SpeechPRIVILEGEConsideration of Privileges Committee Report—Member's Compliance with Appendix B of the Standing OrdersHon DAVID PARKER (Chairperson of the Privileges Committee): I move That the report of the Privileges Committee concerning a member's compliance with the requirements of Appendix B of the Standing Orders be noted. I will as chair of the Privileges Committee give a summary of the report from the committee. This report relates to the failure by the Hon Michael Wood to properly declare his interests in two companies: Auckland International Airport Limited and Contact Energy. As the report shows Mr Wood had these interests at the time he entered into Parliament but he had acquired those shares quite a long time ago around 1998 and he didn't declare them until 2022 and 2023. He first entered Parliament in 2017 and as the report explains—and as Mr Wood explained to the committee—he forgot that he owned those shares. He was at one time also confused between the shares in his personal name and shares held by a trust. But in any event the committee found that his actions in respect of the period between 2017 and 2022 when he did declare the shares was essentially negligent in that he was in breach of his duties to the House to make a proper disclosure of those shares. There was also an allegation that shares that were owned by a trust in which he had an interest—also in Auckland International Airport—should have been disclosed. The committee went through in some detail the—oh no. Sorry. Before I cover that I should note that there are a number of members who on occasions make mistakes in their returns on shares or other assets and those mistakes are not to be taken lightly. But when a mistake is noted it is a duty upon the member not just to fix the error going forward by making a correct disclosure in a later year but to cause the registrar to be aware of the error or the omission in earlier returns and to correct that error by causing the earlier returns to be corrected. And that's the mistake that Mr Wood made here: both not declaring the shares in Auckland International Airport and Contact Energy in those first five years but then once he did become aware that he had made those mistakes not correcting the earlier returns—instead he just made correct returns in the years that followed.The other allegation that was made against him was in respect of shares owned by the JM Fairey Family Trust and there the committee quite carefully sets out the rules that are in Standing Orders. Those rules say that pecuniary interests that are held by a member in a company or business entity are meant to be disclosed to the extent that the rules require them to be disclosed. The rules then make it clear that company interests that are owned by a trust or indeed another company don't have to be disclosed. And that's made clear by clause 5(2) of the relevant rules which says that a member does not have a pecuniary interest in a company … merely because the member has a pecuniary interest in another … business entity"—in this case a trust—"that has a pecuniary interest in [that company]". And it's on that issue that the Privileges Committee makes it clear that on our reading of the rules it's actually quite clear that interests owned by a trust in a company don't currently have to be disclosed. That's also made clear in the relevant form that members have to fill in Form 4 which sets out beneficial interests and trusteeships of trust and the form says "Do not include the pecuniary interests that the trust itself may have (e.g. the assets of the trust). The exception to [which] is real property held in a trust which you should declare in Form 6." Now the reason that there is a different rule for real property is because the Standing Orders make it clear with a specific rule covering that that real interests in land held by a trust do have to be disclosed but the opposite is the case in respect of shares held by a trust. So one of the recommendations of the Privileges Committee is that if the Standing Orders Committee indeed thinks that interests of a trust in a company should be declared then the Standing Orders should be changed to make that clear. But at the moment the opposite is true: it is clear that they don't have to be. So to that extent we disagreed with the reference that had been made to us by the Registrar of Pecuniary Interests because we thought it was clear unanimously across the committee on the face of the rules that those other interests did not need to be declared i.e. an interest of a trust in a company is not caught by the disclosure rules. It remains the case however that the Hon Michael Wood should have disclosed the interests that he held in his personal name between 2017 and 2022 and that he didn't—and that once he became aware of that error he shouldn't have just corrected the matter going forward he should have corrected it looking backwards. I would also note that the committee found that this didn't amount to a contempt. It was a serious breach of the rules that the committee drew to the attention of the House and our recommendation was that the member be required to apologise."