The Public Service Commission will run a rapid review of the Ministry of Justice after one of its staff stayed on full pay for five years while facing criminal charges, Justice and Public Service Minister Paul Goldsmith announced on Wednesday.
The review will be led by Debbie Francis and Steve Haszard, and will examine the ministry’s wider operations and performance as well as its handling of the case. Goldsmith has also directed Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche to write to every public service chief executive with guidance on managing employment cases that involve criminal proceedings.
“What happened with the former Ministry of Justice employee Russell Harrison is utterly unacceptable,” Goldsmith said in his announcement. “I am seriously concerned about how this occurred. It was mishandled consistently for five years.”
He said business owners across New Zealand work their way through difficult employment matters every day, and New Zealanders expect the public service to show the same level of practical management. “Paying somebody for five years for not working cannot be justified,” he said in the release.
Harrison, a former Lotto presenter, started at the ministry on 21 June 2021 as a kaiarahi, a navigator who helps families find their way through the Family Court. Nine days later he was charged as part of the international police operation known as Trojan Shield, which used a compromised encrypted messaging app to sweep up organised crime suspects across dozens of countries. He was suspended on full pay on 7 July 2021.
The suspension ran for almost exactly five years. Harrison pleaded guilty to money laundering on 19 June this year and his employment was ended on 24 June, after what the ministry has described as a brief employment process. He is awaiting sentencing.
Neither the ministry nor the minister has published a total figure for what he was paid over that period. The advertised pay band for the navigator role was $85,562 to $116,273 as at February 2026, which puts five years of salary in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. 1News, which first reported the arrangement in early July, put the cost in the same range.
Stuff reported that while he was suspended on full pay from the justice job, Harrison earned at least $3,000 from Health New Zealand for appearing in a childhood immunisation campaign filmed in March 2023. That detail, more than the salary itself, is what has made the case awkward for the government. Two arms of the state were paying the same person at the same time, one of them for work he was not doing.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon called the situation utterly unbelievable and also unacceptable, according to Stuff’s reporting.
Secretary for Justice Andrew Kibblewhite has apologised. In a statement issued the same day as the minister’s announcement, he said the ministry got some key things wrong and that he apologised for that. The most significant error, he said, was what the ministry did when the police vetting report landed on the day Harrison was charged. “We should have moved to terminate his employment at that point instead of suspending him,” Kibblewhite said.
He also apologised for an earlier public statement from the ministry that turned out to be inaccurate, saying the error was in part driven by a desire to respond quickly. The ministry has set out five corrective actions it intends to complete by October, and says it will strengthen how it manages employment matters and how carefully it spends money that Parliament has appropriated to it.
The apology has not settled the matter. Goldsmith said his confidence in the ministry had been seriously shaken, and that his office only found out about the full picture because it asked, as RNZ reported. That is the part ministers tend to remember longest. A department that manages a problem badly can be fixed with better process. A department that does not tell its minister about the problem is a different kind of headache, and it is the reason the review covers the ministry’s operations generally rather than this single file.
There is a real tension underneath the political noise. An employee facing charges is entitled to the presumption of innocence, and public sector employers are cautious about dismissing someone before a court has ruled, because a wrongful dismissal finding carries its own cost. A ministry official quoted in the reporting made exactly that point, noting Harrison was in the eyes of the law innocent until proven guilty. What the review will have to work out is why that caution turned into five years of doing nothing, when the more usual answer is a considered decision within weeks or months, and periodic reassessment after that.
The wider guidance to chief executives suggests the government thinks this is not confined to one ministry. Goldsmith’s instruction to Sir Brian Roche applies across the public service, which implies ministers suspect other agencies have long running suspensions sitting quietly on the payroll. Those numbers are not routinely published, and if the review prompts agencies to count them, that will be the more useful outcome than any finding about a single case.
The timing matters too. The government has spent this term arguing that the public service had grown too large and too comfortable, and it goes into the October election with public sector headcount and spending as one of its main lines of attack. A case like this one is worth more to that argument than any amount of Budget detail, because it is easy to explain and hard to defend. Labour has not yet responded publicly. If you want to see where the parties actually stand on public spending and public services ahead of the vote, our voting tool lets you compare their positions.
No reporting date has been set for the rapid review. The Public Service Commission has also signalled a Performance Improvement Review of the ministry, a broader exercise that looks at how well an agency is run rather than at one decision.
What do you think should happen when a public servant is charged with a serious offence, and how long is too long to keep paying them? Leave a comment below and tell us.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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