Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has full confidence in his Cabinet despite two confidential papers being leaked in just five days.
Last Monday, Newshub obtained a leaked Cabinet paper about the Coalition Government's plans to repeal Fair Pay Agreements. It revealed the move would disproportionately impact women, Māori and Pasifika and young people and shows the Workplace Relations Minister is at odds with official advice.
Then on Friday, a leaked paper from Treasury revealed Cabinet had suspended regulatory impact statements, which enables the government to repeal things like fair pay agreements.
Luxon appeared on AM on Monday morning for his last interview of the year with the show and said he still maintains "full confidence" in his Cabinet.
"I have every confidence in our Cabinet members and the people that are sitting around the cabinet table," he said.
Luxon told AM co-host Melisa Chan-Green he knows "very well" the leaks did not come from people sitting around the Cabinet table.
"That's why you saw MBIE proactively, on its own volition, actually raise the issue with us and say it would commence its own investigation on the first one," the Prime Minister said.
"The second one frankly is there are thousands of public servants that needed to be informed by Treasury, they were doing their job of telling everybody this is the approach the government wants."
Luxon said the leaking of the paper saying the Coalition Government planned to repeal Fair Pay Agreements, was going to be released in "due course anyway".
On the second leaked paper, Luxon told AM he believes regulatory impact statements are a "huge waste of time".
"The second one is actually quite different, it's saying on issues where we have got our 100-day plan and we've got legislation that we're repealing, we think it's a huge waste of time for everybody to go off and create a regulatory impact statement, particularly given our plan is to repeal that legislation," he said.
"Otherwise, you've got people just working and churning, generating papers that are never going to be read and not that relevant to the decision being taken. So what we did is brief Treasury and then Treasury briefed thousands of public servants in order for them to understand that's a directive from the Government that we don't want people working in spinning wheels, essentially trying to prepare documents that no one's reading."
Watch the full interview above for more.
