Parliamentary Party Funding

I was reading through the Members’ Handbook of Services (part of the Police files released under the OIA) and noticed the section on funding of Parliamentary Parties, so decided to calculate how much each Party in Parliament gets.

The Leader’s Office gets $50,000 plus $57,176 per MP who is not in the Executive (as Ministers get huge budgets of their own).

The Party group gets $20,000 per MP for research and the Whips Office. In practice this is normally combined with the Leader’s Office to give a total budget at the Leader’s discretion.

Then each MP gets support funding of $59,500 for electorate MPs and $37.900 for list MPs. Smaller parties tend to add these to the overall party pool, but the larger parties with multiple electorate seats don’t tend to pool them and each MP spends it on rent, postage and advertising in their local area.

Therefore what I will calculate is three figures:

(a) Party Funding, being the Leader’s Office and the Whips/Reseach budget
(b) MPs Funding being the total of the MPs support budgets for that party
(c) Total Funding

These are shown in order below:

National $3,754,448 $2,488,800 $6,243,248
Labour $2,422,224 $2,564,600 $4,986,824
NZ First $533,056 $265,300 $798,356
Green $513,056 $227,400 $740,456
Maori $358,704 $238,000 $596,704
United $224,352 $135,300 $359,652
ACT $204,352 $97,400 $301,752
Progressive $70,000 $59,500 $129,500

If one looks at total funding per MP, we have:

National $130,068
Labour $99,736
NZ First $114,051
Green $123,409
Maori $149,176
United $119,884
ACT $150,876
Progressive $129,500

Now bear in mind these are meant to vary, You are meant to have more money per MP if you have more electorate MPs or are a smaller party. Likewise you are meant to have less money per MP if you have MPs in the Executive as they get their own funding.

Total support funding for Vote Ministerial Services for the 29 Ministers is $26.2 million so on average $1 million per Minister.