Cleaning up and doing it right

Corruption may be inevitable, but inaction is not. Manuel Delia delves into the measures necessary to combat corruption, foster transparency, and ensure justice. From policy reforms to civic responsibility, he outlines how we can protect the integrity of our democracy and business landscape for a fairer future.

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Corruption will always exist, just as murder and tax fraud will always exist. What matters is what we do about it. Just because some people will always try to get away with it, we should not stop seeking to prevent it and punish it when we find it.

We must do that because we cannot have a fair and level business playing field for our economy to thrive. That's what corruption is: an unfair manipulation of the order of things; it's the guy flashing money at the bouncer and skipping the line outside the club. It's who people are left behind, how the poor are robbed to pay the rich, how the honest are cheated so the crooks can flourish.

It's not the fact that we've experienced corruption to a hitherto unknown scale over the last decade that is particularly galling. It's that we seem unable to do anything about it. We can, and should, keep thumping the book to insist perpetrators of crimes we've experienced are made to pay for their misdeeds. But we need to do more. We need to create a better future where the industrial-scale corruption of the past few years can be prevented and punished when found.

Here's an order book of things we can do. First, we should upgrade our precautions to avoid corruption before it happens.

We need to upgrade our "revolving door" policies. Right now, a government regulator of a business sector must wait a few years before moving to a job with a business they used to regulate. Say the financial services boss in the government office cannot jump into a job working for a bank they used to supervise. It seems logical: you'd want to avoid people using their government powers to help a business they are secretly agreeing to work for. However, the same should apply to government ministers and their senior staff. After all, they're writing laws that influence business interests. Those laws should not be helping someone who has secretly promised the minister a future job.

Speaking of which, ministers must have an open door to talk to businesses and their owners. Political and economic leaders must dialogue because they work in the same country. The risk is not knowing what is said behind closed doors. Are ministers treating all interests fairly? Transparency is key: Keep and publish a record of all meetings ministers hold and measure the "legislative footprint." How much influence has anyone outside of the government had on writing laws? Measure it and let us know.

It's not just about the ministers, by the way. It's their staffers, too. They're handpicked from outside the public service and loyal only to their bosses, not to some independent civil service ethos. Winning the next election is, for them, the priority. So if we must have these people running the show on behalf of ministers – I did that job for some years, so I'm not trying to say we should stay without, though God knows we should have less of them – they should be subjected to the same transparency rules that apply today to ministers. Because if they're bribed, they can cause about as much damage as their hapless bosses.

Take, for example, the rules on declaring assets. Ministers tell us every year how much money they have and how much money they make. The principle is that if they're only making the money they are entitled to as paid state officials, they should not be getting more prosperous than they could have saved. The system needs to get better. There's no punishment today if a minister is caught hiding some of their wealth. If they hide money in their spouse's accounts, there's no way of knowing. And ministers' staffers, too, are vulnerable to bribes. They should be declaring their assets too.

Let's clarify: we need political parties as much as we need courts and police stations. Many of us will never have anything to do with political parties. But that doesn't mean we can opt out of them as much as we can't opt out of courts just because we never expect to find ourselves in one. The next thing we need to get clear is that if you want to support a political party, you should vote for it. Your vote (however wealthy you are) is worth the same as your poorest neighbour. That's the essence of democracy: deciding how our country is run, we all have the same influence no matter our wealth.

Compare this again with courts. If an employee sues their boss for unfair treatment, the judge who decides will not be paid by either the boss or the employee. If they were, the most prosperous party would win. The state pays the judge, and the judge will get their salary no matter how they decide. It should be the same with political parties. We can't have wealthy donors controlling what happens. The state should pay political parties so they can make policies that are in the public interest.

We must look again at the law protecting whistleblowers because our one isn't working. This is not just about government corruption. Consider a business illegally dumping waste and poisoning water, saving on disposal costs and outperforming law-abiding competitors. There's no law to protect an employee of that perpetrator from retribution for blowing the whistle on the illegality. We don't have a law that works anyway. And it's that way because whistleblowers could expose corrupt politicians even as we speak; some people don't want that. Well, it's time to change that.

There's work to be done on the repressive side of things, too: what happens when someone's caught cheating despite all the preventive measures that failed to dissuade them? To begin with, someone needs to catch them. Our policing in this area is ridiculously weak. We need specialist anti-corruption cops who are free of political interference and control. Right now, we have a multitude of entities that have part of the responsibility to fight corruption, but no one has all of it. Things that today are happening in the police, in the magistrate's court, in the attorney general's office, in the permanent commission against corruption, in the office of the commissioner of Standards in Public Life, in the national audit office, and in some other sundry places should be brought together in a place adequately armed to choke this dragon.

They'll need updated laws to help them catch the thieves, too. Our definition of "corruption" is wonky. If someone in political power misuses their authority to profit themselves, that's corruption. If someone in political power misuses their authority to obstruct or mislead an investigation, that's corruption. We should be able to punish those actions as crimes. We need a law against racketeering: an anti-mafia law that captures organised criminals who use corruption as a cheaper form of coercion to divert money that belongs to the public into their pockets.

And there's another thing we must change. Though we must accept that corruption will always exist, we must insist that there must always be a response. We can't just delegate law enforcement to stop it. All honest citizens and all clean businesses must denounce corruption where they see it.

Corruption needs a civic response: protest, voter behaviour, journalism, and activism. If we measure progress by the public's willingness to stop corruption, these last ten years are not only a cause of fear and regret; they are a cause for hope that if we keep insisting on the changes that need to be made, we can look forward to new beginnings.

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