The Age of the Arsehole: ACT returns to its roots
Updated: 2 hours ago
Paul Henry is not a gaffe waiting to happen. He is a service ACT is buying — and the donors paying for it have never had it easier.
Howard Stern invented the job. People did not tune in to hear what he thought. They tuned in to find out what he would say. Thirty-five years on, New Zealand has put the format on a party list. Paul Henry sits at number four on ACT’s list, ahead of two sitting MPs and a Cabinet minister, which on current polling makes his election a formality.
The easy question is whether Henry will embarrass the party. It is also the wrong question. ACT knew exactly what it was buying in July, and it promoted him anyway.
The question worth asking seven weeks out from polling day is what he is for — and who benefits while the country watches him.
Contents
Word of the week
Henry has spent the winter running a gag.
At his announcement in July he told RNZ he was wary of sitting in Parliament late at night “listening to a bunch of twats carping on”. He also wondered aloud whether he would be allowed to use the word in the debating chamber.
In August he told a Marlborough public meeting he would look like a “twat” if nobody came up to meet him afterwards. People queued for half an hour.
By the end of the month he was aiming it at the Climate Change Commission in a St Heliers school hall, and drew the biggest applause of the night. Steve Braunias has been documenting the routine in Newsroom for weeks.
This is not incontinence. It is a set. The word of the week is a product with a delivery schedule.
The interview where the act stopped working
The set failed once, in July, on Q+A.
Jack Tame asked a man with forty years in broadcasting and a seat on the TVNZ board — resigned the morning he was announced — what he would actually do about the structural collapse of the industry he came from. He asked seven times. Henry agreed it was a problem, agreed it was unfair, and declined to “create policy on the hoof”.
When Tame raised the 2010 Breakfast moment — asking then-Prime Minister John Key whether the next Governor-General would “look and sound like a New Zealander”, about Auckland-born, Auckland-raised Sir Anand Satyanand — Henry’s answer was “Can we not move on from it?”
It was not a gotcha. It was the most basic question a media figure standing for Parliament could face, and there was nothing behind it. There was never meant to be.
A shock jock cannot answer a policy question, because policy was never the product.
The ADHD party
Henry did not bring this method to ACT. ACT already had it.
In May 2025 Brooke van Velden became the first MP to say the c-word in the House, protesting an Andrea Vance column in the Sunday Star-Times. Days earlier she had pushed the Equal Pay Amendment Act through all three readings under urgency in a single day, extinguishing thirty-three live pay equity claims.
For the next fortnight the story was the word. It was not the claims.
That same month Laura McClure held up an AI-generated nude image of herself in the chamber. Her cause is real, the harm is real, and her bill deserves to pass. The technique was still the same one: make the picture the story, and the story travels.
Attention is a legitimate weapon for a small party. What is telling is how reliably ACT ends up as the aggrieved party in a controversy it started.
The victim was always someone else
There is a move underneath all of this, and it is the part worth being angry about.
Van Velden extinguished thirty-three pay equity claims, then stood in the House and objected to being called a name. Both things happened. Only one of them led the news for a fortnight.
Beth Houlbrooke ran the same play a decade earlier. In October 2019 Local Matters reported that the Rodney Local Board chair — by then ACT’s deputy leader — was an administrator of five community Facebook groups around Warkworth, while her deputy chair (another Act candidate) administered at least twenty across Rodney. Rival candidates said they had been blocked or removed. Houlbrooke’s answer was that the groups were only ever “virtual community noticeboards”, and that she was the one being subjected to mudslinging and dirty politics.
She then announced she was quitting social media over abuse. The groups did not close. They went to colleagues. I set out how that machinery works in Astroturfs: Act Three of Dirty Politics.
Be precise about what each woman was claiming. One objected to a slur in a newspaper column. The other objected to online abuse during a local body campaign. Neither was describing a sexual assault, and neither should be treated as if she were.
But the structure is identical, and it is the structure that matters. In each case the person at the centre of the original complaint became, within days, the aggrieved party. The complaint went under. The grievance went on the news.
Which would be ordinary politics, except for what the same people did when the victim was somebody else.
An employment lawyer and a report nobody read
In May 2020, Young ACT’s vice-president Ali Gammeter, then 18, resigned publicly, saying she had been “sexually harassed, slutshamed, and ignored” for months and that she was not the only one.
Gammeter told RNZ the harassment had been verbal and physical, including being groped by another member at a private gathering, and that it had been reported repeatedly to the youth wing’s leadership with little result. Young ACT’s president conceded “prevalent and systemic incidents of harm” and that the organisation had failed its duty of care.
