I once watched a judge roll her eyes so hard I expected the registrar to gather them from the floor.  What extraordinary proposition had produced this display? That the Moon landing was staged? That reptiles controlled the Reserve Bank? That Jacinda Ardern was communicating with the United Nations through a secret transmitter concealed inside the Beehive?  No.

The allegation was that three people who worked together had coordinated to discredit a colleague and claim credit for that person’s work.  Apparently, this was too fantastic even to contemplate.

The Phrase That Ends the Inquiry

“Conspiracy theory” has become less a description than a social ejector seat.  Apply the label and nobody has to consider the evidence. The allegation is removed from respectable discussion before it has been tested. The person raising it becomes the subject of the inquiry, while the alleged conduct quietly disappears from view.

This is an impressive trick because the expression now contains almost every conceivable form of coordinated wrongdoing. Workplace collusion sits beside alien autopsies. Corporate price-fixing shares a shelf with flat Earth cosmology. A claim that three mutually interested witnesses agreed upon a convenient story is treated as intellectually related to the belief that the British Royal Family consists of shape-shifting lizards.  The absurd theories provide camouflage for the credible ones.

This does not mean conspiracy allegations should be accepted without proof. It means they should not be rejected without it.

A conspiracy allegation is a hypothesis. It may be true, false or partly true. Its merits depend upon the evidence, not upon how embarrassed respectable people feel when someone uses the word.

Conspiracies Are Not Paranormal

A conspiracy is not, by definition, vast, ingenious or implausible.  At its simplest, it is an agreement between two or more people to do something unlawful. In ordinary conversation, the word is also used more loosely to describe coordinated deception or misconduct, even where the agreed conduct may not constitute a criminal offence.

New Zealand law does not regard conspiracy as a symptom of mental illness. Section 310 of the Crimes Act 1961 makes conspiring to commit an offence a crime.  The law therefore maintains two strangely incompatible attitudes.  

In the criminal jurisdiction, the Crown may stand before a court and allege that several people secretly agreed to commit an offence. The allegation will be heard, witnesses examined and circumstances considered.  In other proceedings, however, a person who suggests that several colleagues coordinated their accounts may be treated as if they have arrived carrying diagrams of UFO flight paths.

The workplace example is not necessarily a criminal conspiracy. It may instead involve collusion, dishonesty, a breach of employment obligations or a common attempt to appropriate someone else’s work. But the underlying factual proposition is thoroughly ordinary: people with a shared interest may communicate, coordinate and lie.  People do it every day.

Secret Agreements Rarely Come With Minutes

Conspiracies and collusive arrangements are seldom proved by producing a document entitled “Minutes of our dishonest scheme”.  They are usually inferred from circumstances.

Did the people involved share a motive? Did they have an opportunity to communicate? Did their stories change in the same way? Do they repeat the same unusual error? Did they act in a sequence that makes little sense unless there was coordination? Are there messages, meetings or unexplained gaps in the record? Did each person receive some benefit from the outcome?

None of those matters necessarily proves an agreement. Together, however, they may justify an inference.  Courts examine circumstantial evidence constantly. They assess credibility, test competing explanations and decide whether an inference is reasonably available. That is what courts are for.

A judge is entitled to reject a conspiracy allegation that is vague, unsupported or contradicted by the evidence. A party making a serious allegation should identify the alleged participants, conduct and available evidence with reasonable particularity.

What should not happen is the substitution of ridicule for analysis.  An eye-roll is not a finding of fact.

History Keeps Producing Official Conspiracy Theories

The categorical disbelief is especially strange because history is full of conduct that would have sounded unhinged before it was proved.  

In 1985, agents of a supposedly friendly government travelled to New Zealand under false identities, placed explosives on a civilian ship in Auckland Harbour and sank it, killing Fernando Pereira. That is not a feverish internet theory. French intelligence agents really were sent to prevent the Rainbow Warrior from joining protests against nuclear testing. Two were arrested, convicted of manslaughter and later released early, decorated and promoted in France. The episode is now recorded as ordinary history by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage.

International organisations including the World Health Organization have documented the continued sterilisation of disabled people, Indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities and other groups without full, free and informed consent. What might once have been dismissed as an outrageous allegation is the subject of a formal interagency statement on forced and coercive sterilisation.

New Zealand’s own inquiries have repeatedly uncovered abuse, neglect and institutional protection that persisted across years and involved numerous people. The Royal Commission into Abuse in Care concluded that pervasive abuse in state and faith-based institutions amounted to a “national disgrace”. Survivors who had once been ignored, disbelieved or characterised as troublesome eventually became the principal witnesses to an official national reckoning.  The pattern is depressingly familiar.

1. First comes the complaint.

2. Then comes the disbelief.

3. Then comes the attack on the complainant.

4. Eventually, after enough documents surface and enough victims tell substantially similar stories, there is an inquiry.

