Democracy Briefing: Entitled to the entitlements

Why MP expenses and travel scandals keep coming back

“Stop laundering these lies, you breathless hobbits”. That was Shane Jones’ reported response this morning when interviewed by Ryan Bridge about the controversy of his $63,000 trip to Toronto.

Jones has been pushing back strongly against scrutiny, especially from Stuff’s Jenna Lynch, who has now run six stories about the Minister’s trip to a conference that cost twice as much as he had got permission to spend, and included a three-day hire of a chauffeured limousine, reportedly to take him from his hotel to a conference venue that was only a three-minute indoor walk away.

Jones has characterised the ongoing stories as a media beat-up and an attempt to kneecap NZ First. And party leader Winston Peters has also pushed back, refusing to answer Lynch’s questions, saying: “Yours is a crap story, you know that” and “I’m not putting up with your unprofessional crap any longer, next question”.

For much of the public, seeing NZ First’s contempt for scrutiny will itself be the evidence that all is not well. And there is always significant public interest in these perks, travel, and allowances stories about politicians. Stuff’s Isaac Davison wrote last week that, “Few political stories generate as much reader debate as the perks and expenses available to politicians.”

The scrutiny is not a beat-up. Nor is it mainly about whether these sums matter in the overall Budget. What the public is really judging is whether a political class that preaches restraint to everyone else is willing to accept the same discipline itself. The perks are relatively small; the breach of reciprocity is much larger.

Jones’ Toronto scandal explained

Shane Jones’ trip to Canada occurred in March last year, and has only arisen because Stuff’s Jenna Lynch obtained documents from the Government to show that Cabinet approved a budget of $33,068 for the trip, but about $63,000 was spent, which led to internal communications in the Beehive to address the over-spend.

According to Lynch, “In May 2025, Ministerial Services began chasing an explanation, asking if any extra budget had been approved as there was a $20,000 overspend. If not, they said, the PM would need to approve a supplemental budget. There were several follow-up emails.” But it wasn’t until earlier this year after “yet another prod from Ministerial Services… Jones wrote to the prime minister’s chief of staff Cam Burrows seeking retrospective approval.”

Lynch then followed up the story with more about Jones’ expenditure on his trip to the world’s largest mining conference, including that the hotel cost was “$1674.69 a night”. But more colourfully she had details of the limo used: “A private driver was kept on standby for three hours one day, seven hours the next and 14 hours the following day – totalling 24 hours of standby time across three days. The full charge for the limousine service was just under C$4000.”

Questions were then put to Jones about the limo spend, as Lynch reports that “it appears he stayed in a hotel that is connected via an indoor passage to the conference he was there to attend – raising questions about why he needed the limo.”

Did coalition partners throw Jones under the bus?

There has been speculation that the travel scandal may have been leaked to the media by Jones’ coalition partners, as part of the heightening cold war between National and NZ First. Certainly Finance Minister Nicola Willis has gone out of her way to condemn Jones’ travel budget blowout.

Willis told Stuff: “when I go to Cabinet and seek approval for my budgets for international travel, I take that spending limit extremely seriously, as does my office”, and “You should never exceed what Cabinet grants you in terms of your travel budget, and I think this reflects significant errors on the part of the minister and his office.”

Willis was clear to make this an integrity issue: “Because there are so many New Zealanders who are doing it tough, they look at us and they know that on average we’re paid more than typical members [of Parliament], and they therefore expect from us the high standards of delivery”.

She also talked about the need for accountability and transparency, in a very strong but veiled critique of Jones. Political journalist Richard Harman commented that “Willis’s response bordered on the pious”, constituting “the visible sign of much more fundamental gaps that are opening up between National and its coalition partners.”

It wasn’t just National, either. Yesterday, Act leader David Seymour went on TVNZ’s Breakfast and pointed out that Workplace Relations Minister Brooke van Velden had been in Singapore on ministerial business and “Didn’t have her own limo, by the way”. Seymour was then asked if Jones should pay back the limo cost, and he replied: “I probably would. I’d be so embarrassed, but what he does is up to him.”

Jones has responded publicly to his colleagues, saying: “I will compose myself and keep political firepower to the six weeks before the election, but I’ve got a message from my coalition partners: Provoke the matua at your peril.”

More media of ministerial international travel

Stuff isn’t the only media outlet focusing on politician perks, travel and allowances – The Post and the Herald have also recently published some strong investigations and stories on this area.

Today in The Post, Harriet Laughton has an extensive article looking at “overseas tax-payer funded trips in the first quarter of this year”, and she discovered that many such trips were actually more expensive than Jones’ Toronto controversy. The most expensive was a five-MP trip to Latin America, which cost $126,264, including accommodation costs of “$5404 for one night in Tahiti, $772 per person.”

A trade delegation to Cameroon by Todd McClay and Damien O’Connor cost $122,015, and was “$45,349 over budget.”

Similarly in The Press, Charlie Mitchell “has analysed hundreds of pages of expense disclosures, invoices, receipts and credit-card records to identify more than 30 hotels used during taxpayer-funded trips.” The point of his investigation is to work out whether ministers are being booked into more extravagant accommodation. He found they were: “About two-thirds of the hotels we’ve identified are advertised as five-star properties, with nightly rates commonly ranging from $600 to $800. Ministers often travel with a staffer, increasing the cost.”

Former Cabinet Minister Judith Collins was one of the most extravagant: “At least two ministers have stayed at the historic Royal Horseguards Hotel in Central London, overlooking the River Thames. On a trip in September last year, then-Defence Minister Judith Collins and a staffer stayed there for seven days, resulting in a combined bill of more than $11,000. On another trip, Collins stayed at the five-star Dupont Circle Hotel in Washington D.C.”

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