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An official in Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters' office failed to even read a security report that detailed Air New Zealand's plans to fly Iraq-bound Australian troops to Kuwait, it was revealed today.
NZPA reported in August that Mr Peters' office received a report on the planned flights from the Combined Threat Assessment Group (CTAG).
The information in that report was never passed on to Mr Peters.
Today the National Party revealed the report was not even initially read.
The detail was revealed in an email from Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade boss Simon Murdoch, obtained by National's foreign affairs spokesman Murray McCully under the Official Information Act.
When the issue of the flights hit the headlines it prompted anger from government ministers who said they had been blindsided by Air New Zealand.
It was later revealed that several officials including Mr Murdoch knew about the planned flights but had failed to pass the information on to their ministers.
Mr Peters today said Mr McCully was way off the pace on the issue.
"It's a pretty slack politician that gets beaten by the media by six or seven weeks."
He denied an assertion from Mr McCully he had misled the House.
He said he told Parliament that no MFAT official had communicated with his office about the Air New Zealand flights before they took place.
That was true as the only communication came from CTAG - a group made up of officials from police, the Defence Force and the country's spy agencies - which was not part of MFAT.
"CTAG does not work for me."
Mr Peters said the CTAG report was among a mountain of paperwork that came into his office.
"The reality of it all is here, you read what you possibly can and read all the bulletins from overseas, but this was a matter not alerted to me by CTAG, but to one of my officials."
Asked why the official failed to read the report, Mr Peters said to the inquiring journalist: "Not everyone is as brilliant as you are."
- NZPA
