in just three weeks. When the IPCA report dropped, ministers were unsparing in their condemnation. Public Service Minister Judith Collins, asked whether what occurred under Coster’s watch amounted to corruption, replied: “If it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it’s not looking good, is it?” She declared that if she were named in such a report, she would be “deeply ashamed.”
Police Minister Mark Mitchell was even more direct. In a Q+A interview, he described the police executive under Coster as “corrupt.” He acknowledged that emails about McSkimming had been deliberately funnelled away from his office to Coster’s chief of staff, calling this “atrocious behaviour” and “evidence of a cover-up.”
Fast forward to this week, and the language has undergone a remarkable transformation. Roche, in announcing Coster’s departure, went out of his way to note that the IPCA “found no evidence of corruption or cover-up.” He added that there was “no evidence of senior officers consciously doing the wrong thing or setting out to undermine the integrity of the organisation.” This is a breathtaking piece of revisionism. It directly contradicts what ministers said when the report was released.
And it raises an uncomfortable question: was there a negotiated settlement over what could be said about Coster’s conduct? The careful framing suggests as much. By focusing on “leadership failures” and Coster’s “accountability,” officials have effectively purged the scandal of the word corruption. In doing so, they signal that this was not a matter of malfeasance or moral turpitude, but of mistakes and misjudgments. That is profoundly misleading.
The Mealy-mouthed ministerial response
Coster himself has leaned into this absolution narrative. In his resignation statement, he maintained that “I made decisions honestly. I acted in good faith... I got this wrong.” It’s a clever piece of contrition: accepting generic responsibility while insisting on noble motives. This framing ensures that, in the public record, Coster’s exit isn’t seen as the disgrace it truly is, but rather as a principled stand by a leader who is technically blameless in intent. It’s accountability without real culpability.
And key political figures are reinforcing this spin. Coster’s minister, Nicola Willis, said that his resignation was “the right decision and his willingness to take responsibility reflects well on him.” It’s the kind of faint accolade you give someone on the way out the door to smooth things over. Willis’ statement implies Coster has shown integrity by resigning, whereas many in the public see a man who clung on until it became untenable, and only then capitulated. Describing that belated exit as commendable accountability is charitable to the point of absurdity.
Coster didn’t volunteer penance. He was essentially cornered into resigning. Roche himself admitted he would have sacked Coster “if I had to”, suggesting the resignation was extracted, not offered. Calling that “reflecting well on him” is the kind of political doublespeak that breeds cynicism.
Roche has been at pains to praise Coster for “unreservedly apologising and accepting accountability,” and to stress that while “serious leadership failures” occurred, there was “no evidence of senior officers consciously doing the wrong thing.” This sounds perilously close to a whitewash. As Hooton noted, it wasn’t a systems issue that poor Coster couldn’t have known about. “He engineered the cover up.”
The Precedent that wasn’t
Roche has claimed this situation is unprecedented. He told The Post that it was the first time he was aware of that a public service boss has had to be stood down in this manner, and that it was challenging “because we had no playbook.”
This is not quite accurate. There is a very strong parallel with what happened to Martin Matthews, who was appointed Auditor-General in 2017 only to be forced to resign before even properly starting the job. Matthews had been Chief Executive of the Ministry of Transport when a senior manager, Joanne Harrison, corruptly stole nearly three-quarters of a million dollars from the organisation. Whistleblowers had repeatedly tried to warn Matthews about Harrison’s fraud, but he consistently failed to act.
When Matthews was appointed Auditor-General, questions about his conduct at the Ministry became public. An inquiry was commissioned, and Matthews was given an ultimatum by MPs: resign or face a parliamentary vote of no confidence. He resigned. The inquiry report was never published. There were accusations of a cover-up. But the principle was clear: conduct in a previous role could and should affect suitability for a new public service position.
Roche’s claim that “you cannot insulate yourself in your current position from things that occurred previously” is correct. But his suggestion that this is somehow novel is not. The Matthews case established exactly this precedent nearly a decade ago. And in that case, at least, there was no garden-leave payout. Matthews simply resigned, disgraced.
The Golden handshake
Then there’s the matter of the money. Coster will receive three months’ salary in lieu of notice (approximately $124,000). Roche has defended this as simply honouring Coster’s employment contract, calling it “not a golden handshake” and insisting that “our contracts are very vanilla.”
Try telling that to the average New Zealander. For context, $124,000 is more than most people earn in an entire year. And Coster is receiving it as a departing gift after presiding over what ministers themselves described as corruption. The Taxpayers’ Union has blasted the payout, noting that Coster “cost the taxpayer more than $33,000 on gardening leave” while the process dragged on, and questioning why it took until the IPCA report was made public before Coster was even suspended, given that Roche had access to a draft version beforehand.
