Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters will be at the High Court in Auckland for a case looking into the leaking of his superannuation details in 2017. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters will be at the High Court in Auckland for a case looking into the leaking of his superannuation details in 2017. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Labour deputy leader and senior minister Kelvin Davis will chair next Monday's Cabinet meeting while Acting Prime Minister Winston Peters pursues a lawsuit against former Government ministers.
Cabinet – a weekly high-level meeting of Government ministers where the most important decisions are discussed and made – is usually chaired bythe Prime Minister.
Jacinda Ardern will be at the East Asia summit in Bangkok until Tuesday and, as such, Winston Peters will be Acting Prime Minister.
A spokesman for the Prime Minister said post-cab – a question and answer session with press gallery journalists and the Prime Minister – was only ever with the Prime Minister or, when they were away, the Acting Prime Minister.
Neither Ardern nor Peters will be fronting for the Government during Question Time on Tuesday either. That responsibility will fall to Davis or Finance Minister Grant Robertson.
Peters has brought a privacy case against two former ministers – Anne Tolley and Paula Bennett – top civil servants and a government department after it emerged before the 2017 election he had paid back about $18,000 of superannuation over-payments.
The case starts at the High Court at Auckland on Monday.
Court documents from the case suggest Peters was sent a letter four years into his seven years of overpayments by officials asking him to confirm if he was "single" but continued to receive a higher rate of super, for single people in shared accommodation, for three more years despite being in a de facto relationship.