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2:29 pm, June 7th, 2026 - 20 comments
Categories: class war, democracy under attack, democratic participation, Media, political parties, Politics, public services, social democracy, uncategorized -
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The last fifty years have seen a constant, sometimes brazen attack on the state sector. The recent proposed mass redundancy of civil servants is one of a chain of such events originating in the 1980s. Presented in terms of efficiency and economy (AI seems be the answer to anything and everything), at times with the trace of a crocodile tear, civil service redundancies rank up there with privatisation in the preferred policy settings of the neo-liberal.
Opprobrium is also heaped on our elected representatives, albeit with more circumspection. Calls for an end to liberal democracy still might be seen by most as extreme but nick a neo-liberal and out will gush arguments about parliaments being too big, too inefficient, too well-resourced, too expensive, too powerful, too captured, too determined to interfere with the rights of private property.
One sees how a belief in a small, well-intentioned, technocratic oligarchy (made up of the “right” sorts of people) supported by private sector-driven administration and measurement and a compliant judicial system, causes neo-liberals to salivate. COVID-related populist attitudes have reinforced this view.
Our elected governments and MPs have been under sustained attack for two generations by this world view. Journalistic acid is poured on the salaries and perks of our parliamentary representatives. Belly-deep in ordure wallow our pampered political porkers, it appears. Excessive salaries, perks for the grasping, cossetted lifestyles in the balmy halls of Wellington. Such a scandal! Where is the leadership to curb such excess? And the clamour to be an MP must be deafening as people seek an easy, well-paid life. Or is it?
Let’s look at the job. For potential parliamentary candidates, two questions are crucial. Why do they want to be an MP? Have they understood the nature of the job? Most people have a good answer for the first; the second is the more challenging for the job is demanding, unpredictable and exhausting.
The hours in Wellington are punishing. Between the sessions of the House, select committees, other committee activities, bill drafting. intra and inter-party meetings, dialogue with constituents, subject experts and petitioners, briefings of one sort or another, speech writing, document analysis, the life of the diligent MP between Monday and Thursday night is packed.
Performance is watched by whips, spokespeople, and leaders, as well as by the media. Sometimes publicly, sometimes not, slips are identified and pointed out. True, MPs receive secretarial and research support, but responsibility sheets home. Blaming the staff is never a good look.
Then, between Thursday night and Monday, MPs, including List members, are usually back in the constituencies and regions, meeting party members, constituents, local government politicians, community organisations, campaigners, and the rest of the civil society apparatus. Most MPs try to free parts of the weekend for family. MPs’ families know that this is often observed in the breach.
Very few MPs are “parachuted” into high status in Parliament, in part because parachuting has a mixed history. Most MPs, despite any previous career eminence, start at the bottom, work their way up by diligence and cooperation, and hope that they do not fall foul of the internal politics of the caucus and party. Many a talented MP has found a parliamentary career diverted by internal divisions. It is, after all, politics. And simple likes and dislikes play a part in Parliament, as they do in any workplace.
Again, caucuses are hot houses of ambition. There are some MPs happy to remain as rank-and-file caucus members, and to do an important job. There is much that is constructively collaborative in parliamentary life, based on MP application and energy. That said, some set their sights on ministerial, or higher, status, and this leads inevitably to jockeying for position. Such tensions are extremely wearing and can lead to serious loss of perspective.
The MP’s career is bounded by a three-year horizon. Every general election holds the possibility for the MP that they will be replaced, by internal selection decisions, by the voter. A parliamentary career is most uncertain. Safe parliamentary seats carry a premium and often enjoy particularly tense selection processes. And once safe seats change as populations grow and shift.
Then there is the question of scrutiny – by the media, by the voter, by colleagues, by the party. Few jobs face such consistent public appraisal. With the advent of social media and cameras in Parliament, no aspect of MP life is now free from scrutiny. Some protections are partially observed – families are generally off limits, for example – but even those limits may be breached today. It is life in a fishbowl.
Worryingly, today we cannot assume that MPs are safe from personal threats as they go about their work. Attacks on MPs’ offices have been known in the past, as have written and verbal assaults. Today, for a variety of reasons, the tenor of those attacks has increased, as seen overseas in other democracies.
