Thursday, January 15, 2009

New minister pulls plug on costly summit

An emergency jobs "summit" due to be held by the Prime Minister in February has been axed after Social Development Minister Paula Bennett declared it a waste of money.

Ms Bennett said she was surprised the PM had continued with plans for the conference after his repeated warnings that he wanted careful spending of public money.

"As you can imagine, sipping my tea at 11 o'clock at night reading that made my face turn blue," she said.

"I then suggested quite strongly to the PM that he might like to revisit that in the current economic times. I told him I didn't think the New Zealand public would see this as a good spend."

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