National leader Simon Bridges says he was not cunning enough to have arranged the Budget hack drama as a smokescreen to bury National's bad news. 

Last week, National released information from Budget 2019 days before it was due to be officially released. Treasury secretary Gabriel Makhlouf hours later released a statement saying that Treasury had been hacked, a claim that was later proven to have been false.

An investigation is now underway into whether Makhlouf deliberately misled politicians about the claims. 

Bridges used the leaks to embarrass the Government and call for Finance Minister Grant Robertson's resignation. It came after several negative stories for National, namely MP Alfred Ngaro deciding against launching his own political party, and criticism over a report in the party's culture.

Asked by Jamie Mackay if he had arranged it all, Bridges had a simple response: "If only I was that cunning!" 

He says that if National was trying to bury bad news, he would have released all that news at 4pm on a Friday as Labour does "every single week". 

Bridges did not want to say if it was his best week as leader, but says that releasing the leaks was the right thing to do.

"All you need to know about it is two words: search bar. That's all that happened here. And as a result of that, we saw the Treasury secretary and Finance Minister go into a frenzy."

He denies that Alfred Ngaro decided against a 'Christian Party' because Brian and Hannah Tamaki launched their own party

"It's a heck of a big task to get up a political party."