Is Steven Joyce still running the show?
- Grant McLachlan
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Two boardroom rescues and a courtroom costs judgment inside five weeks have put the same handful of National-aligned names back at the centre of the party's donor world.
When Winton Land's board needed someone to steady the company after founder Chris Meehan resigned this week amid a board-led employment process, it turned to Steven Joyce.
When NZME's shareholders needed a compromise candidate to end businessman Jim Grenon's takeover push last year, they also turned to Joyce.
And when it emerged this year that a National-aligned businessman had secretly bankrolled a defamation case a judge called wholly unsuccessful, it was that same businessman, Grenon — now Joyce's fellow NZME director — who was ordered to help pay the bill.
Joyce built his reputation as National's trouble-shooter long before any of this: campaign manager for two elections, a minister within his first term, the architect behind the Waterview Connection and the Roads of National Significance programme.
The real question posed by this month's pile-up of boardroom and donor trouble is not whether Joyce still matters to National. It is whether the party, and the donor economy that funds it, has built anything that works without him.
Contents
A career built on being the fixer
Joyce made his money before he entered politics.
He built the RadioWorks radio network up from a single New Plymouth station and selling it to CanWest in 2001 for $6 million.
He became National's campaign manager for the 2005 and 2008 elections, entered Parliament in 2008 and was a minister within his first term, eventually holding Transport, Economic Development, Tertiary Education and, from 2014, Finance.
As Transport Minister he declared the Waterview Connection and the wider Western Ring Route a Road of National Significance in 2009, routing the project through a fast-track national consenting process rather than the ordinary Resource Management Act pathway.
He resigned from Parliament in 2018 after losing the National leadership contest to Simon Bridges, and set up the consultancy Joyce Advisory the same year.
Since then the directorships have accumulated steadily:
an independent board adviser to RCP New Zealand, which project-manages public and private health-infrastructure builds, since 2019;
the Winton Land board from 2022;
a seat on the newly established Hawke's Bay Water Services board from late 2025; and,
this year, the Foodstuffs North Island board.
A fuller list compiled by Bryce Edwards adds Icehouse Ventures and the University of Waikato's business school advisory board. View his directorship history at the Companies Officer here.
Joyce still lists his home, as he has since well before any of these appointments, at Dairy Flat, north of Auckland.
Winton and the Meehan exit
Chris Meehan founded Winton in 2009 and built it into an NZX- and ASX-listed developer with a pipeline of roughly 5,750 residential lots, dwellings and retirement units. He resigned as chief executive and chair this week, during the final stages of a board-led employment process the company says was unrelated to its financial performance.
In 2025 the Employment Relations Authority had already ordered a Winton entity to pay Meehan's former executive assistant more than $100,000 over his conduct on a business-class flight.
Joyce, already an independent director, was elected chair with immediate effect.
Meehan is also one of National's more significant donors.
Between 2022 and 2025 he and entities linked to him gave more than $213,000 to National, ACT and NZ First, most of it to National, and two projects linked to Meehan and Winton have since been granted fast-track approval by the Government.
None of that is unlawful, or even unusual for the property sector. But it is the same architecture the sector runs everywhere: donate, build, and have a reliably useful person in the chair when trouble arrives.
Donate, build, and have a reliably useful person in the chair when trouble arrives.
NZME and the Grenon compromise
Joyce's other chairmanship followed a similar shape.
Canadian-New Zealand businessman Jim Grenon built a shareholding of almost 10 percent in NZME, publisher of the NZ Herald, and moved in March 2025 to clean out its board.
The standoff was resolved in May with a negotiated compromise: Grenon withdrew his own board nominees and joined the table himself, while Joyce — nominated by the outgoing chair's own husband as a compromise — took the chair.
Grenon's own conduct has since drawn far sharper scrutiny than Joyce's.
In March this year a District Court judge ruled that a defamation case Grenon had secretly funded, brought by anti-co-governance campaigner Julian Batchelor against TVNZ and researcher Sanjana Hattotuwa, had failed on every point the defendants raised.
In June the same judge went further, finding that the earlier non-disclosure of Grenon's funding amounted to an abuse of the court's process, and ordered Grenon and Batchelor to jointly pay more than $230,000 in costs.
Joyce has said nothing publicly about his board colleague's conduct. As chair, his job is presumably to make sure nobody has to.
A donor class in the headlines
It is not only Joyce's own boardrooms generating trouble.
Christchurch property developer Matthew Horncastle was referred to police by the Electoral Commission this month over digital billboards that, the Commission says, carried a promoter statement without the separate contact details section 204F of the Electoral Act requires. Horncastle disputes that characterisation and has filed his own Official Information Act request over the referral. The process is unresolved and no finding has been made against him.
In North Canterbury, Wolfbrook Property Group donated $40,250 to National within days of confirming it would seek fast-track consent to rezone the Pegasus golf course for housing, over the objections of a 16,000-signature petition and the local council.
Wolfbrook and its directors had separately settled a $110,000 dispute out of court after a Wellington High Court judge criticised the company's conduct, and lost a Christchurch High Court case over an overhanging-balcony development — the same twelve months in which the donation was made.
This is the same pattern I mapped through Bayleys' donor network earlier this year in A very natural progression: legal, declared, and structurally identical every time.
The machine built for MMP
None of this is new.
Between 1996 and 2005, National reorganised itself for MMP, building the polling, segmentation and targeting operation that a first-past-the-post party had never needed:
Joyce and John Key built the money and the machine;
Paula Bennett became its public face in the growth electorates of West and North Auckland, taking over fundraising duties following her retirement while working for Bayleys Real Estate.
Chris Penk and Mark Mitchell followed a similar path into Parliament;
Simon Watts Erica Stanford and Cameron Brewer extended it further.
What grew up around the parliamentary party is now its own ecosystem:
the National Foundation, a capital-protected fund set up to secure the party's long-term finances outside ordinary campaign-donation disclosure;
the appointment of National Party-aligned people to boards of Crown entities;
the loosely associated network of National-aligned candidates for local councils, power trusts and licensing authorities (such as Communities and Residents); and
a set of nominally independent advocacy groups — the Taxpayers' Union, the Ratepayers' Alliance, the Free Speech Union, Groundswell and Hobson's Pledge among them — drawing on much of the same donor base that gives directly to National and ACT.
Paula Bennett has been the fundraiser.
John Key has been the figurehead.
When the party's oldest fixer is needed in two boardrooms and a chairman's chair inside twelve months, the trouble is not really Steven Joyce. It is what keeps needing fixed.
