Democracy Briefing: This week’s landmark cover up scandal could have positive consequences well beyond the Police

The McSkimming affair might finally shatter New Zealand's dangerous myth of being corruption-free

The Independent Police Conduct Authority’s devastating report into how senior police protected Jevon McSkimming represents more than just another institutional failure. It may be the watershed moment that finally shatters New Zealand’s most dangerous delusion: that we don’t have a corruption problem.

Public Service Minister Judith Collins didn’t mince words when asked whether the findings amounted to corruption: “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck”. Her frank assessment cuts through years of official denial and cheerleading about New Zealand’s supposed integrity. The question now is whether this shocking episode will wake New Zealanders from their complacent slumber about corruption in our public life, or whether the Establishment will successfully contain the damage with familiar reassurances that the system is working and these are just isolated “rotten apples”.

The Corruption debate

Predictably, the defenders of New Zealand’s pristine reputation have already mobilised. Transparency International New Zealand chief executive Julie Haggie appeared on Herald NOW this morning to downplay the scandal, arguing it should be seen “not as corruption, but rather as a cultural integrity problem” involving conflicts of interest. According to Haggie, the McSkimming case is about “not being able to manage conflicts of interest” and “holding information from the minister,” rather than outright corruption.

This is typical of TINZ’s approach, which is always ready to defend New Zealand’s international ranking, always quick to explain away systemic problems as isolated failures or cultural quirks. The organisation has long played a role in maintaining the myth that New Zealand is essentially corruption-free, consistently downplaying evidence that contradicts this narrative. When your entire brand is built on promoting New Zealand as one of the world’s least corrupt countries, acknowledging widespread corruption becomes an existential threat.

But what happened at the highest levels of Police absolutely was corruption. When senior officers prioritise protecting a colleague’s career ambitions over investigating serious allegations of sexual misconduct, when they manipulate oversight processes, when they prosecute a complainant to silence her, when a Police Commissioner attempts to influence an independent investigation to ensure it doesn’t derail a job application – this isn’t just poor conflict management. It’s the corrupt exercise of power to benefit insiders at the expense of justice and accountability.

The IPCA report makes clear that senior police displayed “an unquestioning acceptance of Mr McSkimming’s narrative of events” while completely dismissing the complaints of a vulnerable young woman. They charged her under the Harmful Digital Communications Act while refusing to investigate her allegations. They closed down inquiries prematurely. Former Commissioner Andrew Coster tried to limit the scope and accelerate the timeline of the IPCA investigation. As Sam Sachdeva writes in Newsroom, Coster “sought to exercise influence over the conduct of a serious criminal investigation for the purpose of ensuring it did not interfere with a job application process.”

This is textbook corruption: the abuse of entrusted power for private benefit. The benefit wasn’t necessarily financial – it was protecting the elite club, maintaining the careers and reputations of senior officers, preserving the institutional interests of Police over the public interest. If this doesn’t qualify as corruption, then New Zealand’s definition is conveniently narrow indeed.

Beyond bad apples

In the wake of McSkimming pleading guilty to possessing objectionable material, Police Minister Mark Mitchell urged the public not to let one “rotten apple” overshadow the good work of thousands of cops. It’s a cliché deployed whenever institutional misconduct is exposed – but as Sachdeva notes, the metaphor has changed from its original meaning: “a rotten apple quickly infects its neighbour.”

The rotten apple defence is always deployed to protect institutions from facing systemic critique. We’re told it’s just a few bad individuals, isolated incidents, not representative of the organisation. But the IPCA report demolishes this narrative. This wasn’t one rotten apple, it was the entire senior leadership. The Commissioner, two Deputy Commissioners, an Assistant Commissioner, and numerous other senior officers all failed. They all protected McSkimming. They all ignored the complainant. They all prioritised careers over accountability.

Louise Nicholas and others have tried to put a positive spin on events, suggesting the fact that senior leaders are now being held accountable shows the system is working. But this misses the point entirely. The system failed catastrophically for years. The complaints started in 2018. McSkimming was promoted to Deputy Commissioner in 2023 despite senior police knowing about the allegations. He was shortlisted for Commissioner in 2024 while the cover-up continued. The complainant was prosecuted. The system only started working when brave individual officers (people like Detective Superintendent Kylie Schaare and others commended by the IPCA) defied their superiors and contacted the watchdog directly.

What we’re seeing isn’t the system working. We’re seeing the system being forced to work by whistleblowers who recognised a cover-up when they saw one. As one officer wrote: “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist... this looks like a cover-up”. The integrity mechanisms were deliberately bypassed. It took extraordinary moral courage from junior officers to override their corrupt leadership.

What’s more, we now know that Crown lawyers (acting on police information) successfully obtained a court name suppression order to hide McSkimming’s identity. From that moment, the man poised to lead the nation’s police enjoyed legal anonymity, while his accuser – a young woman who should have been treated as a victim or whistleblower – was dragged through the courts. No one in authority even tried to verify her allegations before silencing her. It was a stunning inversion of justice: a whistleblower was punished and a powerful predator was protected. The effect was to muzzle any public discussion of McSkimming’s behaviour just as he angled for the top job.

