Editorial: Bill's bill should be just the start

When the row in Britain about MPs' expenses was at its height, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that Westminister could no longer operate "like some gentleman's club where the members make up the rules and operate them among themselves".

The comment could apply equally in New Zealand.

Although, by comparison with the excesses of British MPs, the details of travel and accommodation expenses paid by New Zealand taxpayers to Westminister's antipodean counterparts are less lurid, Kiwis are no more impressed than Britons to learn just how much some MPs have spent on themselves in the past six months.

Further, news that the minister of fiscal rectitude, Deputy Prime Minister Bill English, has organised his affairs such that taxpayers dole out almost $1000 a week so he and his family can live in their $1.2 million Karori home, is dismaying, no matter how licit it might be.

That something is within the rules does not make it right.

The partial opening of the books has reminded a new generation of voters just how generous their parents were in conferring on long-serving former MPs perks that would make former Federation of Labour president Jim Knox blush.

MPs have acted in the best traditions of the old boilermakers' union in negotiating themselves deals that allow MPs such as Sir Roger Douglas, for example, to make a return trip to Britain with his wife, and pay only 10 per cent of the airfare. Taxpayers meet the rest.

Speaker Lockwood Smith and Prime Minister John Key plainly expect plaudits for agreeing to release, three-monthly, this kind of information about MPs' spending. They were forced into it and it should be only a start.

In fact, the travel and accommodation data published last week was the minimum MPs could get away with. It does not reveal, for example, where they travelled to or from, the purpose of the trip, and who, if anyone, accompanied them. Thus, taxpayers cannot ascertain how much they paid so that MPs could, say, help their candidates in the Mt Albert by-election or so candidates for the Greens' female leadership could drum up support countrywide.

MPs have gone uncharacteristically silent, probably because of a backroom deal between the major parties not to publicly criticise each other's spending. So voters are little the wiser as to precisely why, say, Labour's veteran Chris Carter, and its newbie, Kelvin Davis, have racked up such big travel bills.

The public will learn no more until MPs are shamed into subjecting the Parliamentary Service, which signs off MPs' expenses, to the Official Information Act, and accepting that, because their remuneration is at least three times the average wage, they look avaricious in claiming more.

Perhaps voter reaction to last week's figures will act as a catalyst. They might consider advocating the Swedish model; there, in that most transparent of democracies, any citizen can acquire almost any information they want about their MP, and it is where one was ousted from Cabinet for using her ministerial credit card to buy nappies for her baby.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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