The optics are terrible. Here is a man found to have presided over serious institutional failure — possibly corruption, by the ministers’ own words — walking away with a six-figure sum. In the private sector, executives in similar circumstances often face clawbacks, forfeiture of bonuses, or immediate termination for cause with no payout. But not in Wellington. In the Capital, the contracts are “vanilla” and the payouts keep flowing.
A Country that cannot say “corruption”
What we are witnessing with Coster is symptomatic of a deeper problem: New Zealand’s inability to confront corruption when it happens. We have built an international reputation as one of the least corrupt countries in the world, and we cling to this self-image so fiercely that we struggle to acknowledge when our officials behave corruptly.
Even Transparency International New Zealand has been at pains to downplay the corruption label in relation to this scandal. Chief Executive Julie Haggie described it as a “cultural integrity problem” rather than “outright corruption,” and suggested it should not hurt New Zealand’s international ranking. This hair-splitting has consequences. If we define corruption so narrowly that it only means brown envelopes of cash changing hands, we give ourselves permission to ignore the more subtle forms of corruption that actually thrive here: the quiet protection of mates, the convenient blindness to misconduct by those in power, the bureaucratic manoeuvres that shield the well-connected from accountability.
By any common-sense definition, what happened in the police leadership under Coster was corrupt. Senior officials used their positions to protect a colleague from serious allegations, misled oversight bodies, and prosecuted the victim rather than investigating the accused. If that is not an abuse of entrusted power for private gain, what is?
The Sympathetic spin
Not everyone sees it this way, of course. The political editor of The Post, Luke Malpass, published a column today that essentially sings Coster’s praises. “At one level, you have to feel for Coster,” Malpass writes. “He was taken in by Jevon McSkimming and accepted his version of events.” The resignation letter, according to Malpass, was “open, upfront and took responsibility without caveat” — “far from the weasel words that attend resignations far too often.”
The Herald’s editorial today takes a similarly sympathetic line, suggesting that Coster’s words “help to answer the question many have asked after the report was released: Was Coster wilfully complicit alongside McSkimming or simply bad at his job? It would appear the latter is the case.”
This framing — that Coster was merely credulous, merely incompetent, rather than actively complicit — is convenient. But it doesn’t square with the facts laid out in the IPCA report. The Commissioner of Police doesn’t accidentally hide 36 complaint emails from the Police Minister. He doesn’t accidentally try to influence the timing and scope of an IPCA investigation. These are active choices. They suggest awareness and intent, not mere negligence.
Malpass concludes that “with regard to Coster, the public service system seems to have worked as it should.” I would argue the opposite. The system has worked exactly as it shouldn’t: protecting insiders, managing optics, and allowing a soft landing for someone who should be facing much harder questions.
What Should happen now
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this whole affair is what is not happening: a proper investigation into whether Coster’s conduct constituted criminal offences. Police Commissioner Richard Chambers has said he asked specialist investigators to examine whether charges like perverting the course of justice might apply to the officers involved. But Coster himself appears to have been exempted from this scrutiny.
The woman at the centre of this scandal, known as Ms Z, has called for a wider inquiry into police culture. She told the NZ Herald this week that Commissioner Chambers’ comments about wanting to “move on” were concerning. “There is behaviour in the wider police which needs more scrutiny,” she said. “The police need to change their attitudes.” But the Government has shown no appetite for a broader inquiry. Both Mitchell and Collins have said the IPCA report was thorough enough. This is the familiar New Zealand pattern: handle a scandal with the minimum necessary accountability, avoid anything that might dig up more uncomfortable truths, and declare the matter closed.
Roche suggested this week that “what he has done and the way that he has done it, and the fact he’s accepted accountability, should restore a level of confidence that when things go wrong, we remedy them.” I doubt the public will see it that way. What they will see is a managed exit, a careful narrative, and a substantial payout. That doesn’t restore confidence. It breeds contempt.
As I argued in my previous column on this scandal, the answer is to have a proper investigation into how the Police leadership handled the McSkimming issue, and whether their conduct crossed legal lines. Only once that has truly been dealt with can the public have trust in the public service and police. Until then, what we have is a cover-up of the cover-up.
The worst outcome would be a return to business as usual, with a tacit agreement that “mistakes were made, time to move forward.” True accountability means facing uncomfortable truths and making substantive changes. It’s time to demand that in this case — for the sake of the integrity of our police and public service, and to remind our leaders that convenience is never a valid excuse to bury issues of corruption.
Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project
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