KEY POINTS:
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has just held a press conference in his caucus room at Parliament about Air New Zealand carting troops to Kuwait, en route to Iraq.
No rushes to judgment from Peters. In fact there was no sense of urgency in his attitude to what National
is rightly calling the biggest foreign policy embarrassment for ages and what Helen Clark concedes is "appalling."
Peters wants to talk first to Simon Murdoch, Foreign Affairs secretary, and to find out more from Air New Zealand about exactly what the company told Murdoch.
He thinks the airline executive who made the call to Murdoch back in January should have kept a minute of the meeting.
Unfortunately, Murdoch, didn't and he is relying on his memory of the conversation.
Air New Zealand supposedly alerted Murdoch to the fact that Air New Zealand was considering tendering undertaking the highly sensitive charter and wanted to know if it breached UN conventions or Government policy.
I hope Murdoch's memory is better than Mark Prebble's. It will be a test of Murdoch's diplomacy to see if he can talk his way out of this without landing Air New Zealand in greater strife than it is in already.
Peters also wants to find out if the troops were off to build latrines and schools or whether they were part of the stabilisation force.
In the same way that it makes a difference to the US that the bombs going off daily in Iraq now are in a "post-war" phase, it makes a difference to Peters what they are there for.
Coalition-of-the-willing engineers are apparently more acceptable than coalition-of-the willing peace-keepers.
Peters' attitude was in marked contrast with Defence Minister Phil Goff, who had the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade hung drawn and quartered before 2pm as he fronted for the Government on the way into the House.
(Helen Clark was up North and Michael Cullen was down South).
Quite why Goff was fronting, no one explained.
But Goff put the boot into MFAT.
"I think Foreign Affairs, yes, should have advised its minister and the cabinet that this was taking place. It is a sensitive issue."
"Not to advise the Government I think is a lapse."
It was not an embarrassment for the Government, said Goff. "It may be an embarrassment for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs."
Goff claims to have no hard feelings about having had to give up Foreign Affairs to Peters. The relish with which he has jumped into this issue - where both MFAT and, by implication, Peters - are vulnerable, suggests otherwise.
One last thing - the Air NZ story was broken by Ian Wishart's Investigate magazine. Good on him. It is welcome change from the previous stories on sex and sleaze that have tarred him as much as his targets.