Beth Houlbrooke was ACT’s deputy leader that week. Tim Jago was its president.
The party’s response was to appoint an employment lawyer to run an independent investigation. Nobody involved was an employee. They were unpaid volunteers, several of them teenagers, and the conduct described included a sexual assault. An employment lawyer is the correct call when your exposure is a personal grievance. It is the wrong call when somebody has been groped.
What happened next tells you which of those the party thought it was dealing with. Newsroom reported that Jago instructed people in ACT and Young ACT not to comment and to refer all queries to him. Brooke van Velden, then the party’s highest-ranking female candidate, said she had no comment while the inquiry was under way. Seymour, asked why the young women had gone public rather than come to him, said they could have called him — “ditto other figures in the party such as Brooke”.
So the two most senior women in ACT said nothing in public while an 18-year-old woman said, in public, that she had been sexually harassed and assaulted inside their party — and the party leader named one of them as a person she could have gone to quietly instead.
Van Velden replaced Houlbrooke as deputy leader seven weeks later, while the investigation was still running.
In October the party confirmed the findings would not be released and no further action would be taken. Jago’s statement said ACT and Young ACT were comfortable with the findings and that no cloud hung over the youth wing. Gammeter said ACT’s response had been appalling, that she had been forced to fight to keep control of her own information, and that comments by Jago and Seymour were “dishonest and harmful”.
It has been reported that Gammeter asked for the report not to be released. That is true, and it has been allowed to stand as though it explains the silence. It does not. Gammeter has told me the report was written in terms that were humiliating for the victims, and that this is why she did not want it published.
A party that commissions a report its complainant cannot bear to see published has not investigated anything. It has bought a document.
And the officer who oversaw all of it — who appointed the lawyer, who told everyone to route their questions through him, who announced that no cloud hung over anybody — was Tim Jago.
In August 2024 a jury took two hours to return unanimous guilty verdicts on eight charges of indecent assault against two teenage boys Jago had mentored through an Auckland surf lifesaving club in the 1990s. He was jailed for two and a half years. In March this year Surf Life Saving stripped him of his honours and life membership.
This was not unknowable. One of the two teenagers made a complaint to police in 1999. Police investigated. No charges followed. Two decades later ACT made the man its president, and then made him the officer responsible for its response to sexual harassment inside its own youth wing.
ACT’s position is that the offending predated his involvement with the party by twenty years and that there was no way of knowing. Take that at face value if you like. It does not explain the second time.
On 7 November 2022 the wife of a man who said Jago had abused him messaged David Seymour to warn that the party president was a sexual predator. Seymour personally replied and gave her the phone number of an employment lawyer. The couple went to the police instead, in the hope of preventing further offending. Jago was charged in January 2023 and resigned days later.
The same reflex, the same profession, the same result. Chief Victims Advisor Ruth Money has since said the referral was a mistake. Seymour stands by it, saying the party followed legal advice to the letter.
Twice ACT reached for an employment lawyer when it was told about sexual offending. That is not a party protecting victims. That is a party managing exposure — and an employment lawyer is what you hire when the thing you are worried about is your own liability.
Jago fought for name suppression from the day he was charged until it lapsed in January 2025. Ken Clearwater of the Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse Trust said at the time that holding it that long may have stopped other victims coming forward. In July this year Jago pleaded guilty to a further charge of sexual violation and was sentenced to another eighteen months.
So set the two things beside each other, because that is the whole argument.
A young woman states publicly that she was sexually harassed and assaulted in ACT, and the senior women of the party have nothing to say while the lawyers work. Five years later one of those women is a minister, and a columnist’s insult about her is a two-week national story that she leads herself, from the floor of the House.
In my opinion, that is the worst species of hypocrisy available in public life: claiming the standing of the wronged, in a party that had a real victim in front of it and reached for a lawyer instead.
Hypocrisy used to end careers. It was the one failing the press gallery could be relied on to punish, because it required no expertise to see — only a memory.
That is what the dead cat is for. Lynton Crosby’s rule: when you are losing the argument, throw a dead cat on the table. Nobody keeps talking about the thing you were losing on. Everybody talks about the cat.
Paul Henry is a very well-paid dead cat.
The machine that absorbs the scandal
Scandal used to kill ACT. Twice it nearly finished the party off.
