Labour appointees and conflicts: how hard is it really?

ANALYSIS: And then another one happened.

Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon has resigned, with the Government putting out a reasonable amount of material around the nature of his departure.

Essentially the Government says that he had a conflict of interest. In particular, he had interests in emergency housing and did not declare them when the Human Rights Commission was doing an investigation into … emergency housing.

Foon insists he did not know he had to declare those interests, and he rejects the assertion that he didn’t declare the interests.

READ MORE:
* Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon resigns over failure to declare $2m conflict of interest
* Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon donated to both Labour and National
* Labour’s sensible decision to pause on hate speech law

Speaking to 1News the former six-time mayor of Gisborne said that he had been “chucked under the bus”.

The minister in charge, Deborah Russell, said that it was “probable” that Foon would have been sacked if he hadn’t resigned.

Appointed by then Justice Minister Andrew Little in 2019, Foon has been a controversial figure, earning the ire of National and ACT in particular for which race issues he decided to involve himself in. Especially saying that “police are racist”.

For Labour, however, this is yet another problem. It is yet another person associated with or appointed by Labour who doesn’t seem to understand that they didn’t have a conflict of interest, didn’t do much wrong and didn’t need to declare it.

Foon doesn’t appear to have seen that having interests in emergency housing – from which he received $2.3 million from Government from 2019 to 2023 – or keeping quiet about those interests when the Human Rights Commission did an inquiry into whether the sector was complying with its human rights obligations, was problematic.

It comes just the week after it turned out that Transport Minister Michael Wood had owned a bunch of Auckland Airport shares that he hadn’t sold, for a reason that is still a bit unclear. He was told by the Cabinet office to sort it out 12 times.

In non-government land if a company secretary told an executive they needed to sort out a conflict and it required a second caution, it would be very embarrassing. A dozen times would have been a good number after that person had lost their job.

Jan Tinetti is up before Parliament’s privileges committee for potentially misleading the House, finding out about it, but not correcting the record for months.

Stuart Nash, who breached cabinet confidentiality and told donors where a law change was at after a couple of other incidents, at least copped to the fact he did the wrong thing each time. But nevertheless, he did it in the first place.

Add into that Te Whatu Ora chief Rob Campbell who thought it was alright to slam National about racist dog whistles on LinkedIn – and also said he did nothing wrong. He lost his job.

Former Labour Minister and chair of ACC Steve Maharey offered to resign after writing (mostly boring) columns which also took aim at the National Party. It breached impartiality “at the lower end of the spectrum”, also fell foul of the public service code of conduct, and kept his job.

It is now the time to ask – if it wasn’t before – whether there is something a bit rotten in the political system where falling short of the highest levels of probity are treated with a shrug.

Or, where they are treated seriously, those who fall foul of the rules don’t see what is wrong.

None of these things are crimes of the century and there’s no evidence of any graft, but the accretion of them just gives the whole government – and some of those it appoints – an entitled, arrogant and slightly smelly vibe.

It’s another bit of bad news for Labour.