The Sport Integrity Commission is our newest independent crown entity, designed to rule over everything that brings fairness and safety to games.
Te Kahu Raunui CEO Rebecca Rolls. Copyright Photo by Marty Melville / www.Photosport.nz Photo: Marty Melville
New Zealand sport and recreation has a new body to oversee the sector.
It comes after a seemingly never-ending parade of sporting officials announcing inquiries, promising reviews, getting rid of problematic people and apologising to athletes.
RNZ sports correspondent Dana Johannsen calls 2018 the 'year of reckoning' for sport, as high-profile reviews played out in high performance environments including cycling, hockey and football.
Then in August 2021 the fact that high performance sport needed a serious shakeup was starkly brought to the fore with the death of cyclist Olivia Podmore.
Athletes lost trust in the system, and it was clear something needed to be done - and it was.
A bill to establish the independent crown entity, the Integrity in Sport and Recreation Commission - Te Kahu Raunui - was the last throw of the dice for the Labour government in August last year, and this month it opened its doors.
Today on The Detail we find out what led to the need for this organisation, what it will do, and what problems it hopes to solve.
"The athletes have trust and confidence in this new body, and they feel they will be well supported," says Johannsen.
"This one has really been a long time coming. It's off the back of about five or six years of feasibility studies and working groups, and of course all the many, many sports reviews that have played out in high performance sporting environments.
"It received cross-party support and I think that's probably a reflection that even though these types of issues in sport around abuse and bullying [and] discrimination have been a hot button topic, they haven't really been politicised at that level."
Several of the reviews that led to this highlighted the fact that there wasn't the capability across the sector to deal with integrity-related issues.
"The key thing about this new body is that it will be entirely independent of Sport New Zealand and High Performance Sport New Zealand, which was one of the key findings to come out a lot of the reviews - that there wasn't a lot of trust in the system."
Often the body doing the review was also having to investigate its own actions, including allowing toxic situations to fester.
Drug Free Sport NZ has been wound into the new body, and it will also take charge of a former mediation service. It will be in charge of anti-corruption, education, moves to stop bullying and sexual harassment, and will triage complaints from anyone. It has links to police fraud experts and child welfare professionals.
Its next job is to draw up an integrity code, which will happen this year, and get the various codes to sign up to it - something that will be voluntary.
The Detail also speaks to the new chief executive of the commission, former Football Fern and international cricketer Rebecca Rolls, who has an extensive history investigating fraud in the justice sector.
"Most people in the sport and recreation sector - pretty much everyone - they're there for the right reasons," she says. "There are tens of thousands - hundreds of thousands - of sport and recreation interactions that are positive every day."
Her job is to make sure that number stays high, and that people who do have issues get the help they need.
She says the need for such a commission has been boiling up for a while now.
"Like many countries, probably in the last 10 years we've had issues just starting to creep in."
And while New Zealand has a justified reputation for being relatively corruption-free, this body is there to make sure it doesn't take hold.
"We are very immature around competition manipulation," she says.
"We are vulnerable because of our time difference."
With all sport streamed now, while the rest of the world is asleep we are playing sport - and people want to bet on it.
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