Education Minister Jan Tinetti has admitted she doesn't know how much she is paid.
Tinetti was appearing on AM to discuss the ongoing high school teacher strikes, which have seen students miss several days of school and are frustrating parents.
AM co-host Ryan Bridge started the interview by asking Tinetti how much she is paid.
"My salary is that of a minister and it's publicly available. I can't actually tell you, off the top of my head, what the base of that is," she said.
"But you said before about backbenchers, not quite true. The backbenchers used to get allowances on top and then that was folded in when a determination was made for the allowances to fold in."
According to the Parliamentary Salaries and Allowances Determination on the New Zealand Legislation website, "each member of the Executive Council who is a Minister of the Crown holding 1 or more portfolios and who is a member of Cabinet" is paid a yearly rate of payable salary of $296,007.
This is the category Tinetti falls under.
There was once a time when backbench politicians and teachers were paid a similar salary. However, that gap has now ballooned and now there's a 423 percent difference between the maximum salary for teachers and what the Prime Minister earns.
Melanie Webber, president of the New Zealand Post Primary Teachers' Association Te Wehengarua (PPTA), told Newshub in January in 1976 teachers were paid $12,370 and a backbench MP was paid a total of $14,097 in salary and allowances.
Now, an experienced secondary teacher has a salary of $90,000 while the lowest-paid and "most inexperienced" backbench MPs get $163,961.
The Post Primary Teachers' Association (PPTA) voted to reject the Government's recent offer for settlement of the secondary and area school teachers' collective agreements on Friday.
When asked by Bridge if she thinks teachers and principals are getting paid enough, Tinetti said the last offer put forward to the PPTA was a fair offer.
"I think the offer we gave and put on the table is a really fair one," she said. "I think over the time since we've been in Government in 2017, if this offer was to be accepted, the top of the scale would've gone up by 28.2 percent. That is quite a significant increase in that short amount of time.
"I can tell you over the time that I was involved in the offer, we as a Government moved a long way. In fact, we brought the offer down from a three-year term to a two-year term, meaning teachers would get their full increases over 18 months rather than over the two and a half years that the previous offer was on the table for," she explained.
"We moved a long way in remuneration by bringing in a fixed amount of money, the $5210 for most teachers to recognise the fact that it has been really difficult for teachers over the last year. We did move a long way on that."
Watch the full interview with Jan Tinetti in the video above.
