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Goose Gander and Golden Eggs

Given citizens now have all financial information deemed "open to the public" when will all of the Minister's tax payer funded expense claims (a private fund of $14,800 per year per member) be opened to the public?

MP's conveniently exempt themselves from the same scrutiny, with Parliamentary Service able to ignore any OIA around Minister's private perks (and a host of other requests for that matter).

And notice a member of the public doesn't have the capability or resource to find out what these personal figures are and simply announce the data "in the interests of transparency"

Another case of Goose, Gander* and golden eggs.


*Trivia: The gander of course is a male goose. Thus the phrase "What's good for the goose is good for the gander", which is perhaps an idiom that what is good for the female should therefore apply equally to the male, but is more broadly interpreted as what's good for one is therefore as good for another. And the phrase "have a gander" is thought to be to have a look, craning one's neck like a long necked gander. And a group of Geese is a gaggle, and feel free to comment on geesely matters, ignoring the point of my post entirely :-)

Comments

  1. Yes, should have clarified that not everything is open to public scrutiny. They may think the use of their expense accounts irrelevant, but I might consider the money spent at the local massage parlour to be of relevance interest in a debate about the prostitution laws.

    And my other point is that a member of the public just can't "look into it" and then publish the amounts.

    I daresay, it might even be illegal to do this, although they could argue in court it was "in the interests of transparency" and therefore be let off.

    And ignoring financial matters, Ministers have more protection under OIA than citizens apparently have under the privacy law.

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  2. But Zen, politicians aren't mere "citizens"--they're our ruling class.

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  3. It's the same here Zen, parasitical bastards, most of them. Which is why most of them are held in such contempt by the voters.

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  4. On reflection, this example is a bad one, as the expense account doesn't require receipts etc - it's just a glorified travel allowance for extra costs.

    It was good to get the travel expenses made public, and this should be a recurring event.

    It would also be interesting to get a nice summary of the complete MP pay packet - something a blogger can easily dig up perhaps.

    My follow on post about entitlements in general is more relevant.

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