One may suggest other arguments why an MP’s role is not plain sailing. Given that, is there any evidence of s shortage of people willing to come forward as a candidate? And the answer, on the surface at least, is no. Most parties enjoy competition, often fierce, for selection.
There is, however, more to this. There is an important interplay between knowledge, experience, and calibre in MP profiles, which speaks to the needs of parties, the parliamentary process and of the country. The skills required of an MP – intelligence, wisdom, experience, tolerance, judgement, application, ability to listen, for example – must also meet party and government needs in terms of expertise and portfolios.
One does not become an expert in tax or housing or macro-economic policy or trade overnight. No amount of technical support can impel an MP or minister over the policy line without a substantial technical grounding in the issues to hand. On-the-job training in this context can be risky! Moreover, MPs must deal with a civil service and advisers, often very clever, with their own skills and policy preferences. It’s a challenge.
This is why most parties actively canvas for skills and experience in potential candidates. The problem is that those skills are often in short supply and in high demand, enjoying substantial packages and, frankly, much less hassle than being an MP (see above). Even the most community-minded politically motivated person making progress in their career will think twice about the vagaries of a parliamentary career. And, if they do come round to the idea, convincing them that most MPs start at the bottom and will not be made minister overnight can be a challenge.
Just to cheer MPs up, the data for senior roles in the private sector commensurate with the responsibilities of an MP suggest base pay in the $200-300k bracket, to which is added a further package of rewards such as health insurance, performance bonuses, vehicles, in different combinations. Hence the MP package is broadly commensurate with the lower end of senior management packages in NZ. A quick run through MP-equivalent packages in OECD economies suggests that NZ MPs are at the lower end of pay and conditions.
Of course, there are areas of the MP package that could be improved in terms of reporting and targeting. Some of the current heated commentary around the broader salary package has identified some issues. Let such change be considered.
There is also a strong case to be made for political parties to take more seriously performance appraisal of caucus members. The argument that the voter provides this appraisal at the election is hopeless. No organisation is free from elements of under-performance. To borrow from Le Carre, Christ only had twelve, and one of them was bad.
Arguments may be made also for a greater pluralism in the origins and experience of parliamentary candidates in a changing New Zealand. Most parties are alert to this challenge and grapple with it, for better or worse, every three-year cycle.
However, let’s also recognise the importance of the MP’s role in a strong, stable, and respected parliamentary democracy. Let’s understand that most MPs perform to high standards within the system they inherit.
Let’s not allow populist rhetoric against MPs to fuel the powerful anti-liberal democracy forces that have grown in last fifty years. If we want talented MPs, able to legislate sensibly on a basis of good analysis, and willing to engage fulsomely with their communities, we must ensure that people of quality step up willingly to the task. Safety, pay and conditions matter.
This is the MPs lot:
An NZ Member of Parliament this year gets a base salary of $181,000 per year. Plus housing subsidies, travel subsidies, etc that no one else in the country gets.
97% of New Zealanders earn less than them. Of the 5, 361,000 New Zealanders, 5,300,000 don't get that and the great majority anywhere near that.
If you are a list MP you have nothing to do except turn up and vote, then you can go home at the end of voting, pop into Moore Wilson on the way to the airport, and have no electoral work at all. I rarely see list MPs being useful for democracy at all. Yes there are exceptions.
51 of our MPs are list MPs. 45 of those have no portfolio job at all. A few of them still aspire to be electorate MPs and turn up to community events.
I would be a whole lot more appreciative of the work of our Members of Parliament who actually do work if we had governments that delivered results I could see and had a positive effect on my wider family.
The people I respect far more are the public servants and direct contractors who deliver actual benefit to actual New Zealanders.
It is the dissembling and hypocrisy that annoys me most. The absolute insult to my intelligence as MPs engage in shifty self-serving rule bending then jusstify with it all with weasel words and fake apologies and all while cutting beneficiarys, who apparently have "won the lotto" if they have a miserable few tens of dollars a week extra due to some mild wrinkle in the system.
A robust and honest case can be made for MPs salaries. Just be freaking honest about it.
And let's make sure they earn the money – term limits for list only MPs, for God's sake please!
