Former Prime Minister Chris Hipkins says he has full confidence his ministers managed their conflicts of interest appropriately while he was at the helm.
Pressure from the Labour Party forced ACT MP Todd Stephenson to sell his shares in three different pharmaceutical companies.
Stephenson is the parliamentary private secretary to Associate Health Minister David Seymour, who's in charge of the Government drug-buying agency Pharmac.
During Tuesday's edition of AM, host Lloyd Burr asked Hipkins, now the Opposition leader, what Stephenson had done wrong - given he was a parliamentary private secretary and not a minister.
Hipkins said somebody in such a role could have access to potentially sensitive information.
"It would be a bit like saying, 'Somebody in a minister's office can have private shareholdings in the companies that the minister is making decisions about and that wouldn't be a conflict'... It would be a conflict - it's pretty clear that would be a conflict."
"Where you are making market-sensitive decisions - or decisions that are related to... entities - it would be very common to ask, 'Does anybody in the room have any conflicts to declare? Does anybody own shares in this company?"
Hipkins said that was "just a matter of good Government".
He also said he was "absolutely confident" ministers in his Government made sure they managed conflicts of interest - if any existed - while he was Prime Minister.
When Burr put it to Hipkins that Stephenson divested his holdings "a lot quicker than Michael Wood sold his airport shares", the former Prime Minister noted Wood "had to resign from Cabinet because he did not manage that conflict appropriately".
Before the resignation of Wood last year, he was stood down as the Transport Minister for not selling off Auckland Airport shares after being asked multiple times to do so.
His subsequent resignation as a minister came as further failures to disclose conflicts of interest emerged.
Stephenson, meanwhile, would remain in the private secretary role - insisting the job was "without decision-making powers".
"I will not allow anything to distract from the Government's goal of delivering real change in the critical area of medicines access. I've decided to divest all my shareholdings as reported in the pecuniary interests register to ensure no distraction exists," he said in a statement on Tuesday.
"I look forward to continuing my work with David Seymour as his parliamentary private secretary."
Newshub.
