Becoming a politician could ruin your life, but it does pay well
Wednesday, 10 June 2026
Henry Cooke is deputy political editor at The Post, and writes a column every Wednesday.
OPINION: One day some years ago, a backbench MP complained to me about their pay.
The complaint was semi-ironic. They knew that the base pay - about $178k now, but marginally lower then - was dramatically more more than most people make. They were probably aware it was well over twice what the lowly journalist they were talking to pulled down. But they had come from a reasonably good position elsewhere, meaning high fixed costs, and were now subject to all the indignities of public life.
Indeed, high fixed costs appear to have contributed to another MP’s spectacular exit from public life in recent years. The initial wound that festered into a relationship breakdown between Simon Bridges and Jami-Lee Ross was the fact that Bridges let Ross be a prominent Opposition spokesman (no extra pay), but not also a whip (decent extra pay).
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Cases like these are the reason people usually put forward for paying MPs decently. As a country we want elected representatives who are at the top of their game, could make good money elsewhere, and don’t have to make long-lasting lifestyle sacrifices like selling their home in order to serve. This is a beatified version of a more hard-edged reason: we want them to be paid well enough that corruption is not worth it. If around 2.5x the median salary is that line, so be it.
Another good reason is the inverse: if all MPs worked for free, only the uber-rich could afford it, and that doesn’t sit right either.
But what is really upsetting the body politic right now is not high pay, but high perks.
Louise Upston, currently in the midst of removing unemployment benefits for teenagers with parents making more than $65,529 combined, is pulling down a $52,000 housing allowance to live in a house she owns mortgage-free in Wellington.
Chris Hipkins has used Parliament’s old-world superannuation scheme (you get $2.50 for every dollar put in, up to $33,720 a year) to buy his family bach off his parents. High pay is one thing - a taxable thing; perks like this feel like they come from a different planet. It seems likely that politicians have been happy to see these perks grow as an alternative to more substantial pay rises.
Considering whether this total remuneration is really “earned“ is impossible because society will never agree on the relationship between effort and pay. As a society we generally allow markets to set pay based on supply and demand, but given there is rarely any change in the supply or demand of politicians that approach is impossible here.
It is obvious that the Prime Minister, who makes $1855 a working day, is not working literally 10 times harder than a careworker who makes $185 a working day. But it is also obvious that his decisions carry a larger weight over the country than any one individual worker, and that there is only one person who does his job at any one time, making the actual impact to the taxpayer of paying him more immaterial. It’s also the case that he probably works a lot harder as prime minister than he did as the CEO of Air NZ, where he pulled down around 10 times what he does now.
Being an effective politician is genuinely a very difficult job, because it is many jobs rolled into one. You are a legislator, an all-purpose problem solver for your electorate, a party champion, and potentially a minister too. You do everything under relentless public scrutiny and if you mangle your words in an interview it could end your career. Being an ineffective politician is possible too, and potentially very lucrative. But deciding who is and isn’t effective is far too difficult and political for us to really assign backbench pay in light of it - we have to let parties be the judge of that via who they promote.
Either way, entering politics is far from a risk-free venture.
Take Labour’s new No.13 on its party list, Superintendant Rakesh Naidoo. He is not technically an MP yet, but the Police Commissioner Richard Chambers has now publicly launched a review into whether Naidoo mishandled sensitive information, thanks to him not telling Chambers about his political ambitions the moment discussions with Labour started.
Chambers says this review is about reassurance and there is no indication any sensitive information has been shared - but his anger with Naidoo is clear. It is hard to imagine Naidoo ever working at police again after this, despite a multi-decade career there up until now.
Ex-politicians don’t generally join the dole queue. But it is the kind of career move that limits a lot of others. This has understandable reasons, as big public institutions generally want to avoid hiring people who have clear and documented party loyalty. Yet it also probably restricts the kind of person who makes the jump into politics, and can make one understand a desire of those who do jump to see some kind of reward for the risk.
One doesn’t want a parliament filled with people who have to be there because they can’t do anything else, or a parliament filled with people who would never do anything that would risk angering future employers.
But it’s also clear that New Zealand is not well served by the current remuneration set-up, which prompts widespread anger and disbelief when voters learn its intricate details.
Is there a fix? A decent review of the wide system of perks combined with the pay and workload could do a lot to increase public confidence. But the solutions may prove unpalatable too.
What if the experts agreed with those who think we need more MPs to spread the workload out? What if they proposed an end to the perks, but combined this with a substantial pay-rise?
It’s a vexed issue, and one most politicians would prefer we all left alone.