Finance Minister Nicola Willis out for a run in Washington DC with other Finance Ministers.<\/p>\n
During Question Time, Willis at one point emitted a long groan. Hipkins interjected that she \u201cmay have been having a few issues\u201d and \u201cmay need some medical help\u201d.<\/p>\n
Willis took offence at that.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would like to assure all members of this House that I\u2019m in great health and I went for an excellent run with the Treasurer of Australia, the British Chancellor in Washington DC recently and I find it offensive and in a long line of politicians in this House making personal aspersions on people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hipkins subsequently withdrew the statement but suggested it had been taken out of context.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was referring, of course, to the noise that she made, and nothing else.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later, Willis approached Hipkins in front of journalists and asked if he would like to apologise.<\/p>\n
Hipkins: \u201cI\u2019m happy to if you were genuinely offended by what I said. I was referring to the noise that you were making and nothing else.<\/p>\n
Willis: \u201cI think you know exactly what you were meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n
She later told the Herald: \u201cChris Hipkins has now contacted me personally to offer a full apology. I\u2019ve accepted his apology and am happy to move on. I have better things to focus on.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs I said in Parliament, I\u2019m in great health and fighting fit for an election year.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cIt has been reported that my remarks were not in keeping with what one would expect from a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":393278,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1443,74,38860,43507,11220,33092,246,1888,2082,2176,13489,2225,1446,6722,111,43,139,20484,69,59342,7228,18216,792,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-393277","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-zealand","8":"tag-about","9":"tag-after","10":"tag-apologised","11":"tag-apologises","12":"tag-comment","13":"tag-deputy","14":"tag-finance","15":"tag-first","16":"tag-for","17":"tag-jones","18":"tag-leader","19":"tag-loss","20":"tag-making","21":"tag-minister","22":"tag-new-zealand","23":"tag-news","24":"tag-newzealand","25":"tag-nicola","26":"tag-nz","27":"tag-seemingly","28":"tag-shane","29":"tag-weight","30":"tag-willis","31":"tag-zealand"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393277\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/393278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}