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Greg Dixon’s Another Kind of Politics is a weekly column which appears on listener.co.nz on Friday mornings. If you enjoy a “serious laugh” - and complaining about politics and politicians - you’ll enjoy reading Greg’s latest grievances.
It really is the most vexing question. Who in our benighted, depressed and potholed little land is sticking it to taxpayers most: our fat-cat judges or our fat-cat parliamentarians?
On the one hand, we have our most senior judges, a group so privileged that, in addition to their salaries of up to $578,000, they receive, among their many wondrous perks and entitlements, free air travel and hotel accommodation for them and their spouses, limousines, long sabbaticals and, bizarrely, expensive pens and briefcases. Presumably they get their wigs, gowns and haughty attitudes on the taxpayer as well.
Nice work if you can get it. But only if you’re not a parliamentary fat-cat.
Our senior MPs are also a group so privileged they receive a salary of up to $327,100 (by mid-2026), and among the many extra perks and entitlements in their big trough are free domestic and international air travel for them, domestic airfares for their spouses, being ferried about in Crown limos, a security system for their house, a pension subsidy and sundry other privileges, like spending the outrageous sum of $4 billion on potholes while breaking election promises on cancer drugs.
Sadly, our MPs don’t get the fancy pens and briefcases. But, as we have been reminded again this week, what they can get, if they represent an electorate outside Wellington (which nearly all of them do, of course), is between $36,000, or if you’re a minister, $52,000 of taxpayers’ money to pay for their accommodation in the capital.
Which might be fair enough, one supposes, if it weren’t for the fact that on top of taking the accommodation allowance some of them are taking the piss as well.
In a situation not confined to this particular Parliament, quite a few MPs who are claiming this accommodation allowance are using it to “rent” their own Wellington properties back from themselves (or their spouse) — much like the Prime Minister was doing with his flash, mortgage-free apartment, until he was embarrassed out of it. (You can read more about that here.)
Don’t bother calling the cops on the rest of them. The practice is — inexplicably, shamefully — within the rules.
What does come as a surprise is that 14 of the 23 MPs who are pulling this legitimate-but-risible rort are members of National, the party led by the down-to-Earth millionaire Christopher Luxon who said last May that, “I am sick of taxpayers being treated like a bottomless ATM, to be raided at any time, for any reason.”
Two more of them represent the alleged taxpayers’ friend, the Association of Consumer and Taxpayers, or the Act Party, and seven come from spend-thrift Labour. What is more, all of these MPs have other homes in their electorates, and in the case of quite a few, other properties as well.
In short, thanks to what amounts to a loophole, these shameless MPs — over half members of parties preaching fiscal austerity to the rest of us — are using our money to help pay off their mortgages on their second (or third or fourth) house.
What’s more, three weeks ago, 16 of these MPs voted for a Budget that ended the popular first-home buyers’ grant, which in the year to February alone, helped over 10,000 buyers (42% of all first-home buyers during that period) into their first homes.
There’s actually a technical word for all of this: disgraceful.
But it’s worse than that, if you think about it. If these MPs were using the allowance to pay for rental accommodation or for hotels in Wellington (which many other MPs do), then the taxpayers’ money paying for their allowance would be flowing back into the city’s economy and supporting something other than the shameless 23.
Instead, these MPs are benefiting only themselves. In the first instance, the allowance helps pay off their mortgage. Then, when their need for a home in Wellington ends, they will be able to sell up for a likely handsome profit, none of which will benefit the wider Wellington economy or, more pointedly, go back to the taxpayers who helped them pay their mortgage in the first place.
Effectively, then, these MPs are screwing the taxpayer twice — legally, of course — while benefiting the Wellington economy not at all.
In a just world, they would be required to either refund the accommodation allowance when they sell, or handover a percentage of the capital gain — whichever is the greater. Or should stop claiming the allowance all together. It will never happen; fat cats don’t pass up a big, free meal of someone else’s Fancy Feast.
Meanwhile Wellington City Missioner Murray Edridge told RNZ that many thousands of people in the city are living on the streets, in caravans, and sheds, and cars, and crowded into houses, all with no hope that their lot will improve with the help of, say, an up-to-$52,000 accommodation allowance.
There’s a word for that, too. It’s the same word: disgraceful.
For the record, the names of these accommodation bludgers are: Tim Costley, Andrew Bayly, Gerry Brownlee, Judith Collins, Paulo Garcia, Paul Goldsmith, Barbara Kuriger, Melissa Lee, David MacLeod, Mark Mitchell, Stuart Smith, Louise Upston, Catherine Wedd, Vanessa Weenink (all National), Todd Stephenson, Simon Court (both Act), Kieran McAnulty, Willie Jackson, Deborah Russell, Jenny Salesa, Jan Tinetti, Duncan Webb and Arena Williams (all Labour).
What a pack of plonkers
From whine time to wine time. In a case of you-couldn’t-make-it-up, Parliament is soon to have its own brand of plonk.
The government agency that provides things like staff for MPs’ offices, security guards to keep the plebs at bay and runs the in-house slop-shop Bellamys, Parliamentary Services, is moving into the wine business with what it describes as an “in-house signature brand” to be flogged at Parliament’s watering holes and given to overseas dignitaries, presumably to go with the replica All Black jersey with their name on it.
Locally owned vineyards keen to slake the thirsts of the 80,000-plus visitors Parliament receives every year have been invited to provide their plonk for a “tasting panel” which will be made up of “diverse people” from across Parliamentary Services, which sounds like a contradiction in terms.
The excuse for this plonkers’ exercise is that it will apparently save money on Parliament’s overall booze bill, which is presumably enormous given the numbers quoted in the tender documents.
The winning winemakers will have to provide at least 5000 bottles of white, 5000 of red and 4000 of bubbles, with 300-plus bottles of port also required.
What remains unclear is what Parliament’s wine brand will be called. “The House Wine” is too obvious, and “The Grapes of Wrath” too appropriate.
No, it should be named after our teetotaller Prime Minister. Anyone for a glass of “Luxon’s Ruin”?
