Pegasus Brief — Poisoning the Well

Grant McLachlan
1 day ago
7 min read

Updated: 41 minutes ago

Holes on the greens were filled with concrete, which residents emptied before it set.

Pegasus residents have built a moral position stronger than anything the fast-track process can withstand on the merits — a council opposed, a mayor opposed, the local MP opposed, more than 16,000 signatures, and Golf New Zealand on the record.

When a developer cannot win the argument, the well gets poisoned instead.

Over the past week Wolfbrook's response has followed a familiar order: dig for dirt, push-poll the narrative, flood the comment sections, then provoke a reaction that can be pointed at as proof the other side is unreasonable.

[This is a developing and escalating story. I have included updates in square brackets.]

What's new

Steve Brooks has confirmed to media he intends to lodge a Fast-track application, even after Waimakariri MP Matt Doocey, Mayor Dan Gordon and a 16,000-signature petition had all gone on the record against it. Star News reported the confirmation on 25 June.
Contractors removed the flag pins from the golf course holes and filled the cups with concrete. Residents dug the concrete out before it set — Stuff reported the outrage on 2 July.
Hours later, Christopher Luxon posted a video to Facebook praising the Fast-track process — timing Pegasus residents have called tone-deaf.
A push poll of loaded questions has begun circulating in the community, structured, in the Residents' Group's own words, “to support a particular narrative rather than genuinely test public sentiment.”
The Pegasus Residents' Group has publicly flagged newly active profiles, AI-assisted posts, AI-generated graphics mocking residents, and multiple accounts repeating identical talking points across community Facebook groups.
The petition has passed 16,000 signatures on its final day, and the Residents' Group has framed the fight explicitly in electoral terms ahead of a tight 2026 race.
[RNZ: In an escalation, paths have been chained.]

The order of operations

What has followed a losing argument, in sequence, looks like this:

digging for dirt on people considered threats;
a push poll designed to shift the narrative rather than measure it;
AI-generated content and coordinated posting across community Facebook groups; and,
spiteful, provocative acts calculated to produce a reaction that can then be used against the people provoked.

Each step is deniable on its own. Together, they describe a campaign.

History rhymes

Steve Brooks has a documented history of ignoring political advice in favour of outlandish, self-directed gestures.

Readers of Read the room will recall the 2019 half-page advertisement Brooks personally funded, morphing John Key into Christopher Luxon — a stunt the National Party publicly disowned and the Electoral Commission examined.

The same instinct appears to be running again.

Brooks has told media he intends to press ahead with a fast-track application regardless of the political cost, even as the company most likely to carry that cost — the National Party — is the one whose leader posted in its support.

Bad timing

Wednesday night, Christopher Luxon posted a video to Facebook praising the Fast-track process.

Pegasus residents have described the timing as tone-deaf — not without reason.

The post came only hours after residents watched contractors remove the flag pins from the golf course holes and fill the cups with concrete. Not sand, not sod, not a temporary core — concrete. Residents dug it out again before it set. One of the contractors on site offered the explanation that has justified worse: “I'm just doing my job.”

Stuff's Poppy Clark reported residents' reaction on Thursday, under the headline “Childish act” — confirmation, if any were needed, that this has moved well beyond a dispute residents are having with themselves.

Filling a golf hole with concrete is not maintenance. It is not consistent with an owner keeping a golf course operating while a rezoning application is decided. It is, however, entirely consistent with an owner trying to provoke a response — and residents, credit to them, dug the concrete out rather than the reaction Wolfbrook may have preferred.

The poll

A survey has also been doing the rounds — structured, in the Residents' Group's own words, “to support a particular narrative rather than genuinely test public sentiment.”

Here is a screenshot:

That survey traces to survey.cmix.com, which runs on Dynata's Cmix platform — white-label survey infrastructure used by hundreds of market-research agencies worldwide, not a tool built for this poll specifically.

The domain itself identifies nothing about who commissioned it; that is the point of white-label infrastructure.

What the link does establish is that it was built and fielded through a licensed commercial research supplier, routed through a named sample source (“ds=nexus”) and tagged with an internal job code and a unique respondent ID, rather than knocked together as a public link with a free tool.

Someone paid a real market-research provider for this.

I am continuing to establish how the link was actually distributed to residents — paid social, SMS or a purchased list — which is likely to be more revealing than the survey platform itself.

Push polling as a dirty politics tool

Push polling has a well-documented history in Antipodean politics.

