Curran ClareCLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): At the very heart of our democracy of our democratic system lies the ability for elected politicians to communicate freely with whomever they want and to exchange information in the course of their work without fear—without fear of their work of their communications or of their attached documents being examined or filtered by any other party. If that is threatened then our ability to represent is compromised.I would like to ask Jonathan Coleman: how is sticking up for democracy not relevant to the people of New Zealand? I have got two valid and very vital questions to ask. Is New Zealand becoming more corrupt? Is the National Government allowing and enabling New Zealand to become more corrupt and less transparent? The answer to both those questions is sadly yes. That is not just my opinion; there is a raft of evidence.There is slippage. In January New Zealand slipped from two to four on the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index after being at the very top for 8 years. There is lip service. There is the open Government partnership amongst 69 countries that we signed up to—which sounds good but we have not been fulfilling our requirements. In March we got a letter from the partnership saying that we had acted contrary to the process.There is stonewalling. There are delays to responding to Official Information Act requests. This has got so bad that the Ombudsman did an inquiry. The result was a slap on the hand but at least the new Ombudsman has said that he will institute league tables. This is the kind of response we are getting to Official Information Act requests—black pieces of paper and no actual information. There is gagging of whistleblowers. The system that protects whistleblowers is out of date and ineffectual. It is weak. Our law is weak. Government pursues whistleblowers instead of actually addressing the problems of waste and unlawful behaviours that they expose.There is turning a blind eye—the Michael Woodhouse immigration scam is a classic example of that. There are deliberate and misleading U-turns. Bill English who used false figures to veto the paid parental leave legislation is another example. There are so many examples of creeping corruption by this Government that the next transparency index result will inevitably see us slip further. Those examples include the teapot tapes the Prime Minister's supposed lost texts to Rachel Glucina about ponytail-gate" the Oravida scandal the Saudi sheep-deal scandal the Skycity convention centre debacle and political interference in our media.We know about New Zealand On Air. We know about Māori Television. More recently we have seen Television New Zealand the State-owned broadcaster spend $60 million renovating its building in Auckland—$23 million or 64 percent more than it told us that it would cost and to do that it got a 2-year holiday on paying its dividends to the Government. Two weeks ago it had a big opening of a new flash building in Auckland and guess who opened it: John Key the Prime Minister. Was the Opposition invited? No. That is very worrying—very worrying—and a very worrying sign. Meanwhile funding for our public broadcaster Radio New Zealand has been frozen for the last year; our only independent non-commercial media has not been given any more money. The media environment is shrinking with the collapse of the traditional business models and the number of news media outlets is shrinking; that is a real worry for our democracy. The culture in Cabinet has more in common with a hedge-fund boardroom than a public office accountable to the public interest.The upshot is that this is not an honest Government. This is not a Government of transparency and integrity. Integrity is precious. Whether you are an individual an organisation or a country it is something we should value. Unfortunately ours is going down the drain and our democracy is eroding."