Heather du Plessis-Allan: The case of Michael Wood will go down as a perplexing political stuff-up

The case of Michael Wood, I think, has got to go down in history as one of the most confusing political stuff-ups ever, don’t you think?

Because no-one can explain why. Why did Michael Wood fail time after time just to own up to the fact that he held shares that the rules clearly said he needed to declare? He should have declared them all when he filled out the register at Parliament of what each MP owns.

He filled that out once a year, for seven years and he said nothing. He should have declared them all when the Cabinet Office was chasing him about the airport shares- twelve times.

And then, he should have declared them all when he finally got busted owning those airport shares a couple of weeks ago and got stood down from his job as Transport Minister when he was headline news for days. He should have declared the rest of them, but he didn’t.

So we found out today that he also owns shares in Spark, Chorus, The National Australian Bank.

The thing is, he’s allowed to own these shares. He just needed to tell us that he owns these shares. That is the only rule that he’s broken- repeatedly. Transparency, not telling us.

Why didn’t he do that? Very simple thing, it’s the confusing thing for all of us.

No-one actually believes that Michael Wood hid them for financial gain so he could use his position as a Minister to give those companies a leg-up over competitors.

Because if the other shares were in the same ball-park as the Auckland Airport shares, around $16,000- it’s not worth it.

There is no financial gain, you’re not going to get much of a capital increase in the shares. Certainly not enough to take a risk losing a $300,000 job over.

No-one thinks this is an oversight, because Michael Wood is not a stupid man. And no-one thinks he is that careless that he forgot to do it this many times.

He’s known as a boy scout with ambitions to be Prime Minister. He is too diligent to just let this stuff happen.

And as I say, even if you think up ‘til now: ‘It’s probably just carelessness’, then surely two weeks ago when he lost his transport portfolio, he would have stopped being careless  and gone through absolutely every last thing he owns and fessed up to the Prime Minister.

Still, he didn’t. Why? Try explaining it, no-one can.

In the end, we’ve ended up with the right outcome, I think. Because it would have been a bad day for New Zealand if Michael Wood had come back to his job as Transport Minister.

When he’d been busted misleading the public, misleading Cabinet Office and misleading the Prime Minister over those original airport shares, if he’d come back and Chippy had sounded like that was a possibility, the bar for what we would have been prepared to tolerate in rule-breaking from our MPs would have been way too low.

Telling the truth should have been an absolute bare minimum, and he didn’t do that.

So it is the right outcome, but it’s just so unbelievably perplexing, isn’t it?

That a clever, ambitious minister would be prepared to lose his job rather than just fess up that he owned some shares.

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