Clark is ready to meet Tamihere

By AUDREY YOUNG

Prime Minister Helen Clark is planning to meet suspended Cabinet minister John Tamihere in Auckland this week.

She will be armed with the details of his public assurances that he would not take severance pay from the Waipareira Trust.

She said yesterday that she would be going back over the statements he made on the public record in 1999, when he turned down the payment in line with her own campaigning against golden handshakes.

"That's one of the issues I want to get to the bottom of now that I'm back," she told TV One's Breakfast.

But she also said she wanted to stick to the process that had been set up.

Mr Tamihere has stood down from the Cabinet pending a report by Wellington QC Douglas White into the $195,000 payment from the trust and other matters.

Helen Clark reinforced the definition of golden handshake set by Deputy Prime Minister Michael Cullen in her absence in India last week when she described it as "people being paid large sums of money to leave the public sector", a definition which does not apply to Mr Tamihere's circumstances.

But she referred to the fact that her Government had gone to court to prevent such a payout - a reference to the Crown contesting the $1.2 million lawsuit filed by Christine Rankin when she was not reappointed chief executive of Work and Income.

And she signalled that Mr Tamihere's point of vulnerability would be the discrepancy between what he said at the time and his later acceptance of the severance package.

"I need to go back and see what was said at the time," she said.

News of the payment, made in 2000, has only just surfaced in a Deloitte review of the trust.

Dr Cullen spent a lot of effort last week arguing that the payment was not a golden handshake - an argument undermined by Mr Tamihere's new defence at the weekend that it was a "koha" which he could not refuse.

That description has been attacked by the trust's deputy chairwoman, Naida Glavish.

Helen Clark refused to engage in debate over the koha issue but Dr Cullen and other colleagues who spent a week mounting a technical defence of their colleague are unlikely to be impressed.

"I'm looking at the evidence. What payments are described as is really of no moment to me," the Prime Minister told Paul Holmes on Newstalk ZB.

"With ministers, you always take a bit of rough with the smooth. The point is where does the balance lie in that and that's the judgment that has to be formed."

Waipareira's board of trustees is set to meet tonight in Auckland.

None of the trustees could be contacted yesterday to confirm speculation that they were to meet Mr Tamihere today.