Winston Peters is defending his deputy’s travel expenses including a private limousine on standby and an upgrade to business class flights, saying it’s “nothing out of the ordinary”.<\/p>\n
Shane Jones travelled to Canada in March last year to attend the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada convention, said to be the world’s largest mining conference.<\/p>\n
According to a report by Stuff the original trip was budgeted and approved by Cabinet to cost $33,000 but ended up blowing out to $63,000.<\/p>\n
Speaking to media on his way into a select committee scrutiny hearing as Regional Development Minister, Jones said his officials were responsible for his travel costs and sign-off was overseen by the finance department – “well above my pay grade”.<\/p>\n
It’s reported Jones had a private limo on standby for a total of 24 hours over three days at a cost of C$3791.15, while the original budget for land transport was set down and approved at $500.<\/p>\n
Asked why he needed the limo, Jones said “I presume that’s when I was in chilly cold snow blizzard-riddled Toronto”.<\/p>\n
He said whether he should have taken a taxi was a matter for officials who he “presumed” booked his trip.<\/p>\n
When asked if he requested the limo, Jones said, “look, all those details – I’m up in the wheelhouse – all those details would have been attended to by the trip organiser”.<\/p>\n
As to why he flew business class when premium economy was approved for the trip, Jones blamed a booking error.<\/p>\n
“To the best of my knowledge there was some sort of cock-up with the original booking, and then it was corrected, and by the time they corrected it there must have been a change in the cost structure of the trip.”<\/p>\n
“I tend not to book my own travel,” Jones said.<\/p>\n
“I mean, these things are detached from the politicians, so that there’s accountability, and the system runs the budgetary travel, and then it’s signed off, I think, by the Prime Minister’s department or something like that.”<\/p>\n
Peters was also stopped by reporters at Parliament on Thursday morning where he insisted Jones had done nothing wrong.<\/p>\n
“There’s nothing out of the ordinary on this matter at all, and by any other comparison with other ministers<\/p>\n
“They made a budgetary mistake at the start as to what it costs were when I saw that, actually I couldn’t believe that they were so low, so what you’ve got is normalcy in this case, and there’s nothing for us to apologise here for,” Peters said.<\/p>\n
“You can say there might be a budget, but when you get there, you have to deal with the realities.”<\/p>\n
On the upgrade from premium economy to business class, Peters said that was within the rules when it’s 20 hours of flying.<\/p>\n
“I’ve flown personally half way around the world on economy and nobody’s ever reflected on that, have you?…but in this case what he did was normal.”<\/p>\n
Stuff reported Ministerial Services began chasing an explanation about an initial $20,000 overspend in May last year, and had to send several follow-up emails.<\/p>\n
In January Jones wrote to the prime minister’s chief of staff seeking retrospective approval, which was approved the following month, according to Stuff.<\/p>\n
Responding to the delay between Jones being asked for an explanation and the approval being sought, Peters said those sorts of issues often take a lot of time “and it’s not the minister’s fault”.<\/p>\n
This will be the system’s delay – that’s why things take that long,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Winston Peters is defending his deputy’s travel expenses including a private limousine on standby and an upgrade to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":482671,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-482670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482670","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=482670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/482671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}