Nicola Willis can't win a seat when she faces actual voters, so goes on the party list where our corrupt and self-serving political parties make sure even the most incompetent and hated professional politicans are shielded forever from voters. My utterly colourless and more or less invisible local MP Helen White will most likely lose Mt. Albert when TOP split the vote. Like Deborah Russell, her reward for being utterly incompetent at politics and losing a previously solid Labour stronghold will be a sinecure on the party list.
No more party stooges getting 9, 12 , 15 year carreers without ever facing the voters. Six years max on the list, unless you are a party leader.
Other factors which need to be taken into account.
I know of these, having twice been a candidate.and aware of the risks.
The article itself is top rate, Nigel. Had I read it all those years ago, I might have stayed away!
I was called a pedophile, a convicted drug dealer, and abused in public, my motives questioned and until people have faced just some of that, and I did not get a lot of it, then be thankful for those who put their hands up to stand for public office.
All I would add is that enough people to support a candidate with all that is required and before even electing the candidate, enough good people being involved in the candidate selection and policy formation, would strengthen our democracy and the quality of our prospective and actual MPs.
I think many people don't begrudge MPs a fair compensation for their employment. I baulk at "service" for a lot of them.
The issue for many is Ad's point about them enjoying pay and perks beyond those of what most get. I wouldn't say no-one else.
KiwiSaver at 20% is a prime example. Why?
A 6% IIRC pay rise when many others will receive little if anything.
Of course when challenged they loudly proclaim that an independent body sets their pay and conditions not them. Is that body truly independent? Not from where I stand. And Parliament can override those determinations if it wished under severe circumstances and we're there now. It is the "highest court in the land" as we're told.
And the remuneration body will say that there needs to be some equivalence with the private sector otherwise there will be a stampede in that direction. Except I doubt many MPs would get anything like what they enjoy in Parliament in business.
And when they can enjoy a significant benefit like their housing allowance some can't help themselves and rort the system while their "defence" is entitlement.
They may not set all the rules but they sure as hell influence them to their advantage.
How many real-world MPs- the ones that aren't lawyers or politics graduates/always worked for the political system- are we missing out on, primarily because they don't have the money, and can't afford the time off work to run a campaign?
The system is rigged right from the start, but debatable as the role of list MPs are, they do bring in a few people with 'normal' backgrounds who would have no chance otherwise.
I think that you'll find that List MPs are also expected to take time off work to campaign, and contribute to the overall election campaign fund.
There absolutely is an expectation that candidates (especially serious candidates with a winnable list placing) are boots on the ground for the 3 months (or more) before the election.
I wouldn't care if list MPs were expected to don body armour and go do battle with Putin's Mad-Max hordes in the drone badlands of the Donbas, it is the outrage of having corrupt and self-serving elite cadre political parties appointing failed electorate candidates to list seats that pisses me off.
An idea I have thinking about is getting rid of the incestuous candidate selection process and legislating to force open primaries for all our MPs like they do in the USA, where open primaries are just about the only remaing functioning area of their democracy.
A defence of privilege and entitlement. As expected from a Labour Party apparatchik.
[Still trolling and still attacking TS Authors. You obviously can’t handle robust debate between adults and your comments as per usual lack substance, so you’re wasting our time. Begone, troll – Incognito]
Mod note
Had a short painful experience in very minor commitee politics recently, you couldn't pay me enough to put up with a building full of sneaky plotters and whisperers, although upston and and ithers is taking the piss.
I think the issue is less about perks and more about who our political parties recruit in the first place.
A healthy Parliament needs people with ordinary professional, community, family, union, small business, public service, rural, Māori, Pasifika, disability, and working-class experience. That is mostly a party problem, not a constitutional one.
Tinkering with salaries, list terms, or electoral mechanics will not solve much if parties keep selecting from the same narrow pool of staffers, lawyers, lobbyists, activists, and career political operators.
The better question is whether parties are doing the hard work of finding, supporting, training, and protecting normal people who could make good MPs but would never otherwise put themselves forward. It is also incumbent on us, as voters, to create an electorate that actually incentivises this.
That is where the democratic deficit is. Not in list MPs as such, but in candidate selection panels up and down the motu.
That's fair but I can recall back into before MMP, and while we had a few dropkicks as local MPs we didn't have the long tail of MMP-allocated mediocrity.
