This is a public webinar. You can register here.
Our recent report, Shining a Light: Improving transparency in New Zealand’s political and governance systems, describes the growing perception of corruption in New Zealand’s political and governance systems in recent years. The report identifies five areas most vulnerable to corrupt practices: the practice of political lobbying; political donations and elections funding; access to official information; foreign bribery; and beneficial ownership of corporate entities. The report then makes a number of recommendations to make our political systems fairer, including:
- Regulating lobbying
- Limiting donations to political parties and improving disclosure of these donations
- Improving access to official information
- Strengthening laws against foreign bribery
- Establishing a registry of beneficial ownership
The webinar will explore why transparency is critical to good government and how New Zealand can improve its increasingly inadequate approach to this crucial policy area. The webinar will be moderated by our patron, the Rt. Hon. Helen Clark. The panellists are:
- Philippa Yasbek – Philippa is the author or the report, Shining a Light. She has an economics degree from Cornell University. She worked as a public servant for a number of years in a diverse range of areas, including competition and innovation policy. She also had a secondment to the Beehive as a private secretary. Philippa has more recently worked as a consultant on a number of high profile issues including the COVID-19 response and three waters. Philippa previously co-authored a paper for the Helen Clark Foundation and the NZ Drug Foundation on Minimising the Harms from Methamphetamine. She co-founded Gun Control NZ in 2019 and lobbies on their behalf, as an unpaid volunteer.
- Christopher Finlayson – New Zealand’s former Attorney-General, Chris Finlayson was born and educated in Wellington. After graduating with a BA in Latin and a LLM from Victoria University, he practiced law in Wellington as a solicitor before going to the Bar in 2002. He was elected to Parliament in 2005 and became Attorney-General and Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations in 2008. Mr Finlayson held those positions until October 2017. In 2018 he received a grant from the New Zealand Law Foundation to complete a book on the Crown Māori relationship, and he has also written a book on the Office of the Attorney-General, published in 2022.
- Yuen Yuen Ang – Professor Ang is the Alfred Chandler Chair of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University and author of two award-winning books, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016) and China’s Gilded Age (2020), both recommended by The Economist. In China’s Gilded Age, Ang introduced a new typology of corruption. She differentiates “access money” – which can be legalized, institutionalized, and found in advanced economies – from the conventional focus on bribery, embezzlement, and extortion in corruption studies. Based on this typology, she piloted a cross-country measure of different types of corruption: the Unbundled Corruption Index (UCI). China’s Gilded Age received the Douglass North Book Award from SIOE “for the best book in organizational and institutional economics” and the Alice Amsden Book Award from SASE for “best book that breaks new ground in the study of economic behavior,” and an honorable mention for the Barrington Moore Prize in Historical Sociology. Ang’s work on unbundling corruption and “access money” in advanced economies was featured in Freakonomics Radio. That episode was described by the host Stephen Dubner as “one of the most powerful and fascinating pieces we’ve done in some time.” Professor Ang is active in public education and engagement. She serves as a Trustee of the Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company, a guardian of the Trust Principles of independence, integrity, and freedom from bias in news reporting. Apolitical named her among the world’s 100 Most Influential Academics in Government, for research that “provides insights into policy problems [and] contributes innovative ideas and solutions.
You can read the report Shining a Light here.
