Fraudster must lose knighthood

Ngatata Love should certainly lose his knighthood following his conviction for fraud. But the Government might not decide to take this step. History suggests that governments are not only too quick to confer knighthoods, they are much too slow to remove them.

Love was convicted of defrauding his iwi, and is now serving two and a half years in jail. His crime is a betrayal of the cause for which he was knighted, which was for services to Maori. He defrauded the Wellington Tenths Trust, and the trust has rightly called for his knighthood to be removed.

Love’s case, therefore, is different from that of Sir Douglas Graham, the former minister of justice. Graham was knighted for services to Treaty settlements. He was convicted of making untrue statements to investors as a director of Lombard Finance, and sentenced to six months’ home detention and 200 hours’ community work, and ordered to pay $100,000 in reparation.

Former National prime minister John Key decided not to strip Graham of his knighthood on the grounds that his conviction had nothing to do with the cause for which he received his honour. Key also argued that the conviction was for a strict liability offence, where dishonest or criminal intent was not required for conviction.

These arguments are not available to Love. His crime was intimately connected with the reason for his knighthood. His crime was not one of strict liability. It was a case of serious fraud, and earned a much more severe punishment.

Bill English therefore has nowhere to hide in this matter. He cannot use his predecessor’s arguments as reasons to allow Love to keep his honour.

But the suspicion arises that English will want to find some kind of excuse. Hence his statement emphasising the ‘‘seriousness’’ of removing a knighthood. And this goes to one of the central problems with the official honours system.

This National Government, like many governments before it, has debased the currency of honours by handing them out too readily.

Knighthoods are still routinely given to people who do not deserve them. They are still routinely given to senior judges or other persons who have simply done the job they were very well paid to do.

A knighthood should not be the culminating reward for being a senior part of the establishment. But in fact that is how knighthoods first came about – as a weapon of patronage that allowed the monarch to reward his allies and buy off potential foes. And this role has continued, although it clearly clashes with modern notions of meritocracy.

Key also argued that in both New Zealand and the United Kingdom ‘‘it has been very rare for honours to be cancelled’’.

This is true, but it does not help Key’s argument. Sir Anthony Blunt, the keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, confessed in 1964 to being a Russian spy. He was allowed to keep his knighthood and his confession was kept secret. It was only years later, when Margaret Thatcher confirmed leaks of his treachery, that he lost the honour.

Even treason, it seems, is not necessarily enough to lose a man his knighthood.

Ngatata Love must not keep his title.