By AUDREY YOUNG political reporter
Five dedicated MPs are using their parliamentary air points to fly to Australia on a private trip tomorrow to inspect its sex industry at close quarters.
They are members of the parliamentary select committee looking at decriminalising prostitution.
The MPs will meet prostitutes and brothel owners as well as law enforcement, health and local government authorities in Melbourne and Sydney.
They may also take a stroll around Sydney's Kings Cross district but they say brothels will be off-limits.
They are paying for the trip themselves because only one select committee a year is funded for a trip to Australia.
Foreign affairs had one recently and the next one would not be allocated until next year, said Clerk of the House David McGee.
Because the four-day trip is not official business, MPs will have to pay their own expenses of about $750.
But concerned taxpayers need look no further than the composition of the group to be fairly sure this is not a transtasman sex romp in the parliamentary recess.
Heading the delegation is National's North Shore MP Dr Wayne Mapp, regarded as one of Parliament's most serious, even dull, inmates.
Labour's Christchurch Central MP, Tim Barnett, will be there, too.
He is the gay MP promoting the private member's bill.
The women travellers are National's Maori matriarch, Georgina te Heuheu, the Alliance's women's health campaigner Phillida Bunkle, and Labour's reserved Te Tai Hauauru MP, Nanaia Mahuta.
Mr Barnett said the committee members wanted to see the industry for themselves because they were "getting wildly fluctuating accounts of what's going on there" depending on whether the submission was for or against law reform.
Prostitution in Victoria is legalised. In New South Wales it is decriminalised.
"Meeting in a brothel would be the last place we'd want to go.
"It would be too chaotic to see what's going on.
"I think walking late at night seeing the geography of the industry is relevant.
"Certainly we'll be doing that around Kings Cross.
"You see how the street industry is separate from the brothel industry, how the street industry has generated its own safe houses in the side streets," said Mr Barnett.
Dr Mapp said it would be "inappropriate" to visit brothels.
Asked if he might feel a little exposed being the only heterosexual male on the trip, he said he had Mrs te Heuheu as his chaperone.
Some MPs on the committee are being left behind.
First-term MPs on the committee - Green MP Sue Bradford, Act's Stephen Franks, and Labour's Mita Ririnui - were unable to use air points to join their more senior colleagues.
Under a rule revision this year, MPs are encouraged to use their air points accumulated in their parliamentary work to offset trips paid for by Parliament.
The MPs going have served more than one term so they are entitled to a 25 per cent parliamentary discount on a private trip to Australia, unlike the first-termers.
The air points will now entirely pay for the trip that parliamentary funds would otherwise have part-funded.
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.
Latest from New Zealand
Black Power veteran illegally 'squatting' on coastal land eyes another round in eviction fight
Kevin Moore claims he is tangata whenua and refuses to move from the beachside property.