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Heather Roy - Source: ONE News -
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A defiant Heather Roy has fronted up to parliament's question time a day after her party leader Rodney Hide said it would be difficult for her to come back after her demotion within the party.
Roy returned to parliament flanked by her husband, Duncan Roy, and fellow Act MP Sir Roger Douglas and officials.
"I'm back," she told a throng of media inside parliament as she took her place as the lowest ranked of the party's five MPs.
"Rodney and I can both lift ourselves above the fracas of last week," she said.
Roy said she looking forward to getting "stuck in to the things I was elected to do".
Roy was voted out of her deputy leadership role last week and replaced by John Boscawen. She also lost her role as Associate Defence Minister and Consumer Affairs Minister.
She is back a week early from leave, saying she's sick of gardening. She told Close Up's Mark Sainsbury she'd had plenty of time to think things over.
"I'm committed to staying with the Act party and the right thing to do seemed to be coming back to work."
Roy said she would not get into the slanging match with her leader who she described last week as an intimidating bully in a dossier leaked to the media. She also denied rumours of an inappropriate relationship with former adviser Simon Ewing-Jarvie.
"We've been family friends for a long time... There was never anything inappropriate in our relationship at all," she told Close Up.
When asked today whether she held to the views she expressed in the dossier, she said that was last week and the party was bigger than personalities.
Roy said she can work with Hide and has accepted the decision of her caucus. She said she has confidence in Hide as leader and she was the casualty of a democratic process.
She brushed aside media claims of trouble within her party and said she's ready to put the incidents of last week behind her.
Prime Minister John Key said he is pleased Act is back in force. He said Act will always vote with a centre right government and the party is not going anywhere in a hurry.
Fronting up on TV ONE's Breakfast this morning, Hide said Act promised the people of New Zealand that there would be five votes for John Key and the National Party.
"It's important that we have stable government and if John Key had asked me 'what's going on with Heather', because the complaints that she was making about me were going to the Prime Minister, I'd have to say 'I don't know'," Hide said.
Last week Ewing-Jarvie confirmed there was fall-out over leader Hide taking a defence document from Roy's office.
Hide said last night the whole Roy saga had been "a sad and in many ways a pathetic saga".
Hide challenge
Meanwhile, Hide is also facing another challenger from a party insider for his job in Epsom.
IT consultant Peter Tashkoff, ranked number seven on the party list, is questioning Hide's leadership.
"I don't think Rodney Hide is a worthy leader of the Act Party, I haven't thought so for some time," Tashkoff said.
He said Hide simply lacks credibility.
"I name him also as a bully. I have seen him bully people in my presence," he said.
