Is it a junket?

National MPs have called the week long trip to Australia for the Justice & Electoral Committee a junket, and are boycotting it.

Generally I am in favour of MPs travelling overseas.   When you are a national legislator, most of the ideas and experience are in other countries.  They are your peers you learn from.  So I wouldn’t discourage such trips in principle.

One issue in this case is that the travel is business class to Australia.  I don’t think that is the core issue.  The MPs fly according to what the rules are.

One could agree however that the rules are reasonably generous with business class for a three hour flight.  At InternetNZ the rule is business class if the flight is over 12 hours long.  That’s pretty harsh considering the number of 11 hour destinations.  My preferred policy would be economy class to Australia, premium economy to Perth and SE Asia, and business class beyond that.

The real issue is the workload for the trip.  Now often these are punishing. I recall a good friend Suzanne who went with her Minister to UK and Europe.  When she got back we all wanted to know what she had purchased and seen.  She had to confess that apart from half a day on a Sunday she never got outside.  It was non stop meetings.  And many Ministers do have very busy trips – they fill up every spare minute. The trips are not fun, they are work.

This brings up back to the Justice & Electoral Committee trip.  They are there Monday to Friday.  In that time they have just nine meetings over five days.    That is  not the most demanding schedule.  And really considering they are staying in Melbourne the entire time, it could be done in two to three days.

No Right Turn bizarrely compares the workload in Australia (20 hours work for a week) with the fact the committee would normally only meet for 4 hours.  This is irrelevant tosh.  Most NZ MPs are hard working and do I would say 60 – 80 hour weeks. If they are in Australia they can not do most of the work they do in NZ – constituency meetings, policy discussions, public meetings, Caucus, other select committees, house time, correspondence etc etc.  They are giving up getting through 60 hours+ of work for a trip with a third of that.