Taxpayers struggle to stomach parliamentary junkets at the best of times. The trips are commonly explained as a way to provide legislators with valuable insights to how other countries handle problems common to all. But what can be said of a tour of eastern Europe next month awardedto five MPs, four of whom have announced their retirement at the coming election?
The four, National MPs Katherine Rich and Brian Connell, a former Labour minister Marian Hobbs and Speaker Margaret Wilson, who will lead the tour, have been chosen, their leaders say, precisely because they are retiring. Others would be too busy with the election campaign. The fifth tourist, New Zealand First's Peter Brown, presumably is superfluous to his party's now desperate prospects of survival.
The rationale will not wash; ordinary MPs are not campaigning in April. Even if we were to accept that no others were available, it does not follow that retirees should be sent. The Prime Minister prefers to cast parliamentary trips in diplomatic terms. They go, she says, where Foreign Affairs suggests a visit could promote some goodwill. We struggle with that rationalisation, too. Foreign parliamentary delegations come to this country all the time and do nothing of note. Reciprocal these jaunts may be but it is hard to see that they are more than mutual favours.
All five MPs are plainly receiving a trip as a token of their leaders' gratitude, probably in some cases for going quietly. But their business-class fares are an outrageous use of public finance. The justification for MPs' travel will be a long time recovering from this abject farewell jaunt.
