Rosemary McLeod: Case for diplomatic immunity

Inflicting cost-cutting on the new combined Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade was always going to be an interesting proposition. The diplomatic corps is expected to be an elite, after all, well educated, masters of the art of the loaded and the clandestine exchange. They would resist.

They wouldn't use explicit means. Too uncivilised. They'd use protocols and words, their skills trained at endless cocktail parties among others of their ilk from many nations, degrees from out of little universities expected to foot it with the best from Harvard and Oxford. Try dealing with people like that.

I know about these things because I've read Duff Cooper's marvellous biography of the wily French statesman, Charles-Maurice, Prince de Talleyrand. The book may be 70-plus years old and Talleyrand dead a lot longer, but I doubt that it's dated.

My vote is with the staff so far. I'd say they won the first round of the game by pointing out that their salaries and allowances compensate for spouses being unable to work when they're on foreign postings, and their children needing to attend suitable schools in countries where there may be few of them. On top of that, they probably have to store the contents of their homes and rent them out when they're overseas, which is costly, as any dejected landlord viewing the inevitable damage will tell you.

Is there envy in the way we're supposed to look at these people, because they can get to live overseas and be paid for it? Or is it just that they suffer from not being able to achieve measurable outcomes that a bookkeeper can applaud?

A seeming counter-leak to media last week revealed that $218,857 was the top salary among these international players, the largest allowance paid $200,000, the largest education bill for offspring $213,780, and that highest residential bill (presumably for rent) was $439,518. Halve those sums to be realistic in the world outside this country and they're hardly phenomenal amounts.

Perhaps Foreign Affairs staff leaked that data themselves. If the sums are accurate, you see, we pay top-level ambassadors and negotiators, who represent us abroad, a fraction of what we pay city council chief executives. The Kapiti Coast District chief executive gets $285,000 a year for goodness' sake.

Now we're told a repair man working in an overseas NZ posting has been paid $154,000, and that it's not uncommon for Foreign Affairs and Trade staff to collect $100,000-plus a year in allowances. We're not told how the true cost of their employment is broken down, but costs can be high in some postings. A look on the net shows the going rate for a well-qualified maintenance carpenter in Westminster is about $2000 a week, or $104,000 a year if he does basic eight-hour days. A one-bedroom flat in that posh area costs about $700 a week, and I found a nice three-bedroom house in Islington at $8000 a week. Or would we want our staff there to live in run-down areas with huge commute times?

What irks me isn't the cost of keeping up high-level contact overseas, which is necessary for our long-term interests, and has to attract top people. It's what we pay the CEOs of our energy companies, formerly owned by us and run by men in grey cardigans who caught the bus to work, carrying their lunch in brown paper bags, and lived in state houses.

Doug Heffernan, head of Mighty River Power, gets $1,769,342 a year; he's had a 34 per cent pay increase since 2010. Don Elder, of Solid Energy, gets $1,410,000, Mark Binns, of Meridian Energy, $1,220,620, and Albert Brantley, of Genesis Power, $1,180,000. We created these princelings at home, not in London. Why we needed to beats me.