Mark Textor, Lynton Crosby's business partner, apologised and paid Labor candidate Sue Robinson roughly $80,000 in Australian dollars after a 1995 Canberra by-election in which telephone canvassers asked voters whether they would be less likely to support her if she had “publicly supported abortion up to the ninth month of pregnancy” — something Robinson had never said.

Textor later maintained the poll was not intended as a push poll and that he had been given false information; the payment and apology stand regardless.

That network's most direct New Zealand descendants are Sean Topham and Ben Guerin, who founded Topham Guerin in Auckland in 2016. Their roots go deeper than a passing subcontract: Wikipedia's entry on the firm and The Spinoff's 2020 interview with both founders record that Topham served as president of the National Party's youth wing, the Young Nationals, from 2012 to 2015, before the pair worked as digital subcontractors for Lynton Crosby's CTF Partners — part of what The Guardian has described as a large-scale disinformation network run on behalf of paying clients.

Topham Guerin has since been directly and formally engaged by the National Party itself: the NZ Herald reported in 2023 that Topham spoke on the record about running National's social media campaign, and The Democracy Project's profile of the firm lists National's 2020 and 2023 election campaigns among its confirmed clients, alongside the UK Conservative Party and Isaac Levido, another Crosby protégé.

None of that identifies who is behind the Pegasus poll, or whether Topham Guerin, CTF Partners, or anyone connected to them is involved. It establishes two things worth holding onto:

New Zealand has produced its own generation of operators trained in exactly this style of campaign, several with direct and on-the-record National Party engagements; and
the one time this style of polling has been tested in court in this part of the world, it ended in an apology and a payout.

Whether the Pegasus poll is amateur or professional, in-house or outsourced, remains an open question I am continuing to pursue.

Astroturf and AI slop

The Residents' Group has itself flagged what it is seeing:

newly created or previously dormant profiles suddenly posting at volume;
long, polished posts with the unmistakable cadence of AI assistance;
AI-generated graphics mocking residents; and
multiple accounts repeating identical talking points while posting anonymously.

“Not everything appearing in local discussions,” the group wrote, “is necessarily as organic or independent as it may first appear.”

None of this is proof of coordination on its own. All of it together is the pattern this masthead has documented before — the deliberate manufacture of noise and division, timed to exhaust an audience before its questions are answered.

Case and point

Wolfbrook are clearly trying to poison the well so to weaken the moral standing of its opponents. Steve Brooks is doing it himself:

Michael Ward's comment triggered several similar comments, which was just the type of reaction and material that people like Wolfbrook are looking for. Another local stepped in:

Shortly after Brooke's Azzopardi's comment, Steve Brook's comment (and the comment string attached to it) disappeared.

This brief interaction is a brief insight but speaks volumes.

The Pegasus community needs to realise who they're dealing with. Fortunately, Steve Brooks and the likes of Matthew Horncastle don't make any secret of what they're like and what they're up to. Steve Brooks has made no secret on numerous occasions that he has 'always hated golf.'

But what the Pegasus community really needs to get its head around is the template that Wolfbrook are following.

A familiar playbook

The shape of the Wolfbrook response — dig, poll, flood, provoke — fits a modus operandi this masthead has tracked across several fronts:

the Santana Minerals campaign at Tarras, where a , where a former National Party staffer is heading their PR;
the history of similar tactics I identified in this piece about when the journalist becomes the target, where a former National Party staffer did a hitjob campaign on a journalist;
the fights over Queenstown's council playbook against its own watchdog, where a campaign by vested interests undermined a high profile veteran journalist; and
what is playing out between media organisations, where wealthy donors appoint former National Party ministers to chair media organisations.

Steve Brooks's own connections were examined here in The kids who lit matches in the mine.

What is happening at Pegasus is the most brazen version of this playbook I have yet encountered.

The questions worth asking are who is advising Steve Brooks on this campaign, who he has commissioned to run it, and who is lobbying whom to get it through.

Watch list

Whether Wolfbrook formally lodges its Fast-track referral application, and when.
Whether the pattern of spite escalates further on the course itself — residents are encouraged to keep timestamped, dated records of anything they observe.
Whether a more organised PR counter-offensive follows, on the model this masthead has previously traced through the Santana Minerals campaign.
Who commissioned the push poll, and whether that traces to a firm or individual with a Crosby-Textor lineage.
Any response from Wolfbrook, which has not made a substantive public statement in some weeks.

Coverage and primary sources

The Pegasus Brief is Klaut Media's running record of the Pegasus Golf Course story. Earlier editions, and the feature reporting behind them, are available in the archive here.

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