Interesting Chart from Stuff

Andrea Vance is National Affairs Editor for The Post and Sunday Star-Times.

OPINION: If there is one thing that reliably gets under MPs’ skin, it is scrutiny of their salaries, pensions and perks.

Dare to question these entitlements, and you’ll set off a chorus of defensive whining inside the parliamentary precinct accompanied by practised, solemn hand-wringing about the unforgiving hours, the brutal sacrifice of public life, and the great tragedy of stepping away from the private sector to serve the nation.

It’s not just generous pay that they are guarding so fiercely. The state has beautifully designed a cradle-to-grave lifestyle insulation package that completely detaches our lawmakers from the economic realities endured by the rest of the country.

Read more: MPs shouldn’t claim $52k allowance to live in homes they own: Labour Kāpiti-based MP rents back his Wellington flat at taxpayers’ expense 23 MPs rent back their own homes at the taxpayers’ expense From July, thanks to yet another pay rise, a backbench MP will drag home a base salary of $181,200.

Climb up the greasy pole into the Executive, and the numbers hike: standard ministers sit on a comfortable cushion between $276,000 and $327,100, while the Prime Minister will peak at $520,500.

Shane Jones, Nicola Willis, David Seymour, and Chris Bishop celebrate printing their budget with gourmet pies. Bruce Mackay / The Post The Speaker pulls the same cash as a Cabinet Minister, and the Leader of the Opposition sits a whisker below them at $309,000. Even junior under-secretaries pull a tidy $214,800.

But because watching that base salary erode would be far too stressful, they are also handed a tax-free annual expense allowance of up to $19,300 on top.

It’s a little pocket-money to absorb the minor indignities of daily life, like their meals, club memberships, and constituent gifts, leaving their actual six-figure salaries untouched.

Then we get to the real racket: real estate. For politicians who suffer the great inconvenience of maintaining a primary home outside the capital, the state funds their Wellington living arrangements. Common or garden MPs can draw up to $36,400 a year for capital housing, a figure that balloons to $52,000 for ministers.

Here is the tasty part: because this money is paid out as a convenient continuous lump sum rather than a strict, receipt-checked reimbursement, MPs can - and routinely do - funnel this taxpayer cash straight into properties they already own in the city.

It is an exquisite bit of alchemy: struggling renters and mortgage holders hand over their tax dollars so that wealthy politicians can passively service their own capital mortgages or build private equity.

The domestic travel perks nicely expand this protection to the entire family, and ensures no politician is ever exposed to the raw volatility of the market, like the rest of us plebs.

When travelling on business, hotel caps are remarkably generous, featuring automated emergency top-ups of an extra $100 to $120 a night the second a storm or a late night in the House causes a minor booking inconvenience.

Layered over this is a lavish matrix of funded domestic travel for partners and dependent children, who get dozens of free flights a year. For the senior ranked, the perks dissolve into luxury: their families get free travel and discretionary access to a fleet of VIP chauffeur-driven cars. Yes Minister, indeed.

But the best bit of this perks system is how it cushions the abrupt exit from office.

Out in the real world, losing your job or retiring means an unsettling financial time.

In Parliament, defeated or retiring backbenchers continue to draw their base rate for 12 weeks, while ministers enjoy full executive pay until the exact day their portfolios are formally handed over. There is one upside to prolonging those coalition negotiations...

And for the final act, MPs’ retirement is spectacularly leveraged. Through a superannuation scheme that would give a private sector CFO conniptions, the taxpayer matches an MP's retirement contributions at a staggering ratio of $2.50 for every $1 invested.

On back-of-the envelope calculations, this gold-plated set-up would allow a two-term MP (who never elevated beyond the backbench) to walk out of office with a private retirement nest egg worth roughly $300,000.

At the absolute apex, anyone who manages to survive as PM for two years is guaranteed a non-taxable annuity for the rest of their natural life, with spousal entitlements that legally endure even after they die.

The 2026 Budget offered very little cost of living relief. DAVID UNWIN / The Post In the context of last week’s lean and mean Budget that offered no cost-of-living relief and boasted endlessly about restraint, responsibility, and discipline, these perks are now, well, a bit awks.

Especially when Social Development Minister Louise Upston is simultaneously moving to tighten access to the accommodation supplement, lifting the threshold for homeowners from 30 to 40% of income spent on housing before support even becomes available.

