Hipkins Chris: Members of Parliament (Remuneration and Services) Bill — First Reading 
Hipkins Chris: Members of Parliament (Remuneration and Services) Bill — First Reading 
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CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 I am happy to rise to take a brief call on this Members of Parliament (Remuneration and Services) Bill. I want to in a moment get into a couple of issues with the drafting of the bill which I hope the Government Administration Committee will be able to clarify. But I think at the outset it is important to talk about the principles that lie behind this first. We have seen a move to a much more transparent system for setting the non-salary components of services and entitlements—if we can use the word “entitlements”—provided to members over the last few years. That has been a very welcome thing. I think the public have welcomed that and I think it has led to a higher standard of accountability within the House and that is a very welcome thing.  
What we are doing in this bill is moving a step further which is to institute a further degree of independence in the determination around some of these matters. At the moment the Remuneration Authority already determines what salaries and allowances members are paid; this bill goes a step further and transfers to it the responsibility for also determining travel and accommodation-related matters. I think that is also useful because those are the matters as the Attorney-General pointed out when he spoke in which members could also be deemed to have more of a personal interest.  
It leaves with the Speaker the responsibility for determining matters around members’ support for out-of-Parliament offices and for in-Parliament offices—areas where clearly there is unlikely to be any perception of members having a personal interest in those matters so they remain with the Speaker. But what it is doing is instituting a further degree of independence in any matters where members may be perceived to have a personal interest although I would argue in the case of travel and accommodation payments it is more perception than reality—and I say that as a Wellington member of Parliament who does not qualify for Wellington accommodation. I do however qualify for travel but have far less need to use it than a member of Parliament who lives significantly farther away than Wellington.  
I will quite happily defend those members of Parliament who do live outside the Wellington area having that support. I think it is essential for them to do the job that they are able to travel freely between Wellington and their home base their constituency. In some cases members need to use air travel within their constituency because their constituencies are so large. That is something that we also need to support. If you look at the case for example of Rino Tirakatene the Labour member he has the entire South Island and a chunk of Wellington in his constituency. For him travel is essential just to meet the people from one end of his electorate to the other let alone actually to be in Wellington to execute his responsibilities to the House.  
So I think making sure that members still have access to travel services that allow them to do the job is very very important and providing some degree of independence in how they are determined I hope will remove any suggestion that members are benefiting personally from the provision of those. I would hate to get to the point where in order to serve a constituency effectively as a member of Parliament one had to have a large degree of personal wealth in order to do the job. This is a House of Representatives and as such we are going to have people from a diverse range of backgrounds. Some come in here with large personal wealth already but some do not and some come I hope from backgrounds that are far more modest than that. They should still be able to do their jobs effectively without having to dip into their own pockets in order just to do the job. I think that that is one of the really important principles that should be defended and I hope by providing some more independence in this process we will be able to do that.  
Having said that providing independence is all very well but if things go wrong we are still going to get the blame so we should be quite open about that. Whenever we get a pay rise even though the pay rise is determined by an independent body we still get blamed for that and I do not think it will be any different when we transfer the travel and accommodation services to the Remuneration Authority.  
I do want to raise an issue around post-election arrangements. It is a technical issue but it is one that came up following the last election and one that I hope will be carefully considered in the consideration of this bill. It relates to members of Parliament who may be returned on election day but then in the counting of further votes are out again. This does not relate to the case of an electoral petition because there is a specific provision in the bill that deals with those members. This is a case where members are back and then they are out or they might be out and then they are back. If you are out and then you are back that is not so bad because you can get your pay and everything; that is not so bad. But if you are in and then you are out you actually may be in for 2 3 or 4 weeks after an election and continue to be paid as a member and then you might find yourself out. But the provisions in this bill with regard to what gets paid to former members and what they can access dates back to polling day regardless of whether they have been a member of Parliament temporarily for some period of time immediately after polling day.  
In the case of support services to members of Parliament this becomes very important. To give the example of an out-of-Parliament office all of us have our out-of-Parliament offices leased in our own name. These are not leased in the name of the Parliamentary Service. They all have a clause in them that says that the lease terminates 1 month after the person ceases to be a member of Parliament. If the person on polling day thinks that they have been re-elected as a member of Parliament albeit the narrowest of margins they are not going to terminate their lease. If 3 weeks later they are out again they will have 1 week left of the 1-month payment that they can get post polling day but they will still be liable for a whole month on the lease of that out-of-Parliament office. So they will effectively end up paying out of their own personal pocket for something over which they had no control. They lease the office to serve constituents and to provide constituency services for the 3 weeks immediately after the election and they continue to supply those services which is fine. Then with only 1 week of their 1-month notice period left to go they have to pay for the remaining 3 or 4 weeks of their notice period out of their own pocket. That is not fair. It is a minor technical issue. But if a member of Parliament is making the adjustment having just lost their job I think we should be fair to those members and make sure we make adequate provision for that in the legislation. 
Chris Auchinvole 
: We’ll call it the “Chris clause”. 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: Well I am not the person who is affected by it. The “Chris Auchinvole clause” maybe.  
But moving to the other issue around post-election arrangements it is to do with the inconsistency in the bill relating to the salary calculation for a member who has stood for re-election but ceases to be a member. In the explanatory note it suggests that someone who is not a Speaker Deputy Speaker Minister or parliamentary under-secretary will be paid at the salary rate of an ordinary member. Yet in the actual legislation itself it suggests that the member who has not been returned for the 3 months that they will continue to receive their pay will be paid effectively at the rate that they were paid at on election day. So if they were a select committee chair or a whip or somebody who held some other office that was not Speaker Deputy Speaker Minister or parliamentary under-secretary by the explanatory note they would only be paid at the rate of an ordinary member for the 3 months after an election. But by the actual wording of the legislation by my understanding of the reading of it they would be paid at whatever they were being paid on election day.  
I think that needs to be clarified because around all of these things it is just a question of getting the clarity right. You do not want ambiguity in these circumstances. These are people who have just lost their jobs they are trying to get on with their lives and we just need to be fair to former members and outgoing members. We need to make sure that they know what they are entitled to access in terms of their pay when they cease to be members of Parliament so some clarity around that will be important.  
The bill introduces formally in legislation the informal voluntary reporting regime that we have in place at the moment for members’ expenses. That is something that is being widely welcomed not just by the media but by the public as well. I think that legislating for that making that a formal requirement now rather than a voluntary regime is a welcome step. It is good progress and that is something that the Labour Party will certainly be supporting.  
Much has been made in the earlier parts of the debate about the absentee MP clause in this. I do sometimes wonder sitting here though whether in fact we should be more worried about some of the MPs who arrive at Parliament and whether or not we are getting value for money out of them. But those are not matters that are going to be dealt with by this piece of legislation. Those are matters for another day. They are matters for the electorate in fact and in 2014 when it returns a Labour Government I am sure that it will have no qualms about the fact that it is getting exceptionally good value for money from the newly resurgent Labour Party which it will see post 2014. Thank you very much.