MPs can often be heard complaining about the amount of travel they do, but figures released yesterday show their enthusiasm for travel greatly increased during the run up to November's election. Parliamentary travel budgets are a resource that parties can easily exploit for electioneering, and the latest figures are very revealing - see: Claire Trevett's $1.24m spike in MPs' travel costs and Andrea Vance's MPs' travel bills leap during election. Both journalists point to the significant increase in spending during the period that coincided with the last two months of the election campaign. According to Trevett's calculations, 'domestic travel and accommodation costs of MPs and ministers totalled $3.7 million from October to December - 51 per cent higher than for the same quarter in 2010'. The upshot is that politicians were out madly campaigning and using public funds to do so.
Is this a legitimate use of taxpayer money? Vance suggests not, citing the prohibition from Parliament's Speaker on 'using their taxpayer-funded travel perk for electioneering'. She also quotes ex-Labour leader Phil Goff, who says that it's difficult to separate legitimate parliamentary activity from electioneering. While this is true - to some extent - such arguments do not justify the incredibly lax rules on MP use of public funds, nor the exemption that the politicians have given themselves from the Official Information Act, which means the public isn't allowed to see the detail about how the funds are spent.
As I argued back in 2006 in the Herald, this all amounts to an unhealthy system of subsidised political activity - see: Backdoor funding affects democracy. It's not commonly known that millions of dollars of parliamentary funding is the main source of income for parliamentary political parties on which they have come to rely for their partisan electoral activities.
Police investigation of John Key's RadioLive show is also occupying the attention of politicos, even though the details of the case are relatively difficult to comprehend - see, for example, RadioLive in gun, PM ducks censure. The best overall coverage of the issue is from legal expert Graeme Edgeler, who very clearly explains the main points, while arguing why RadioLive's breach of the law might not be deemed serious.
Labour and Winston Peters, however, disagree about the seriousness and are having a field day. But there seems to be a contradiction in Labour's position - do they regard the RadioLive show as illegal in itself or is their main complaint that Phil Goff wasn't invited to host his own show? And though Winston Peters is calling for further scrutiny of John Key by the police, David Farrar points out that Peters was guilty of the same offence in 2008 - see: Will anyone call him on his hypocrisy?.