That this scheme nearly succeeded is a chilling indictment. Until only a few weeks ago, a permanent suppression of McSkimming’s name was on the verge of being rubber-stamped, which would have kept the IPCA’s damning report forever under wraps. It was only through the dogged efforts of investigative journalists and the IPCA itself challenging the gag order that the truth was finally prised into the open.

The Public Service Commission’s failure

The Public Service Commission (which oversees the appointments of public sector chief executives and statutory officers) also emerges with its credibility dented. The Commission managed the recruitment for the Deputy Commissioner and Commissioner roles. Yet it failed to catch obvious warning signs, relying too naively on assurances from police referees. An independent review later conceded that the Commission should have more rigorously probed a referee’s mention of a “misstep” or “strange relationship” in McSkimming’s past. Instead, they took comfort in a routine NZSIS security vetting that had cleared him, treating that as a clean bill of character. In hindsight this was a grave error: a man who was manifestly unfit for high office nearly rose to the very top under the Commission’s watch.

Sir Brian Roche, the Public Service Commissioner, has attempted to deflect responsibility by today calling McSkimming a “devious liar” who manipulated the system. Yet Roche himself admits the Commission has known about the McSkimming issues for a year. As Rachel Maher reports in the Herald, Roche saw a “very rough draft” of the IPCA report in August 2024, yet no action was taken until this month, when the report became public.

Roche claims this delay was about “natural justice” and that “the stakes here are really, really high.” But whose stakes? Certainly not the complainant’s. The stakes were high for protecting Andrew Coster’s new appointment as chief executive of the Social Investment Agency. The stakes were high for maintaining the reputations of senior officials. Once again, the interests of the powerful took precedence over accountability.

When finally pressed, Roche offered the most offensively weak bureaucratic platitude imaginable: “We’re a learning organisation”, he said, adding, “the whole public sector needs to continue to learn”. This is not an apology; it is the language of systemic impunity. It is the classic verbal “whitewash” of the Wellington bureaucracy, a phrase designed to imply a vague, collective “learning” precisely to avoid any individual accountability.

After the Bazley Inquiry into police sexual misconduct in 2007, we were told the police had learned their lessons. Comprehensive reforms were promised. Yet here we are in 2025, with the IPCA documenting remarkably similar failures: senior officers prioritising the careers of powerful men over investigating allegations, an unwillingness to scrutinise colleagues, disregard for victims’ voices.

As Jonathan Milne writes in Newsroom, the IPCA itself noted that “the fact that actions were not perceived by the leaders of the organisation as undermining integrity makes the problem more insidious. If decision-makers do not perceive wrongdoing, even when it is drawn to their attention after the event, it is unlikely they will take appropriate action to prevent it from recurring.”

This is the real corruption: a system where senior leaders genuinely don’t recognise their abuse of power as wrongdoing. Where protecting one of your own seems natural, even righteous. Where the complainant becomes the problem to be managed rather than a person seeking justice.

A Deeper pattern of institutional rot

The McSkimming scandal doesn’t exist in isolation. It coincides with the revelation that 120 police officers falsified over 30,000 breath tests. As Sachdeva observes: “There may be no direct connection between the events, but it’s tempting to wonder whether a police leadership team all too willing to compromise on integrity and ethics has passed on the wrong lessons to the junior ranks.”

When officers see leadership protecting the powerful and punishing whistleblowers, when they see senior executives bypass integrity systems with impunity, what lessons do they learn about the value of honesty and accountability? A culture of corruption trickles down. If the Commissioner can manipulate investigations, why can’t road policing officers manipulate their statistics?

This pattern extends well beyond police. New Zealand’s political economy is riddled with similar problems. Our electricity market is broken, delivering extortionate prices to consumers while generators profit handsomely. Our supermarket duopoly extracts monopoly rents. Our banking sector operates with minimal competition. Our housing market has been captured by property investors whose interests override the needs of ordinary New Zealanders.

These aren’t accidents. These aren’t just market failures. These are the results of systematic regulatory capture, where vested interests have successfully prevented government intervention that would threaten their profits.

As I’ve documented extensively, New Zealand operates on chumminess, networks and connections. The elites protect each other. Lobbying operates largely in darkness. Political donations buy access and influence. Revolving doors between business and government blur the lines between public and private interest.

Elites protecting their own

The McSkimming cover-up exemplifies how New Zealand’s elites often protect their own behind closed doors. It pulls back the curtain on an establishment culture that is far too cosy and unaccountable. In this case, a small circle of powerful individuals in the Police and bureaucracy closed ranks to shield a senior figure from scrutiny, at the expense of honesty and justice.

