Kiyota.
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. Rmps have stakes in a combined three hundred and seventy nine million dollars worth of property in New Zealand. A Herald investigation has found that is an average of three point one six million dollars across each of our one hundred and twenty members of Parliament, and despite the rumors, Prime Minister Christopher Luxen doesn't top the list as the most lavish
Today on the front page ends at Herald. Data journalist Chris Knox is with us to dive into the numbers and discuss why it matters. First off, Chris, what motivated you to investigate and compile this data on MP's property ownership and what challenges did you face when gathering this information?
Well, I guess from the motivation point of view, I think that it's an important thing to understand what MPs, how much property they have, and how they may or may not impact their decision making. It's something that Parliament kind of recognizes as being important by making MPs to clear what they have, but they don't actually ask them
to declare what it's worth. So we decided to kind of take it a little bit a step further and find out what the property is that they declared were worth, which is something the Herald had previously done in twenty thirteen. So we're also sort of it's like, well, you know, it's been twelve years, let's revisit it and see how.
Things have changed.
So you knew where to look.
Yes, we knew where we were starting from the register.
Who are the top five and what do they own and how much is it worth?
So the total portfolio is worth about three hundred and eighty million or three seventy nine million, and Sue's redmain is who's the new national MP for Rangotikei. She as the top with twenty four about twenty four million, most of which is a large farm worth eighteen million. Interestingly enough, she took over assumed office after Ian Mcalvey retired and he was the previous top so it's obviously farms in that area are clearly worth quite a bit of money.
He was worth a lot more. I think more like sixty million if I remember correctly.
Oh wow.
So Luxon is often rumored to have the most significant property assets. But he came in second, right.
He did, Yes, yes, certainly he had the most significant residential property assets, so if you exclude farms to come in first. But yeah, so he has a couple of houses in Auckland worth about seven million each and one rental property.
So who came in at three, four and five?
So third was another national farming MP and Barbara Krueger who's the national MP for the Taranaki kin Country. She has about fourteen and a half million dollars worth of property, has declared interest in that and again quite a bit of that's farming. Fourth was cal Bates who is the national MP for Wanganui. And then fifth on the list was the first non national MP, so Panji Palma, who's an act MP, has about eleven million worth of property in Ackland.
So some MPs have this complicated property asset interest kind of thing involving trust. You've got company shareholdings and things like that. You just mentioned Old Maiden Wanganui. Was it? Why is trust ownerships so prevalent among MPs?
I don't know if I have a good answer for that.
Is it just what rich people do?
I think that's part of it.
I think that and there's a bit of commentary round because I was trying to work out, like so, I think I found that there were forty seven MPs that use trusts, which is over a third, and I was trying to work out what percentage of New Zealanders used trusts and couldn't find kind of good numbers on that. There were some estimates from two thousand and six from IID to I believe, and they were sort of about
ten percent. But I think it's reasonable. Its hum that, yeah, the MP usage is higher, but I think part of that is just that a lot of MPs have been in business for quite a long time before they became MPs. Certainly farmers make a lot of use of trusts, and so I just think that anyone was kind of subset your property holdings and also property holdings that kind of run across multiple family members.
Trusts seem to be the.
Other thing I think is that trusts were I think this has been some commentary that trust is sort of overused in New Zealand up until the rules tightened up after the Panama papers came out a few years ago. So I think now there are costs, so that the costs associated with trusts make it something that you have to have a real reason to do, whereas previously it was just kind of.
Why not, Well, how transparent is the current disclosure regime and do you think that gives the public a full picture of an MP's wealth.
I mean, I guess it's not. The disclosure regime is not intended to give a picture of their wealth, just the things they have interests in. I think it's reasonably transparent, but it does it is a very it assumes good behavior by the MPs, so there's a very little enforcement kind of that. There's no like the registrar doesn't check
that MPs have declared things correctly. It's it's kind of entirely up to them, and it's only when the media raw or another party kind of starts digging around that that things kind of may get referred up to an inquiry.
But it isn't like it's not there's not a process in place where where so the MP's are given guidance and then they make I do think that though the guidance could be tightened up, like I've noticed a lot like there's quite a bit of variation between different MPs declarations, like for example, the national MP for Kaka has declared an incredible detail all of his shareholdings, and then other people have sent to follow a much more kind of sort of vibe based approach, and some some some MP's
are declaring very like you know this pay of rental property in this suburb, and then other just like residential property in Auckland, and you're like, you know, so there's quite this sort of variation and I think it would be good to have a bit more consistency.
In the process. It has made up a big part of the election campaign so far.
Your party has repeatedly insinuated that labor is planning a capital gains tax.
How many houses do you own?
I've been upfront seven houses. There are one hundred and twenty MP's in parliament.
Who owns the most houses?
I have no idea.
Is there any MP you can name who owns more houses than you?
Don't nijack?
Is there any MP you can name that owns more houses than you? I don't know.
I don't have a clue who owns what?
Why is it important for MPs to declare property and I guess other financial interests? What are the parliamentary rules around that kind of transparency basically, so they don't go and make decisions. You know, I've got a house in COUI coulda for instance, and there's a big development happening. I have the power to do something about it, right, Yeah.
