MEMBERS’ SALARIES.

Evening Star, Issue 20328, 9 November 1929, Page 14

MEMBERS’ SALARIES.

Thanks to the Christmas box of £IOO which they will receive, the contentious session will bo remembered by members of the House of Representatives •for its happy ending. In its expiring hours they voted this sum to themselves as a special bonus in addition to salaries—a privilege which not many of us enjoy.' Not'a lew members when they consider the session may decide that nothing in its duration became it like this, conclusion of it—a judgment which' the public may endorse not without irony. The case for the increase was not that the session bad been a particularly hard one. Members made most of its hardness for themselves. It would have been easier than usual if they had been-able to keep to the revised hours for sitting which it was found in practice imposed too much restraint upon their passion for heroics. The case was based on the plea that the prevailing salary is unreasonably low, more especially in view of the expense which is imposed on members in having to maintain two homes for themselves while the session lasts—one in Wellington and one in their electorates. That plea lias been made continually since the salaries were raised nine years ago, and almost immediately cut down again by the Public Expenditure Adjustment Act; and the justice of it has been seldom very seriously disputed. Compared with other Parliaments which can bo quoted, the members of our Legislature are poorly paid. The Leader of the Opposition, as well as the Prime Minister, had expressed his sympathy with the desire for an increase ; Labour was wholeheartedly in favour of it. There were one or two strong dissentients in the House, but, irrespective of parties, the proposal of the bonus was approved with a degree of unanimity scarcely shown during the session on any other question. If payment by results had been the principle no case whatever could have been made for it; and, as it was, it was a very handsome bonus—nothing so niggardly as a minimum—which members awarded to themselves. It was more generous in view of the figures for the first half of the financial year announced by Mr Forbes, which give no promise of any excessive surplus at the end of it. The only graceful feature of the appropriation was that Ministers who sponsored it, in recognition of the needs of the rank and file, declined for themselves to have any share in it. In justification of the. award it must be admitted that members of Parliament are not in the same position as members, of the Civil Service, taken as a whole, whose salaries were also reduced by the Public Expenditure Adjustment Act, and whose Oliver Twist petitions they have less kindly treated. Most of the members of the Service by whom cuts were suffered have either left it since then or have had their emoluments improved through promotion or other means ; but for parliamentarians there are few chances of promotion. That is also the complaint, however, of a large section of the employees of the Post and Telegraph Department, and it was inevitable that the politicians’ self-considera-tion should stimulate them to a new pressing of their claims. The politicians’ increase, being made as a bonus, has no effect beyond the moral one on future sessions, and it would have been better if the matter could have been settled by an amendment of the Civil List which would have fixed salaries at a reasonable level for more than one session.