He was leading a three-MP group that travelled to Europe last month for meetings in Brussels and Geneva when he decided on the jaunt.
"How many times in my lifetime am I going to get to Europe? So I thought `. . . I'm off. I'm off to Paris,"' he said yesterday.
Mr Harawira, whose wife accompanied him on the trip, paid for the extra travel and said many of the issues to be discussed at the meeting had been broached at a dinner the previous night.
He had asked European Parliament MP Mara Bizzotto, who chaired the delegation for relations with Australia and New Zealand, if he could skip the meeting "and she was cool with it".
"We had dinner with her the night before.
"I said to her, `Look, I'll introduce you to some All Blacks when you come down to Aotearoa' and she really liked that bit."
National MP Katrina Shanks and Labour MP Rajen Prasad were in Europe with Mr Harawira.
The meeting dicussed relations between the European Union and New Zealand, family and youth policies, and multiculturalism.
It is not the first time the Tai Tokerau MP has departed from the agenda while overseas.
In 2007, he was ordered to pay back $1100 - half the price of his flights - after leaving halfway through a select-committee trip to Melbourne to visit Aboriginal groups in Alice Springs.
A Parliamentary Services spokesman said yesterday the Office of the Clerk was looking into Mr Harawira's Paris trip.
But Mr Harawira was unrepentant.
"I accept it was outside the boundaries, but I don't feel uncomfortable with it."
Mr Harawira wrote about the trip in his column in the Kaitaia-based Northland Age newspaper.
In it, he describes the Louvre as "the museum made famous by Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code" and tells why he and his wife only went to the second level of the Eiffel Tower: "Too many people, not enough time, but high enough to see the grandeur of a beautiful city."