5. The inquiry produces a report.

6. The government apologises.

7. Everyone solemnly agrees that lessons must be learned.

Nobody apologises for the eye-rolling.

McSkimming and the Respectable Narrative

The handling of allegations concerning former Deputy Police Commissioner Jevon McSkimming provides a particularly recent example of why institutional coordination and common interests cannot simply be laughed out of consideration.  The Independent Police Conduct Authority did not find that senior police officers had formed a criminal conspiracy, and it would be wrong to claim otherwise.

What it did find was that several people, predominantly at senior levels of Police National Headquarters, failed to respond appropriately to serious complaints. It found a largely “unquestioning acceptance” of the narrative advanced by McSkimming, failures to ask robust questions, an investigation closed prematurely, and efforts to bring a serious criminal investigation to an unduly rapid conclusion so it would not interfere with a job application.

The IPCA report said the officers concerned did not act with the intention of undermining the organisation’s integrity. Their actions nevertheless had that effect.  That distinction matters.

Coordinated outcomes do not always arise from an explicit agreement. People within an institution may protect the same person because they share assumptions, loyalties, incentives and fears. Each may tell themselves they are acting independently and reasonably. The result can look remarkably like an organised cover-up without anyone ever convening a meeting to organise one.

Sometimes there is a conspiracy.

Sometimes there is institutional conformity.

Sometimes several people simply understand, without needing to be told, which version of events will be rewarded and which version will end a career.

A serious decision-maker must remain capable of considering all three possibilities.

The Convenient Coincidence

Suppose three coworkers give similar accounts that damage a colleague and benefit themselves.  There are at least two possible explanations.

The first is that each person independently observed the same events and has truthfully described them.  The second is that they communicated, aligned their accounts or reinforced a shared version that served their interests.  Neither explanation should be chosen merely because it feels more respectable.

Indeed, excessive similarity may sometimes require examination. Independent recollections are rarely identical. People notice different details, remember events imperfectly and express themselves differently. When witnesses reproduce the same peculiar phrasing, omit the same inconvenient fact or make the same unusual mistake, coordination is one possible explanation.  Not the only explanation. A possible one.

Yet the allegation of coordination is frequently treated as inherently more extravagant than the claim that several interested people independently arrived at the same misleading account.  The coincidence receives the benefit of the doubt. The conspiracy receives contempt.

This is not scepticism. It is a preference for the explanation most flattering to the institution.

Scepticism Must Work in Both Directions

There are good reasons to approach conspiracy allegations cautiously.  People detect patterns where none exist. Suspicion can become self-sealing, with every denial treated as further proof. Large conspiracies are difficult to maintain because the number of documents, participants and opportunities for disclosure increases. Some theories survive only because contrary evidence is absorbed into the theory itself.

But those observations support careful investigation, not categorical dismissal.  Genuine scepticism must work in both directions. It should test the conspiracy allegation, but it should also test the official account. It should ask whether the alleged scheme is practical, but also whether the supposed coincidence is credible. It should scrutinise the complainant’s motives without pretending that officials, managers, police officers and professional witnesses have none.

Institutions are not neutral clouds. They are collections of people with relationships, ambitions, loyalties and reputations to protect.

The idea that three coworkers might cooperate to take credit for another person’s work is not extraordinary. The extraordinary proposition is that human beings cease to form alliances, exchange favours and protect one another the moment they enter a courthouse or obtain an impressive job title.

Wait for the Evidence, Not the Report

The answer is not to believe every conspiracy theory.  It is to stop treating the word “conspiracy” as a substitute for thought.

Require particulars. Examine communications. Compare accounts. Test motive and opportunity. Look for independent corroboration. Consider innocent explanations. Apply the correct burden and standard of proof.  Then decide.

Against that history, for a judge to greet the mere implication of collusion in a civil matter with incredulity is not healthy scepticism. It is unreasonable to the point of judicial delinquency.  Abuse in state care did not persist because every participant signed a formal pact. The McSkimming affair did not require minutes recording an agreement to protect a preferred narrative. Institutions close ranks. People coordinate accounts. Mutually interested actors protect one another. These are not exotic possibilities. They are repeatedly documented features of human organisations.

A judge may reject an allegation because the evidence does not support it. But to treat the allegation itself as inherently absurd is to refuse to perform the judicial function. Courts cannot solemnly accept coordinated concealment once a Royal Commission or IPCA report has made it respectable, while ridiculing civil litigants who ask them to consider the same possibility when it still matters.

There is a dark appropriateness in leaving the final word to Ted Kaczynski. Long before he became the Unabomber, his path included a deliberately brutal psychological experiment at Harvard. It would be simplistic to claim that experiment alone created him. It would be equally simplistic to pretend that secret institutional conduct leaves no casualties.

As Kaczynski put it:  “You can’t eat your cake and have it too.”