Editorial: Time to kick travel perk into touch

In another time, perks were an accepted part of almost every job.

For those working for the state, these often involved transport because of the government's ownership of the national airline, the railways, buses, and much else besides. For those in the private sector, there was a variety of perks, some set in stone and some taken on the fly.

Gradually, these have dwindled. Much of the transport network has passed into private hands, while other perks disappeared as employers sought to contain spending in tight economic times. In most places of work, they have become an anachronism. Not in Parliament, however.

Attention has focused most recently on the perk that gives ministers unlimited free domestic travel for spouses and partners and heavily discounted holiday flights.

New love seems to have provided a spur to take advantage of it.

Generously subsidised escapes have proved irresistible to the top three spenders for the year - Act leader Rodney Hide, Northland MP John Carter and ACC Minister Nick Smith. All are divorcees who have recently remarried or found new partners.

Mr Hide, of course, slid down the list when he repaid $22,000 of his $34,000 partner's travel tab for taking his girlfriend with him to Hawaii and on a ministerial trip to Europe.

Over all ministers, the average spend on the perk was a sizeable $10,600 for the first nine months of the year. Not one of them has yet explained satisfactorily why it is a necessity for the job.

Usually, the perk's continued operation is defended by a claim that it is compensation for accepting lower salaries. That, however, was not its genesis.

It was bestowed by Cabinet, not an independent commission. Indeed, only in 2003 were perks, as such, formally taken into account. At that time, the Remuneration Authority set the actual salary of MPs at $110,000, with the pay and value of perks, among them superannuation and travel subsidies, boosting that to a package worth $142,700.

By what process the authority arrived at this conclusion is less certain than that final figure.

It was enough, however, for the Speaker, Lockwood Smith, to suggest this week that the holiday perks were a well-established part of MPs' salary package.

"If it wasn't for this, the salaries would be higher," he said. It is time for that theory to be tested by a Remuneration Authority inquiry.

If it backs Dr Smith's line, so be it. Above all, the holiday perk should go. A small increase in salary, if necessary, would be preferable to its continued operation, the more so because Dr Smith's other excuses do not stack up.

He suggested it was also a "subtle way" of recognising and rewarding experience. If total remuneration packages like this did not exist, Parliament would, he said, be peopled by MPs of independent means, people attracted by the salary, or those who did not consider spouses.

But there has never been any shortage of applicants to be MPs, and money is never the lure for the vast majority. In any event, the Remuneration Authority has deemed the levels of pay to be broadly equivalent to positions of similar responsibility in the public sector.

Despite Dr Smith's rearguard action, it seems slowly to be dawning that the perk is long past its use-by date. Mr Hide has admitted his folly in charging airline bookings to the parliamentary expenses, knowing that such expenses are now disclosed.

In effect, this is an acknowledgment that a minister who claims the sort of perk no longer available in the vast majority of occupations is guilty of severe misjudgment.

It is difficult to imagine anyone treading in Mr Hide's footprints. Given that, it should be a straightforward task to consign this perk to history.