Harawira skips EU meeting for Paris jaunt

Hone Harawira may be asked to repay some of his travel costs after skipping official business to go sightseeing in Paris. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Maori Party MP Hone Harawira is being investigated after skipping a European parliamentary delegation meeting to make a 300km dash from Brussels to go sightseeing in Paris.

He was leading a three-MP group that travelled to Europe last month for meetings in Brussels and Geneva when he decided on the jaunt.

"How many times in my lifetime am I going to get to Europe? So I thought, 'F*** it, I'm off. I'm off to Paris'," he said yesterday.

Mr Harawira, whose wife, Hilda, accompanied him on the trip, paid for the extra travel himself and said many of the issues that were due to be discussed at the missed meeting had been broached at a dinner the night before.

He had asked European Parliament MP Mara Bizzotto - who chaired the delegation for relations with Australia and New Zealand - if he could skip the meeting "and she was cool with it".

"We had dinner with her the night before.

"I said to her, 'Look, I'll introduce you to some All Blacks when you come down to Aotearoa', and she really liked that bit."

National MP Katrina Shanks and Labour MP Rajen Prasad were in Europe with Mr Harawira, and Ms Shanks was left to chair the meeting, and later to report on it.

The meeting discussed relations between the EU and New Zealand, family and youth policies and multiculturalism.

It is not the first time the MP for Te Tai Tokerau has mixed pleasure with business while overseas.

In 2007, he was ordered to pay back $1100 - half the price of his business-class flights - after leaving half way through a four-day select committee trip to Melbourne, to visit Aboriginal groups in Alice Springs.

A Parliamentary Service spokesman yesterday said the Office of the Clerk was looking into Mr Harawira's Paris trip and it was possible he could be asked to repay a portion of his travel costs if he had missed official business.

But Mr Harawira was yesterday unrepentant. "I accept it was outside the boundaries, but I don't feel uncomfortable with it."

He said he told Ms Shanks before going to Paris, but had not spoken to Dr Prasad until his return.

"He [Dr Prasad] had a laugh and said, 'Well, what goes on tour stays on tour'."

Mr Harawira effectively dobbed himself in by writing about the Paris trip in his column in the Kaitaia-based Northland Age newspaper.

In it, he describes the Louvre as "the museum made famous by Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code" and tells why he and his wife went to only the second level of the Eiffel Tower: "Too many people, not enough time, but high enough to see the grandeur of a beautiful city."

Yesterday, he said he was not the kind to keep such things hidden and readers of his column told him they loved the piece.