Take the scissors to the plastic

There's been a coordinated series of mea culpas emanating from the Beehive this morning in the wake of the story about ministerial credit card misuse.

At 9.11am, Housing Minister Phil Heatley issued an unreserved apology for using his ministerial credit card, paid for by the taxpayer, for non-work purposes, including a family trip to the Nelson-Marlborough region (where he had speaking engagements) and two bottles of wine at the National Party's annual conference.

Four minutes later, at 9.15am, Energy Minister Gerry Brownlee issued a similar, if slightly less fulsome, apology for using his credit card to take his electorate staff out for lunch. Gerry's decided to cut up his ministerial card altogether.

Both ministers said they had also apologised to the prime minister for their actions.

Clearly this was a coordinated effort to try to cauterise this particular wound before it bleeds all over the Beehive carpets. John Key at least has learnt a valuable lesson over MPs' expenses, which is deal with any perception of misappropriation or wrongdoing immediately.

Key let the fuss over Finance Minister Bill English's housing allowance and the previous rort involving Heatley and some of his fellow ministers who were charging their own properties out to the taxpayer drag on far too long.

So the ministers have apologised, paid back the money, and Key has given them a good ticking off in public in this morning.

End of story? Not quite. The odd unintentional error on the work plastic is understandable. But questions need to be raised about A) why Heatley in particular continued to charge up expenses he wasn't entitled to and B) why Ministerial Services, which scrutinised the accounts, did nothing about it.

Because to believe Key's claim that he believes that neither minister thought he was doing anything wrong, one must instead conclude that both Heatley and Brownlee are stupid. And they're not.

But how else to explain Heatley's thinking that somehow taking his wife and kids and a car on the Interislander and charging up dinners around the top of the South Island could possibly be construed as ministerial business?

Picking up the tab for some booze at the National Party's conference is even more glaring. Party conferences are PARTY business. NOT ministerial business. That rule has been around for a hundred years, and it's difficult to see how Heatley could not have understood this.

Likewise Gerry Brownlee's decision to use the taxpayer plastic to pay for lunch with his electorate staff. He should have used his own electorate MP's allowance to pay for this, or, God forbid, even paid for it himself. Brownlee has been around long enough to know better.

Steven Joyce should have known better, too, than to accept Heatley's paying for the pair of them to dine at a swish restaurant in Heatley's own electorate. Joyce was entitled to dine as he was out of his electorate on ministerial business. Heatley was entitled neither to dine nor to pay for Joyce.

Some of these examples of ministerial misspending might be more forgivable if the rules had changed, or if the ministers hadn't had fair warning to watch their step previously. But some of the spending occurred after the whole furore over MPs' expenses last year. The bottles of wine Heatley bought were purchased on the same day as the Dominion Post broke the story over English's housing expense claims.

And where was Ministerial Services in all of this? The Department of Internal Affairs has a deserved reputation for cringing, lickspittle behaviour when it comes to their political masters, but this takes the cake.

Someone should have had the guts to pull Heatley up and refuse his expense claims, or at the very least tell him he was in breach of the rules. It doesn't appear that has happened. Even yesterday, when Fairfax Media was asking questions about the rules, the department ran and hid behind the Official Information Act, refusing to answer journalists' questions.

No wonder John Key is angry this morning. Heatley, Brownlee, and Joyce are three of his most senior ministers. This isn't a case of a lowly backbencher or junior minister in trouble like Richard Worth.

Key will be well aware that the public gets furious at this sort of behaviour by MPs, and ministers in particular. Even if Heatley and Co really meant well, voters could be forgiven for seeing the spending as cavalier and careless at best.

They might also think that ministers earn enough of a salary and get enough perks and allowances without needing to flash the public plastic around as well, and that perhaps ministers could pay for their own dinners on occasion, even when on business.

Heatley and the others who hold ministerial cards should follow Gerry's lead and cut them up. There are plenty of other ways ministers can charge expenses or get the Crown to pay directly. Ordinary MPs don't have credit cards, and can only claim back actual and reasonable expenses.

Ministers should be treated no differently.  

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