Steven Joyce: former Finance Minister on the privileges that come with the role

Ahead of the 2026 Budget, discussion has erupted about the privileges MPs get - and whether they have to face cuts as well.

As former Finance Minister Steven Joyce explained, there's a lot that goes into the role, with a lot of benefits and drawbacks. 

He joined the Afternoons team to explain further.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
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Speaker 2 (00:16):
So are our MPs and titaments and salary fear? And
is it a cushy ride being an MP? To discuss
former Cabinet Minister and MP for almost a decade, Stephen
Joyce joins us Steven Afternoon to.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
You, how are you? Twice in one day? I'm just
you were in the popular Man You're on this morning,
weren't you? That's right?

Speaker 1 (00:35):
You were also an MP for nearly a decade? Is
it nice to be an MP?

Speaker 3 (00:37):
As this article suggests, it's a genuine privilege to be
an MP in that you know, you get to do
lots of things that nobody else gets to do in
terms of making a contribution, which is a tripe thing
to say, but actually it is. Actually you get to
to get to decide them things, you get to do
some things, you get to see the impact of your work.
All that's all. That's fantastic, But it's it's not an

(01:01):
easy guy. And that's not to get people to feel
sorry for MPs in any way, shape or form, but yeah,
it's it's it's there's quite a lot involved, particularly for
the senior ones. It's a it's a big job.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Well, describe that workload for say a cabinet minister.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
Well, again, there's probably there's probably two groups of cabinet
ministers if you're talking about the the sort of the
kitchen cabinet, if you like the type five or six. Yeah,
pretty much every hour God gives. I would say through
that period, I was lucky that I got to be
a cabinet minister for nine of the nine and a

(01:36):
half years I was there, And yeah, it is it
is incredibly full on and on one thing that and
I was always slightly mad hard worker in radio, and
I remember leaving radio and saying, well, I'm never ever
going to work that hard again into politics, which which
was was was clearly a mistake, if that was my view.
And the the it takes a little bit to get

(01:58):
your head around is that there is for every hour
in the day, there's any number of things that you
any number of demands on your time. So you've got
your party people, you've got the people in the community,
you've got the MPs, you've got and you know, if
your minister, you got your officials and so on. So
you were constantly spinning plates and yeah, it's quite a gig.

(02:24):
And I would normally, if it was me on a Monday,
i'd fly to Wellington from Auckland where I lived. Notionally,
I would leave on the sort of six point thirty plane,
probably on a Monday morning, and then you'd finish on
a Monday night about ten or eleven, and then you
do the same thing again on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday,

(02:47):
and then I'd often go I wasn't an electric MP,
so on a Friday and Saturday, which is administers or
electrical MPs would go back and try and catch up
on their electorate. And I would travel around the country,
go to a place like christ Church or a need
or whatever, and spend a day there talking to businesses,
and then you go home. And then the famous thing

(03:10):
on the weekend was a thing called the weekend bag,
which your office would send you, which would have a
whole pile of paper in it that you have to read.
And it was it was a big box. And there
was there was the big box, and then there was
the really big box. And I kid you not, my
senior private secretary. This is back in the days before

(03:32):
they distributed papers by the Internet. My senior private secretary,
who was not a you know, who was quite a
petite person. She would jump up and down on the
box to try and squish more stuff in. And then
when you opened it at home, it would sort of
spring out at you with all the stuff in it.
And and I'll tell you what, there were mornings when

(03:54):
the really big box arrived and you'd see it getting
out of the you know, they'd take it out of
the car, and your heart would just sink. On a
Saturday morning, so you go, oh my god, it's the
big box. And that, you know, meant because normally I'd
spend three or four hours in the afternoon on a
Saturday or a sun and a Sunday, both days reading papers.

(04:17):
And if it was the big box, you knew that
there was definitely a full day. One of those two
days was going to be a full day. And so yeah,
it was put this way. When I left, I look
back and think, you know, it wasn't before time to
be a relation to having time for family and stuff.
So what percentage of nights would you fall asleep reading papers?

(04:41):
A lot of times? But the other thing is you
end up with meetings scheduled at ten pm, right, and
occasionally at eleven PM. I drew the line eleven by
the way, when I say I drew the line, because
it was normally the Prime Minister would have a meeting
at eleven because literally there was something that she had
to do that there was just no more time in

(05:02):
the day. So at eleven PM there'd be a bunch
of officials and the PM. They're obviously a few ministers
who would be there to you know, because it was
either their portfolio or it was it was you know,
they were there as a member of the kitchen cabinet.
And I used to say to JK when he was PM,
you know these eleven PM meetings. Nothing good comes of

(05:24):
those because you're always incredibly tired, but you know you
have to meet because it's a pressing issue. There's a
red cross nerve stuck in the sedan somewhere or something,
you know, and and you actually have to You can't
just sit there and say, oh, that can wait till tomorrow.

Speaker 1 (05:41):
So do you think MP pay and allowances are fair?
And how do you think optics plays into this?

Speaker 3 (05:48):
I doubt that there's any any any positive debate to
be had about mp PA, because there's plenty of people
that would say that it doesn't matter how much it does,
it's too much. And to be fair, there is always
a few and you know in every workplace who people
can look at and go, oh, they're having a bit
of a laugh. You know, they're not really, they're phoning

(06:08):
it in. Yeah, and yet they're earning the same as
other people. And so absolutely no names, but there's always
somebody that you can point to goes, you know, this person,
it's just just just creaming it for the amount of
effort they put in. And hopefully, hopefully over time the
public get the opportunity to work that out and either

(06:30):
they move the mine or the party moves the line
or something. But I'd say most people work very hard.
And then the other debate you get is, oh, that's
a higher pay than they would have got any other job.
And then there's and that's true for some people, and
then for some other people it would be a much
lower pay than they were used to getting. And then
some people say, oh, you should pay according to what

(06:51):
they used to get in the private sector, but you
know that's pretty impossible, so you have to make your
own decision. To get when the ISO pay them a
reasonable salary for the fact that they're away from home
a huge amount of time, and and you know, and
then let's just get on with it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:11):
Great to have you on, Stephen. Thank you very much
for jumping on a show for the second time today.
Really appreciate your thoughts. Very interesting, that is former Cabinet
Minister Steven Joyce. It sounds like a real ball like
to me, but those boxes sounded frightening.

Speaker 1 (07:24):
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