MMP itself gives rise to my suspicion that there's too many useless MPs.
It took me until my early 40s to realise that I am really really proud of the changes I've made to NZ cities and it's better to be a small volunteer doing useful things than ever becoming an MP.
And so when I see the right people to support to become MPs, I'm boots-and-all for them. Even in my deep blue central Otago world.
I think that there is a real challenge for parties under MMP. Where they have to simultaneously get a slate of people elected (so they have a chance of getting into government); while not elevating expectations from rank and file party or list members that they will actually ever be anything more than a fill-up-the-numbers game in the voting chamber.
With coalitions, resulting in fewer actual cabinet positions for each party – there is little scope for many back-bench MPs to ever actually personally make a difference in government.
Under FPP – each of those MPs had a highly important role in the local community. Not just attending all community events, and keeping the seat warm for the party – but advocating for their constituents in Wellington with the bureaucracy; and within the party when legislation threatened the electorate interests.
I know of several people who regarded their local MP as an excellent constituent MP – who advocated for 'his' (it was mostly 'his') constituents regardless of their political loyalties. The 'I didn't vote for him, but he does a good job' trope.
Some electorate MPs still regard this as a key component of their job. And they are the ones which typically get re-elected (often despite the indifference of their party).
This has completely gone with list MPs. They may advocate for a self-selected group of people they consider to be their 'constituents' – but they don't advocate for people they politically disagree with.
I think a lot of that mediocrity existed before MMP too. Labour and National simply had more safe seats in which to stash it.
Take Norman Jones, MP for Invercargill from 1975 to 1987, whose main contribution to public discourse appears to have been opposing homosexual law reform. Or Gerry Wall, who represented Porirua for nearly twenty years and reportedly ended up Speaker largely because he was considered too annoying to put in Cabinet.
I do think MMP changed the visibility of political careerism and party management. But it also broadened representation and weakened the old near-duopoly where parties could quietly warehouse mediocre MPs in safe electorates indefinitely. cough Barbara Kuriger cough
The problem was never uniquely list MPs. Political systems have always had ways of protecting loyalists, placeholders, factional operators, and locally entrenched personalities.
MMP just made some of those dynamics more visible and arguably more contestable.
I agree. It's not the remuneration which is the barrier, it's the position itself. Not to mention the endless scrutiny over every statement you've ever made in the history of the Internet.
There is no amount of money which would make me put myself forward as a political candidate (which will no doubt come as a relief to some Standardistas)
No amount of salary or perks could compensate for the harassment, threats of violence, actual violence, and online hate speech and vitriol our MPs are exposed to, and I am pretty sure women and Maori MPs cop most of this, but probably they all do to some extent.
Winston's house was attacked. Tamatha Paul and Tory Whanau have been subjected to awful abuse. James Shaw was viciously assaulted. ETC.
I agree, personally.
However, there seems to be a (so far) inexhaustible supply of candidates who are prepared to throw their hats into the ring.
We should also remember that Don Brash, John Key and Steven Joyce were all assaulted at Waitangi.
Good Post!
I think that MPs’ remuneration package is a red herring.
I consider that MPs are conflicted [no pun] as to why and for whom they’re in Parliament. The apparent gap between MPs and those whom they represent seems to be widening – can they really claim that they’re ‘one of us’ and ‘represent us’? This question might be harder on/for the Left although there are many rumblings on the far-Right side too. With that ‘perception deficit’ comes lower trust and a weaker social licence, of parties & politicians and of the system as a whole.
The question of representation actually applies more to the MPs’ professional lives & activities before & after their political terms – do they come from a pool of equals and do they go back to that same pool afterwards?
NZ Initiative has put out their instructions for the next government. On our parliamentary system their recommended changes include
– Increase the proportion of list MPs from 40 percent to 50 percent and increase Parliament from 120 to 170 members.
– 4 year term
– Reduce the party vote threshold to 3.5 percent
– Repeal the waka-jumping provisions
of the Electoral Integrity Act.
– Amend Standing Orders to restrict urgency to genuine emergencies
– Enact targeted legislation to reverse aberrant court decisions
and quite a bit more. But no change from MMP to another electoral system.