I have today repaid to Ministerial services the sum of $151.90 spent by me on the Ministerial credit card on 2 September 2009 for lunch with electorate staff in Christchurch.

I accept this expenditure falls outside the determination of what is Ministerial business.

Housing and Fisheries Minister Phil Heatley today apologised for the unintentional misuse of his Ministerial credit card and vowed to ensure no such mistakes are made in the future.

The time has come for Communications Minister Steven Joyce to demand some answers from Telecom following the latest major outage in the XT network, Labour's Communications and IT spokesperson Clare Curran said today.

The Government has approved the Otago and Southland District Health Boards' plans to merge.

Professor Janis Swan of the University of Waikato has been appointed to the Marsden Fund Council, Minister of Research, Science and Technology Wayne Mapp announced today.

Labour's Auckland Issues spokesperson Phil Twyford says public submissions at the first day of the Auckland Governance Select Committee hearings have been overwhelmingly negative about the super city.

Labour Minister Kate Wilkinson needs to front up and look into why the number of personal grievances due to redundancy complaints has doubled in the last year, Labour's Associate labour spokesperson Darien Fenton said today.

Communications Minister Steven Joyce must put consumers first when responding to the Commerce Commission's report on mobile termination rates, Labour Communications and IT spokesperson Clare Curran said today.

Auckland City Mayor and Super City candidate John Banks says poll results released by Curia Research are encouraging but there is still a lot of hard work to be done.

Mayor Banks says the poll shows the Mayoralty race for the Greater Auckland Council will be a tight battle.

Agriculture Minister David Carter will join his Austrian counterpart Nikolaus Berlakovich as co-chair of the OECD Agriculture Ministers' meeting in Paris this week.