Who would have thought that New Zealand had cor­rupt swin­dling lawyers. Espe­cially after the usual clap­trap from trans­parency inter­na­tional, the to pol­icy wonks who sit in cor­po­rate lux­ury in Welling­ton and declare New Zealand to be cor­rup­tion free.

Yet here we have the major New Zealand daily in their biggest paper of the week, the Sat­ur­day edi­tion with the front page head­lines telling us we have per­haps 200 cor­rupt lawyers swin­dling the legal aid system.

Dame Mar­garet Baz­ley must be com­mended because in say­ing that she is tak­ing on the estab­lish­ment. As Cor­po­ral Jones says “they won’t like it up them sir”. But the Her­ald arti­cle is but the tip of the iceberg.

Cac­tus Kate alerts us to NBR sub­scriber con­tent of a Judge who was in debt to a QC who unsur­pris­ingly kept on win­ning cases brought before him. The Judge owed the QC nearly a quar­ter of a mil­lion dol­lars. Essen­tially that Judge was bought and paid for. I hope he enjoys his retire­ment for he should be sacked immediately.

This of course will now play out again in the courts no doubt and in the var­i­ous law soci­eties round the coun­try and I’ll tell you some­thing right now for free, name sup­pres­sion will be exten­sively used because these folk are estab­lish­ment and the sys­tem will pro­tect their own.

Dame Mar­garet Baz­ley though will have only touched the tip of the ice­berg. If she thinks there are cor­rupt lawyers rort­ing the legal aid sys­tem there is a much larger prob­lem loom­ing where the large amounts of cash in the drug trade could lit­er­ally buy some­one a Judge, all the QC’s and even the jury. If there is cor­rup­tion in the Manukau Dis­trict court and cor­rup­tion in the QC’s cham­bers you may be sure that there is cor­rup­tion all the way in between.

This is the tip­ping point. We have had an MP jailed for cor­rup­tion, now we have a Judge, A QC and hun­dreds of lawyers being called cor­rupt. I think that Trans­parency Inter­na­tional can safely be ignored and we must face that New Zealand has become cor­rupt and it has slowly crept up on us like a thief in the night.

We MUST have an Inde­pen­dent Com­mis­sion against Cor­rup­tion and really rather urgently. no need to rein­vent the wheel either, sim­ply copy the Aus­tralian version.

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