KEY POINTS:
When plague, famine, nuclear war or some other vehicle of mass destruction eventually lays waste to the planet, one thing will survive along with the cockroaches - Speaker's tours.
So entrenched is this perk on the parliamentary calendar that a politician as steeped in logic as the Prime Minister was yesterday forced to throw logic out of the window to defend the latest outrage surrounding this annual taxpayer-funded overseas junket.
You've heard it all before. The official justification for such trips is typically that the contacts made with fellow parliamentarians are "invaluable in building reciprocal ties with other countries, while informing MPs about regions of growing importance to New Zealand in both trade and diplomatic terms".
That rationale has been blown out of the water. Four of the five MPs on next month's two-week business-class Speaker's tour to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are retiring from Parliament in a few short months. What does the taxpayer gain from this pre-departure jet-setting jaunt?
Sure, the delegation will produce a report some months after they return _ a report which no one will bother reading.
Helen Clark was left defending the indefensible when she was quizzed about value for money yesterday. Somehow she kept a straight face as she lauded the trips as vital exercises in "diplomatic outreach". She made it sound like the MPs accompanying Margaret Wilson were going out of a sense of patriotic duty. All those receptions, cocktail functions, official lunches and dinners ... it's hard work. But according to Clark, being election year, only those MPs quitting politics wanted to do it.
National and Labour put up a united front. John Key simply wiped his hands of the matter, saying it was up to the Speaker to comment. However, National nominated maverick MP Brian Connell as one of its two members on the tour. It is unusual reward for someone who is not currently deemed worthy to be a member of the National caucus.
However, National strategists may have waived the trip in front of Connell as a good behaviour bond this side of the election.
Excepting Wilson, who as Speaker would obviously go anyway, and NZ First's Peter Brown, who is not quitting politics, the trip amounts to a golden handshake for three of the five MPs.
Such was the united front even Act's former perkbuster Rodney Hide was reluctant to ping his parliamentary colleagues. But then he was on the last Speaker's tour to hit the headlines _ the one which went to South America in 2001.
Then Speaker Jonathan Hunt foolishly refused to released an advance copy of that tour's itinerary. That guaranteed constant media scrutiny of every handshake, meeting, and vineyard stop on what was dubbed the Tango Tour after the delegation was treated to a demonstration of the famous dance in Buenos Aires. Wilson has not made the same mistake with what may be remembered as the Polka Tour. But the scrutiny will now be just as intense.
