Collins steering a fine line
JUDITH COLLINS was back this week, smiling and bending the rules again. This is a politician who just doesn’t seem to learn.
This time she is bragging about her sponsor, a South Auckland car dealership. It gives her a car to use for six months and free petrol to go with it.
So the MP for Papakura has a jazzy black car bearing her own name, the name of the car dealer, and also the Papakura Crimewatch label, which gets a contribution from the company.
Collins thinks she is offering the best of all worlds. The taxpayer saves money and cash goes to a good cause.
She is quite wrong. It’s not that the MP has sold herself to a car dealer. Rather, she has left the impression that a car seller in South Auckland is too close to her. The deal is a built-in conflict of interest.
If the company has a problem with planning laws or has a view on any other political issue affecting the car industry and wants to lobby its MP, that leaves her in a hopeless position. How are the voters to know whether her sweetheart deal with the company doesn’t influence her behaviour?
This is the same issue that caused Collins so much trouble as a Cabinet minister. She visited her husband’s company in China while on an official visit. Cabinet ministers must not favour the family firm or anyone else – and above all they must not create the impression that they have done so. Collins could not escape that impression, and got a telling-off from the boss.
The rules for backbenchers are not so strict, and Prime Minister John Key says she has not broken them. He warns, however, that if she ever returns to Cabinet she would ‘‘have to adjust her behaviour to be in line with the Cabinet Manual’’. In other words, she would have to ditch the car sponsorship.
Actually, she should ditch it now. She might not be breaking the strict letter of the rules. But she is spurning a much deeper and broader democratic requirement: that MPs are seen to be independent. MPs are paid from the public purse precisely in order to avoid both the reality and the impression that they have other loyalties.
Collins argues that the deal saves the taxpayer money. This is one case, however, where saving taxpayers money does not win the argument. MPs are on the public payroll as a proof that they are the servants of the people. They don’t owe anything to anybody else, and that’s how it should be.
Collins argues that the deal provides money for a good cause, a Crimewatch patrol. But suppose all MPs had similar deals. After all, 120 sponsored MPs could produce a stack of money for good causes – money that otherwise the needy might not receive.
But the sight of all those politicians in logo-painted cars paid for by other people should send a shudder through voters’ hearts. Who, they would wonder, are the MPs working for? Us or their sponsors? The New Testament rightly warned about the impossibility of serving two masters.
Collins, of course, smiles her friendly smile and can’t see a problem. But that fact is itself part of the problem. It is also the main reason why Collins should probably not be allowed back into Cabinet.
She just doesn’t seem to get it.