There's a name for this...

The Labour Party is rorting its Parliamentary expenses to steal from the public again:

The Labour Party’s Hutt South wing has been running an apparently unusual subletting “arrangement” in which it gets cheap rent on office space off a local union, sublets the rooms to its local list MP Ginny Andersen, and then bills parliament at mark up, pocketing the difference.

Rent for MPs’ offices are paid in bulk by Parliamentary Service. Accounts seen by Stuff for the Labour Party’s Hutt South wing, home to Andersen, show a sublease arrangement where Parliament pays the local Labour Party significantly more in rent than the Labour Party actually pays the original landlord, the New Zealand Professional Firefighters Union (NZPFU).

Accounts seen by Stuff appear to show $6000 of public money going into a Labour Party account for “rent” in 2019, but with only a quarter of that money, $1500 a year, actually going to the building’s owner.

Of course, this is "within the rules", because self-serving politicians wrote them. But any normal person can recognise this for what it is: theft. If Labour is being charged only $1500 a year in rent by its landlord, that is all it should receive from Parliament. Claiming anything more is simply fraudulent. And if the rules allow that, then so much the worse for the rules.