Michael Wood Auckland Airport shares: Opposition calls for sacking after revelations asked to sell shares 12 times

National deputy leader Nicola Willis said suspended Transport Minister Michael Wood should be sacked from all his portfolios after it was revealed he was advised 12 times to sell his Auckland Airport shares.

“He should be fired,” Willis said after Question Time on Wednesday.

“He has effectively thumbed his nose at the Cabinet Office for two and a half years as they have begged him to get rid of his shares.

“By ignoring their advice, he has effectively ignored the Prime Minister; how can the Prime Minister possibly have confidence in him?” she said.

Willis, standing in for leader Christopher Luxon in the House, extracted the revelation from Prime Minister Christopher Hipkins.

On Tuesday, Hipkins said Wood had only been told about “half a dozen” times that he should divest himself of the shares.

In the House on Wednesday, Hipkins was forced to read an excruciating list of the 12 dates on which the Cabinet Office asked Wood whether he had sold the shares.

On each occasion, Hipkins said Wood “confirmed that he was about to or was in the process of divesting the shareholdings”.

Willis later said she was “shocked” by Hipkins’ answer.

“It’s not often in the House when you ask a question where the answer is so much worse than you expect,” she said.

Willis asked Hipkins whether it was “honest” for Wood to say he was selling his shares, but fail to do so after each of those reminders.

Hipkins did not directly answer that question, responding only, “as I indicated yesterday, I think he should have divested the shares when he first said he was going to”.

On Tuesday, Hipkins outlined a way back for Wood, involving selling the shares, clearing up his prior disclosures to reflect the fact he has owned them for the entire time he was an MP, and ensuring no further damaging revelations emerge.

Hipkins said news on Wednesday that Wood had blocked the bid of North Shore Airport to have Airport Authority status did not clear this threshold, saying he reviewed the documentation around that and was happy with the way Wood had handled the matter.

“I’m satisfied that his shareholding didn’t play any role in the decision,” Hipkins said.

Wood told reporters after question time that he should have responded to the Cabinet Office requests with more urgency.

“I should have responded to it with more urgency. I didn’t,” he said.

“That’s an error that I made. That’s what I’m fixing now,” he said.

Opposition parties continued to turn up the temperature on Wednesday.

Act MPs piled into the Prime Minister, asking how New Zealanders could have confidence in the Government that does not take potential conflicts of interest seriously.

“How can a developer applying for a subdivision consent be confident the independent hearings commissioner does not have an investment in a competing subdivision when the Prime Minister couldn’t trust his own Transport Minister to declare shares of Auckland Airport when declining “airport authority” status to the North Shore Aerodrome?,” was one example from deputy leader Brooke van Velden.

The tactic grated on Labour MPs, Leader of the House Grant Robertson attempting to have it ruled out of order, saying the Act questions did not relate enough to the topic of the primary question.

The bigger issue for Wood is that neglecting to respond to those 12 requests from the Cabinet Office has turned him into a joke for opposition MPs.

Willis drew a comparison with her 13-year-old son.

“Sometimes I have to ask him five or six times to pick his towel up off the floor but a dozen times, that is next level,” she said.

“This saga went on for two and a half years - it is unfathomable to me,” she said.