Shame the language out of the Minister's mouth about “better targeting” didn’t float across the parliamentary perimeter, where MPs are dodging the question about whether their own generous housing benefits should be slashed.

Because of her policy, $320,000-a-year Upston has become the target of quite reasonable accusations of hypocrisy. (It doesn’t help that while telling low-income families to do more with less she’s bunging millions of dollars to rock stars under the banner of economic growth.)

But she’s not the only trougher banking that $1000 a week. Across the House, 28 MPs are claiming the allowance to boost their assets. That’s up from 23 in 2024 and cost the taxpayer $1,070,473 last year.

To tell homeowners drowning with ever-rising bills that they are too wealthy for a supplement, while writing massive cheques to international stadium acts and drawing taxpayer cash to clear your own Wellington mortgage, makes that fiscal discpline strategy stick in the craw like a $15 gourmet pie.

The transportation rules put a fine point on this glaring double standard. For most households, buying fuel is a live, weekly exposure to global price swings that dictates whether they can afford to drive to work. For MPs, it is a totally blunted and reimbursed cost.

So, while the language of government is increasingly about discipline and telling the public to tighten their belts, the lived reality inside the political system is absolute insulation from the economic frost they are making everyone else survive.

To preach the gospel of a lean budget to people skipping meals while sitting on a leather-lined bench that pays you $2.50 for every dollar you save is delusional. And they wonder why peoples’ rage boils on social media and voters are growing ever more detached from politics?

Yet when pinned on the hypocrisy, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon hits the moral mute button and retreats behind the constitutional firewall of the Remuneration Authority, which is an arm’s-length, independent body that sets pay and perks.

The tired defence for all of this largesse is that these salary packages have to be extraordinarily generous to attract the best and brightest of society to the job.

Looking at the current talent pool on display, does anyone honestly feel like we are getting value for that money?

For a while I've been working on an offline topo maps site for NZ and its finally in a state worth sharing.

• mountains and routes from ClimbNZ
• hut locations
• slope angle for assessing avalanche danger
• 3d view

Looks like its going to be a pretty sweet pool

Martin van Beynen is a Press journalist and regular opinion contributor.

OPINION: When a political party becomes amusing fodder for columnists it really is in serious trouble.

Te Pāti Māori has this year lurched from one disaster to another, which, to be fair, does not make it that dissimilar to other New Zealand parties. However, it was supposed to be different, especially with its tikanga approach to resolving tensions and disagreements.

Well, the approach revealed in the last few days is brutal.

A showdown must have been brewing for some time, but let’s start with Te Pāti Māori demoting whip Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, regarded as the party MP most respectful of Parliament’s processes. Her son Eru, formerly the party’s vice-president and a spokesman for the Toitū te Tiriti movement, then broke ties with the party, saying the leadership had become dictatorial and toxic.

This week party management sent an email to members and either leaked it to the media, or knew, as sure as eggs, that it would find its way there. The email showed Kapa-Kingi’s office was heading towards a budget blow-out and that Eru had allegedly said some nasty, entitled and ethnically disparaging things to a parliamentary security guard.

This could be regarded as Te Pāti Māori being transparent and honest with its members and electorates, except for two things. The first is that the party is not that open. It dictates who it speaks to and what questions it will answer. It is very good at shutting up shop when it suits.

Secondly, the party has been aware, as Stuff’s political correspondent Glenn McConnell has pointed out, of the issues with the Kapa-Kingis for months and yet has waited until now to have a crack under the guise of openness.

All this is entertaining and great material for Māori bashers, but is very sad for people who want to see Māori do well.

New Te Pāti Māori MP Oriini Kaipara did not help things last week by breaching the time limit for her maiden speech, which was followed by a haka in the public gallery.

However, she warrants a bit of slack. Parliament can spare a few extra minutes and Kaipara spoke impressively. The singing from the public gallery was beautiful. Perhaps we didn’t need the history lesson and we could have done without the haka, but she looks very much like a leader of the future.

I’m not sure what ails Te Pāti Māori, but it needs to sort out a few things if it is going to look like a credible partner in any government.

The first is ensuring relatives are not in key positions in the party or on the payroll. President John Tamihere is the father of TPM’s general manager Dr Kiri Tamihere-Waititi, described as a “relentless force in her husband’s success and probably more liberated”. Tamihere-Waititi is married to the party’s co-leader, Rawiri Waititi.

