Cabinet Minister Michael Wood again faced a grilling by the media, saying he sold his Auckland Airport shares and donated the proceeds to charity.
Video / Mark Mitchell
Embattled Minister Michael Wood has finally sold his Auckland Airport stock and is now the subject of an investigation, while it also emerged the Cabinet Office informed former prime minister Jacinda Ardern of the controversial shareholding.
Yesterday, the Government faced one of its most challenging days of the year inParliament as the probe was launched into Wood’s shares scandal while Education Minister Jan Tinetti faced questions over whether she should be found in contempt of Parliament.
The registrar of pecuniary interests Sir Maarten Wevers, who is in charge of MPs’ declarations of their interests to Parliament, announced he would open an inquiry into the suspended Transport Minister’s declarations after a complaint from National’s Chris Penk.
Wood has admitted he owned shares in Auckland Airport and Contact Energy which should have been declared in the register of MPs’ interests each year after he became an MP in 2016.
Instead, thinking the shares were held in a trust, Wood only declared them in 2022. Wevers will look at whether Wood should have declared the shares initially and whether he should have gone back to correct the record as soon as he realised a mistake had been made.
“The Registrar noted that Hon Michael Wood had, in recent days, made a number of public statements, including in the House of Representatives, in relation to the need to amend previous returns under the Register,” a statement from the registrar said.
“The Registrar’s preliminary review also took account of the degree of importance of the matter under inquiry; whether the matter may involve a breach of the obligations to make a return; and whether the matter is technical or trivial,” it said.
Three days after the story first broke in the Herald, Wood said he had finally sold the shares, netting about $16,000, which he has donated to a charity.
Wood said the inquiry was “appropriate and is a useful exercise to go through at the moment”.
“I’m keen that arising out of this, there’s absolute clarity and transparency and I hope that that inquiry can achieve that,” Wood said.
The inquiry will only look at the Parliamentary side of the equation, dealing with Wood’s declarations as an MP. As yet, there is no inquiry looking at Wood’s declarations as a minister.
Wood did declare the shares as a minister, but repeatedly told the Cabinet Office he was in the process of selling the shares.
Wood faced further damaging revelations on Thursday, including that he did not declare the shares when asked directly by the Newsroom website whether he had any interests to declare in July 2021. This was just six days after Wood was delivered his fifth reminder to sell the shares.
Labour deputy leader Kelvin Davis was deputising for Prime Minister Chris Hipkins and Deputy Prime Minister Carmel Sepuloni in the House yesterday.
Davis revealed the Cabinet Office told Ardern that Wood owned the shares in November 2021 and November 2022.
In March 2021, Ardern was incorrectly told Wood had sold the shares. In February 2022 the issue came up again with Ardern’s then-chief of staff who was told Wood was in the process of divesting the shares.
Wood told media that Ardern had not spoken to him personally about the shares.
Education Minister Jan TInetti appears before Parliament's privileges committee. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Hipkins said the responsibility ultimately rested with Wood to sell the shares and not the former prime minister to get him to sell them.
Hipkins confessed to himself being puzzled at why a well-regarded senior minister would behave so unusually over such a small shareholding.
“Like everybody, I can’t quite understand what happened here. Michael is a hardworking, diligent, conscientious person - he’s one of the people who does deal with the details, he does get across things,” Hipkins said.
“I still don’t quite understand how this has gone on for as long as it has and that is something that Michael needs to reflect on and work his way through,” he said.
Education Minister Jan Tinetti was also under fire, facing her own inquiry from the privileges committee into whether she may also be found in contempt of Parliament for failing to immediately correct an incorrect statement she made into whether her office was involved in the delayed release of education data.
Tinetti said she received a range of advice from her staff on the matter but refused to say whether she was advised by her staff to correct the record immediately.
Instead, she waited until she was told by the Speaker that she had to.
National’s Michael Woodhouse was unimpressed by her appearance before the committee, saying the revelations showed her staff were “donkey deep” in deciding when to release the information”.
Gerry Brownlee was similarly displeased, at one point saying: “How can you be functioning as a minister if you don’t know about this?”
But Labour’s day of pain was not all to National’s gain, with leader Christopher Luxon being outed for a poor joke made in Christchurch.
Asked about New Zealand’s demographic challenges, he responded urging people to have babies - a fairly unhelpful remark considering Luxon is trying blunt Labour’s attack that he is anti-women and anti-contraception.
“We need people,” he said. “Here is the deal – New Zealand stopped replacing itself in 2016. I encourage all of you to go out there and have more babies if you wish, that would be helpful.”
Willis later mopped up the mess, saying it was not “National’s position that people need to have more babies in New Zealand. We will never be a party that tells people what the right size for the family is that is a matter of individual choice, family choice”.