Basically it's to provide transparency about the kind of parliamentary process, and I think that often I suspect that that often there's more of a like an assumption of kind of wrongdoing.
You know, like if there's.
No information, then it's very easy to kind of start speculating about what might be behind decisions, Whereas if the information is out there, then you can just kind of have a look and be like, okay, you know that this that they had these properties, and you know it probably didn't impact it, or maybe it did or It is interesting though that the local government rules are much
stricter in terms of it. Once you've declared an interest in at least in some of the local government meetings that I've seemed, if you have a conflict interest, then you actually recruit yourself from that meeting, whereas at a parliamentary level, it's more just that declared and then it doesn't actually impact that you're kind of your decision making process.
Should there be better safeguards in place to make sure that MPs don't make those policy decisions in relation to what they own or what kind of interests they might have. Do you think?
I think it would get pretty tricky.
You know, because you can, you were, one person can say I've got shares in New Zealand, and then one person can say my cousin's sister works for New Zealand or something.
Yeah, I mean, I think that you would land up with kind of half of the MPs having to recuse themselves from most you know, so many sort of the decisions that are made at a national level can have such a big impact, you know, and like particularly when you look at the so there was a three million dollars of property roughly per MP, but if you look at it per party, then the Act and National MPs are sitting in more like four and a half million each, and so that's getting up to be quite a lot
of kind of interest in property. And so then you know, do you need to get every national and Act MP to accuse themselves from any decision that might impact property prices? Which is kind of you know, for all the decisions or not quite but you know, certainly there's a lot of rules that Parliament can can consider which may or may not impact property prices.
Yeah, well, your article mentions restoring mortgage interest deductibility for landlords as a significant policy change.
Obviously, how did.
You estimate potential financial impacts for MPs and what did that reveal?
Yeah, so I was able to look at a number of MPs who declared that they had rental properties, and then you can see from records how much they paid for those properties and how long ago it was. So if and then you have to start making big assumptions, which is why we didn't name any MPs for this,
because the assumption. You know, obviously I have no idea what an individual mpiece loan structure is, but if you kind of generally, you know, there's a requirement at the moment that I think, I think there may be some move a foot to change it, but at the moment, you need a thirty percent deposit for a rental property
or an investment property. So if we just assume that those properties were bought with a loan equal to seven seventy percent of the value of the property, and that the loan was set for a thirty year term, and that the interest rate on average was six percent, which is kind of roughly what average interest rates over time are. Then you can go on to something like the sorted mortgage calculator and see what what the what amount of interest is being paid after a certain number of years.
So one MP I looked at after seventeen years of paying that mortgage, that'd be looking at about fifty thousand a year in interest payments. And so if and you can also assume that all MPs are any extra in can they gets going to be in the thirty nine percent tax bracket because it's probably over one hundred and eighty thousand, and so then they're able to deduct that.
So if they've got extra income, then they can deduct fifty thousand from their income and in the thirty nine percent tax bracket that's going to be about twenty thousand.
Back tell me, Chris, why does this all matter?
Do you think?
I think it's just important to understand whereut what our MP's own, and what they're doing and how those decisions could, how any decisions they make could impact their personal situations. For example, that the MPs are sitting on almost two hundred million worth of family homes and you know, and there's there's constant discussions on around things like capital gains tax, wealth tax, you know, which isn't say, you know, I'm not putting forward whether any of those things are the
right policy. But I think that that you have to look at an MP's holdings to really understand how they whether they are considering those things kind of from looking at a future like what is the tax structure of New Zealand how is it going to look going forward that sort of thing. Are they actually able to consider things from from kind of the nation's point of view or are they too drawn into their own own portfolios?
And a lot of trust goes with that as well, And like you said, a lot we trust people and especially MPs to just do the right thing.
Hey, yes we do. And so yeah, and I think that being able to see what they have. The other thing too is that it's not you know, being rich is not necessarily a bad thing, you know, And so I think if it's also good to see what it gives us a message of where amps have come from and what they've done. And you can see, you know, you can see their involvement in farming and that sort of thing as well as part of this process.
When you were digging into the numbers and seeing how much each person owns and everything. I mean, was there anyone apart from the top five, say, was there any other people that stuck out to you that you thought, huh interesting?
Not particularly, I mean there was obviously Carl Waits popped out as there was something interesting going on.
There because his family ended up being one of the largest landlords in that area.
Hey, yes, that certainly.
Looks like there were one of the largest private landels in his own electorate, which is an interesting situation to be in, and one I think that ought to.
Be more transparent.
I think actually one of the things that I was surprised by was that, compared to the last time the Herald did it, the kind of the headline numbers aren't
actually that large. So for example, Ian Mcalvey was worth on the era of about sixty million in twenty thirteen, and John keyes properties were worth far more than the Prime Minister's properties now and so it's almost like this twelve years later Parliament actually in some way says less property holdings than they did previously, And there was kind of there wasn't anyone whose property holdings kind of would reach into that sort of mega which certainly there's some
quite wealthy people then, but you know there are there are people in New.
Zealand who own considerably more than anyone in Parliament.
Thanks for joining us, Chris.
No.
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzidherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is produced by Jane Ye and Richard Martin, who is also our editor. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.