Then we have Mariameno Kapa-Kingi engaging her son as a contractor. She’s not the first MP to hire family, but it’s never a good idea because it leads to conflicts of interest and looks terrible.

The second is doing the mahi. MPs are paid to do a job and that job entails being, well, a member of Parliament. It’s long been said by political reporters that Te Pāti Māori leaders have a sniffy attitude to Parliament and have made little effort to be good parliamentarians.

The attendance of Te Pāti Māori MPs is patchy at best and protocols and rules are continually breached. One observer noted that Te Pāti Māori MPs are “quite content to use Parliament as a soundstage for its social media content. It’s far from the first political party to do this – but it’s the first party that only uses the House for this purpose.”

MPs are paid $168,000 a year. Taxpayers, who include grassroots Māori, deserve better. With all the problems that beset Māori, it was instructive to visit the party’s website this week to see what it is currently campaigning about. The first featured campaign was a petition to “Say No to the FBI in Aotearoa”.

Finally, the party needs consistency. Take the approach to the Instagram post from Te Tai Tonga MP Tākuta Ferris, that accused Labour of using “Indians, Asians, Black and Pākehā” supporters to “take a Māori seat from Māori”.

The party’s co-leaders were disapproving, but Tamihere told Radio Waatea “what Tākuta Ferris said, in substance, was right”.

Looking at the party’s implosion from the outside, it seems it needs more of a clean-out than a reset.

Sorry for the editorialized title - seems a bit hypocritical for a libertarian though

Looking back at our tracks down from Mt Brewster after climbing the South West face

Fairly scathing

The websites look pretty slick too

"Ditch the winter chill” and “expand your horizons in sunny South East Queensland!” reads one newspaper advert, luring New Zealand’s health-care workers towards a new life in Australia. “Warmer days and higher pays”, enthused another, last year, from the Australian state’s police service. Kiwis who chose “policing in paradise” could look forward to 300 days of annual sunshine and a A$20,000 ($12,500) relocation bonus, it declared.

For many New Zealanders that is an easy sell. They are leaving their country in record numbers. Almost 129,000 residents emigrated last year—40% above the pre-pandemic average for this century. It is not a case of last in, first out. The majority of those leaving were New Zealanders, rather than immigrants returning home, creating a net loss of 47,000 citizens.

New Zealand, though a settler country, is also shaped by emigration. Its small economy and relative lack of opportunity have long driven young New Zealanders towards what they call the “overseas experience”, fanning fears of brain drain. Proportionate to its population of 5.3m, it has one of the largest diasporas in the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. Emigration ebbs and flows: the last spike occurred in 2012, near the end of the financial crisis. As the pandemic raged, many expats returned to hunker behind closed borders, but the outflow quickly resumed. Recently, New Zealand has been in a rut. The economy is in recession and unemployment has risen. Outgoing Kiwis grumble about costly housing and a crime surge.

Unlike most, they have an alternative when times get tough: they are free to live and work in Australia, and vice versa. Almost 15% of them are now based “across the ditch”. It is not just that Australia’s economy has weathered the cost-of-living crisis better. The income gap between the pair has been growing for decades. Adjusted for purchasing power, Australia’s per person GDP is about a third higher than New Zealand’s. Its pensions are more generous, and its centre-left Labor government has made it easier for Kiwis to get passports and benefits. By comparison, New Zealand is “a sinking boat”, says one transplant on a Facebook group for Kiwi expats. Australia is “best for [an] easy life”, writes another.

In the past, fears of brain drain have proved overblown. Young expats have generally returned, and governments have offset losses by letting in immigrants from countries such as India and China. The result was a “brain exchange”, says Paul Spoonley, a sociologist at New Zealand’s Massey University. But there is a risk of that changing, he argues. First, he says, it is no longer just young New Zealanders who are leaving, but more experienced professionals and extended families. Second, inward immigration is now slowing. After a post-pandemic spike, it plunged by around a third last year, though the population is still growing. Christopher Luxon, the prime minister, says the solution is “to build a long-term proposition where New Zealanders actually choose to stay”. But that has not proved easy. In 2009 John Key, then prime minister, set out to “match Australia by 2025”. In Wellington, the capital, some now joke that a more realistic goal would be to “beat Fiji by 2050”.