Such behaviour is the very definition of corruption in practice, even if it doesn’t fit the narrow legalist definition that organisations like Transparency International might use. It’s a form of “soft corruption” – the kind that operates through old-boy networks, quiet phone calls, and mutual back-scratching among those at the top. And analyst Paul Buchanan has today called it a “culture of impunity” in which elites are protected by weak, captured, or complicit oversight bodies.

New Zealand is a small country, and its power elites (political leaders, top public servants, judges, business magnates) often inhabit the same circles. They sit on each other’s boards, attend the same functions, and often share a vested interest in preserving the status quo. This can foster an environment where accountability is muted. Bad news is managed, not confronted. Scandals are contained to avoid tarnishing reputations of institutions. And when one of “ours” gets into trouble, the instinct is to hush it up or deal with it quietly, rather than risking public trust in the institution. We see this dynamic at play in the McSkimming affair: the priority of those involved was not to seek truth or justice, but to manage reputations and career trajectories. In doing so, they thoroughly betrayed the public trust.

The Myth of corruption-free New Zealand

New Zealand has long hidden behind its high rankings on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. But these rankings measure perceptions, not reality. And the perception has been manufactured by decades of official messaging that New Zealand doesn’t have a corruption problem.

TINZ’s own 2024 research acknowledged that “New Zealand’s response to increasing corruption pressures over several years has been lacklustre and complacent.” We haven’t taken a strategic approach to preventing corruption. We lack a well-resourced lead agency. Legal weaknesses frustrate investigations. Yet TINZ continues to defend New Zealand’s reputation rather than confronting these systemic failures.

The truth is that New Zealand has been declining in corruption rankings since 2015, with that slide accelerating in recent years. But even these rankings don’t capture the full extent of the problem because so much New Zealand corruption is legal. Political donations from wealthy interests, lobbying by vested interests, revolving doors between government and business, and regulatory capture. All of this is permitted and normalised in our system.

The McSkimming scandal has pulled back the curtain on how institutions actually operate when scrutiny is absent. The comfortable assumption that public servants are acting with integrity, that the system has checks and balances, that whistleblowers will be protected and wrongdoers held accountable. All of this has been exposed as fantasy.

A Watershed moment?

The question now is whether this scandal will prove to be a genuine turning point. Will New Zealanders finally become appropriately sceptical about their institutions? Will they start demanding real transparency and accountability? Will they question whether other authorities might also be corrupt? Will they wonder whether market failures are really accidents or the result of elite interests operating to their own benefit?

There are reasons for hope. The scale of this scandal is shocking enough that it can’t be easily dismissed. The corruption reached the very top of the police force. The cover-up involved numerous senior officers. A vulnerable complainant was prosecuted to silence her. The behaviour was so egregious that even ministers are using the word “corruption.”

The public anger is palpable. Trust in police will plummet, and rightly so. A torrent of surveys already show Kiwis losing faith in the pillars of society. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer recorded trust in government at only 45%, trust in media at an abysmal 35%, and overall trust in New Zealand’s institutions falling into “distrust” territory for the first time. Nearly two-thirds of New Zealanders believe the “system is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful.”

Grievance and cynicism are on the rise, and frankly, the public is being given good reason to feel that way. When people see a police deputy commissioner protected and enabled by a who’s-who of elite officials – and only held to account after an outside intervention – how can they not conclude that there is one set of rules for ordinary folk and another for the powerful? Every time a whistleblower is punished or a scandal swept under the carpet, the public’s remaining trust erodes a little more. The McSkimming affair has undoubtedly deepened the sentiment that the political and bureaucratic elite “don’t care about people like us” and will look after themselves first.

But this anger should extend beyond police to the entire apparatus of public authority that failed. Where were the oversight bodies? Why did it take whistleblowers defying their superiors to expose this? Why did the Public Service Commission sit on the information for a year? Why is TINZ still trying to explain it away?

If this scandal channels public anger into a broader demand for integrity in public life, it could be transformative. New Zealanders might finally recognise that high trust in institutions isn’t always warranted. They might start asking uncomfortable questions about other cosy relationships and captured regulators. They might demand real transparency around lobbying, political donations, and the revolving door. They might insist on stronger oversight mechanisms and better protection for whistleblowers.

The Establishment will resist. They will try to contain the scandal to police, insist the system is working, promise reforms that never materialise. TINZ will continue defending New Zealand’s reputation. Politicians will make the right noises while doing little of substance. The hope will be that public attention moves on to the next scandal, and nothing fundamental changes.

But perhaps this time will be different. Perhaps the corruption was so blatant, the abuse of power so clear, the betrayal of public trust so complete, that New Zealanders will finally abandon their dangerous complacency. Perhaps they’ll recognise that if it can happen at the top of the police force, it can happen anywhere. Perhaps they’ll start looking at other broken parts of our political system, our public service, and our economy with appropriately sceptical eyes.

The McSkimming scandal could be the crack that brings down the whole edifice of New Zealand’s corruption-free mythology. It should be. The question is whether we’ll let it.

Dr Bryce Edwards

Director of The Integrity Institute

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