Labour on perks
Claire Trevett reports in the Herald:
Speaker Lockwood Smith will decide tonight whether to abolish MPs’ travel perks – but a wholesale scrapping is increasingly unlikely as some MPs argue to keep a limited discount for work trips. …
While there is broad consensus over scrapping the perks for holidays, Labour MPs at least are expected to argue in favour of retaining some funding for MPs to go on trips related to their parliamentary work, such as meeting MPs overseas or attending conferences. …
Labour leader Phil Goff has made it clear he sees the use of the rebates for holidays as unjustifiable but legitimate work-related trips were important. Opposition MPs and backbenchers are limited to official parliamentary delegations and there are few opportunities to take trips of their own initiative.
I support MPs being funded for international work related travel, but if you continue with it as an “entitlement” it will get abused, beyond doubt. If there is an entitlement for say one “work” trip every three years, then I am sure many MPs will manage to put together a trip which will qualify for funding.
The reality is that even some “work” trips have little parliamentary aspects to them, and are mainly party political or recreational. Quite easy to visit three or four European countries to catch up with your political mates, spend a few days being wined and dined at a party conference in the UK and for good measure see the All Blacks play as you just happen to be there at the same time.
That’s at one end of the scale. At the other end you might have say the Shadow Education Spokesperson travelling to a couple of countries to meet with Education Ministers, their officials and perhaps tour around some schools being run under a new model. That is entirely legitimate and should be encouraged (again many of the best policy ideas come from overseas).
Parliamentary Service should not be placed in a position where they have to judge whether a trip has enough “work” in it to qualify for a subsidised airfare.
The answer, as I have said before, is to fund international travel out of the leader’s budget. A party leader is far better positioned to decide whether a trip is worthwhile, and they will have an incentive not to say yes to the more dubious proposals, because the more they approve for travel, the less they have for other purposes (staff, policy, research, propaganda etc).
So it is vital that any money for travel not be ring-fenced. The moment you do that, you encourage people to come up with ways to use it all. It must be part of the “bulk” fund that goes to each parliamentary party.
Now there is an argument that the current allocation of $57,000 per (non-Executive) MP isn’t designed to cover international travel, other than for the Leader. This is a fair enough point, and a consequence of abolishing the travel perk could well be to increase the level of funding to the parliamentary party to allow legitimate overseas travel to be funded.
How much should any increase be? Well my rough calculation would be that on average you would expect an MP to do a trip say every three years. The senior ones will do more, and the junior ones less. The average cost of a business class fare is $9,000 so maybe you look at increasing funding from $57,000 to $60,000 per MP per annum. You could argue one trip every five years, so that would be $1,800 extra per annum.
The one thing that should not be done is to retain a travel subsidy as an “entitlement”. That will just lead to rorting of the system. National has signalled it wants the entitlement abolished. Labour’s position is less clear. I hope they will clearly signal tat they do support abolishing any international travel entitlement, rather than just modifying the criteria for it.
No other business has an “entitlement” for international travel. If there is a good case to travel overseas, you make a proposal to your boss, and they agree to fund it out of their budget – or not. That is how Parliament should work also.