this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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That's not what I meant. What I meant is that this is not an NZ thing, it's a whole world thing.
There are countries in the world where this kind of thing would have ended up with arrests of all parties involved including the politicians.
There are not many countries in the world where that would be true. And in many of the countries where that is true the arrests are often not on the judicial merits but more arbitrary wings of power blocks flexing their muscles.
One of the differences here is that in NZ we tend to find out about this sort of "light" corruption.
On another note, What will likely happen - along with most of the things our dairy lobby pushes, is that as trading partners like the US become unreliable and market realities change we will need to meet the standards we've just rejected anyway.
Its the same story as the eggs thing a couple years ago. The weakened voluntary standards didn't meet the demand of the market and those that hadn't opted to invest in what the market wanted were left behind. Same thing will happen to our agriculture if they want to continue to sell into Europe and China will just flex whatever they want so like it or not the increased standards will be coming down the line anyway.
First of all I don't see this as "light" corruption. Light corruption is slipping a cop a few dollars to let you go on a speeding ticket. This is corruption that's measured in tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. the fact that it's not just one cop but the entire apparatus of the government makes it HUGE corruption.
Secondly as I have stated elsewhere this kind of corruption is so prevalent that most people don't even perceive it as corruption. They have internalised it and accepted as business as usual. That's why you see it being reported, because there are never consequences for corruption out in the open.
For NZ to be "one of the most corrupt", that would need to happen in almost all countries. I suspect it's a single digit number of countries and possibly an amount you can count on one hand.
Most countries in Europe are less corrupt and so is China and Taiwan.
I'm not sure how to respond to that. You think the grass is greener but it's not.
I think in terms of corruptions the countries I listed are objectively less corrupt. In China people get the death penalty for taking bribes or doing favours.
Uh sorry but corruption in China is so bad there's even a Wikipedia page about how bad it is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_China
Having laws about things doesn't make it true, that's the whole point.
Wikipedia is hardly an unbiased source when it comes to politics. Just look at their Israel/Palestine pages for example.