New Zealand owes a huge debt of gratitude to John Ryan, our retiring Supreme Auditor. He has carried out his role as the Controller and Auditor General with great wisdom, courage, objectivity, humanity and integrity, the qualities of a strong leader.
John began his term as Controller and Auditor-General on 2 July 2018 and will end it exactly 7 years later, on 1 July 2025. His seven years as Auditor General have flown by. Without fear or favour, he selected some of the most challenging areas of government for closer scrutiny.
After graduating from Victoria University of Wellington with a Bachelor of Commerce and Administration, John studied strategic leadership at Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants.
He applied his knowledge of strategy and accounting in senior executive positions across a range of public sector organisations. During his more than 40 years mostly spend in the public sector, he led some of the largest programmes of capital works, large-scale change management, and significant regulatory reform.
Before his appointment as Auditor General, John was a board member of the Royal New Zealand Ballet, the New Zealand Festival, and the Wellington Jazz Festival.
His wide expertise and experience enabled him, as Auditor General, to dig deeply into complex areas of government.
John has shouldered the responsibility of leadership aimed at maintaining New Zealand’s reputation as having one of the world's least corrupt public sectors. This is reflected in our consistent ranking in the top 5 countries of Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index.
Throughout his career, he has demonstrated the clarity of thinking that comes when people choose to exercise integrity as core to everything they do.
John developed and promulgated the first ever “Integrity Framework” for the public sector in New Zealand. He was able to progress this even though his term was impacted by COVID and the constraints it generated. Despite tight public sector resources, time, limited availability of people with the qualities to interrogate with accuracy and sensitivity, he motivated the implementation of this integrity framework across a range of central and local government organisations.
John demonstrated that exposing bad policy implementation is the best way to ensure faults are identified and addressed. And following on from this, the corruption is mitigated and its consequences managed.
He did this facing the challenge of managing the publishing of results of poor policy implementation conscious of the potential damage to New Zealand’s reputation for low levels of corruption. This is a particular risk because measures such as Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index are based on perceptions. People’s perceptions can often be one-sided, with negative information blinding them to the more complex reality that corruption first needs to be exposed and expounded before it can be terminated.
Further attention was generated to corruption prevention through John’s introduction of “Integrity Day”. Integrity Day included a range of national and international speakers who highlighted the range of problems faced by senior leaders. The open discussion compared different approaches for solving them. Examples included dealing with uncertainty and the description of improved outcomes when organisations adopted robust integrity systems.
John enthusiastically adopted the Public Sector Leaders Integrity Forum (LIF) initiative developed by his predecessor, Auditor General Lyn Provost in conjunction with Transparency International New Zealand (TINZ). Throughout his term, his office has hosted regular leaders Integrity Forums where public servants discuss core topics and share strategies for preventing corruption. This assists in strengthening integrity systems within their organisations and across the public sector.
In his role as Secretary General of all Pacific Auditor Generals, John has run quarterly integrity webinars and his office undertook integrity assessments of public sector agencies in several Pacific countries.
Our world is experiencing the greatest level of uncertainty seen in most of our lifetimes. There is a growing lack of trust and this reduction in trust is spiralling, even enabling, more fraud and corruption.
John has certainly earned a long rest, after 7 years of intense mahi. Let’s hope that it will be a regenerating rest as we will all gain from continued leadership like John Ryan’s during these trying times.