In 2002 ACT held nine seats on 7.14 per cent. Then came Donna Awatere Huata. The caucus expelled her in December 2003, then fought her through the courts until a Supreme Court ruling removed her from Parliament in November 2004.
She was convicted of defrauding the Pipi Foundation of about $80,000 and of attempting to pervert the course of justice, and jailed for two years and nine months a fortnight after the 2005 election.
Effectively, Huata stole money from a reading program for under-privileged children and spent it on private school tuition for her family, even spending some of it on a stomach-stapling operation. That is next level hypocrisy.
ACT’s vote went from 7.14 per cent to 1.50 per cent. Nine MPs became two. The party survived only because Rodney Hide took Epsom.
As I wrote at the time, she was expelled not for what she did, but because she was caught.
ACT clawed back to 3.65 per cent in 2008. Then it happened again, and faster.
Hide had built an entire career as Parliament’s perkbuster. In 2009 he put $25,163 of his girlfriend’s air travel on the taxpayer.
In 2010 David Garrett — the Sensible Sentencing Trust man ACT recruited to write Three Strikes — admitted in the House that he had taken a dead child’s identity to obtain a passport, on top of an assault conviction in Tonga he had not disclosed, then didn't disclose it to the Law Society. Three Strikes. He resigned within days.
Seven months later Don Brash rolled Hide for the leadership.
ACT’s vote went from 3.65 per cent to 1.07 per cent. Then 0.69 in 2014, then 0.50 in 2017 — the worst result in its history.
Twice the pattern ran identically. A scandal, a leadership implosion, and roughly three-quarters of the vote gone.
What changed was not the party. It was the apparatus built alongside it.
In February 2013, Jordan Williams and the National Party pollster David Farrar — both named in Dirty Politics — incorporated the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union. Its founding chairman, John Bishop, had been ACT’s constituency services manager in Parliament under Richard Prebble.
The founding alone changed nothing. ACT recorded its worst-ever result four years later. What moved was the money.
The Taxpayers’ Union budget ran at $66,383 in 2014 and $155,965 in 2017. Then $354,947 in 2018. Then $406,537 in 2019. Then $831,848 and nine paid staff.
ACT’s polling over the same four years: 0.50 per cent, 0.60, 1.60, 4.80 — and 7.58 per cent at the 2020 election, its best result ever.
The party’s own spending went the other way. ACT spent $1.6 million on the 1996 and 2002 campaigns. By 2014 it spent $293,241. The money did not dry up. It moved outside the party, where it is not a campaign expense and does not have to be declared as one.
The inflection point has a name. After the 2017 election Louis Houlbrooke — David Seymour’s former press secretary, and son of ACT’s then deputy leader — became the Taxpayers’ Union campaign manager. I set out how that pipeline works in July.
And note what the organisation has never done. In 2014 its founding chairman boasted that it had attacked National more than any other party. In the twelve years since, it has gone after politicians from every party in Parliament except one.
ACT stopped spending on ACT. Something else started spending on ACT’s behalf — and called itself non-partisan while it did.
Then came the test.
Ali Gammeter resigned from Young ACT in May 2020 alleging sexual harassment and assault inside the party. Five months later ACT recorded 7.58 per cent.
Tim Jago was convicted in August 2024 on eight charges of indecently assaulting two teenage boys, and pleaded guilty to a further charge this July. ACT is polling between seven and nine per cent.
Before 2013, a fraud conviction cost ACT four-fifths of its vote. Since, a party president convicted of sexually abusing two teenage boys has cost it nothing anyone can measure.
The mechanism is not complicated. The pressure group sets the agenda, so the party never has to hold the microphone. Farrar’s polling company polls for the Taxpayers’ Union, and those polls are reported as news. Jordan Williams has confirmed on RNZ that the Union is an Atlas Network member. Two organisations that present as independent keep producing each other’s staff, each other’s numbers, and each other’s headlines.
A party can only be damaged by a scandal if the public is looking at the party. Build something that supplies the story, the polling and the outrage from outside, and the party becomes almost impossible to hit.
The scandals never stopped. What stopped was the part where they cost anything.
The arithmetic of five per cent
ACT has been polling somewhere between seven and nine per cent through most of this year. Epsom has returned an ACT MP since 2005, and David Seymour holds it comfortably enough that National stopped bothering to pretend it was a contest long before it announced in 2023 that it would campaign there properly.
So the electorate is insurance. Five per cent is survival. Ten per cent is negotiating power in a coalition room. That gap is the whole strategic problem, and it cannot be closed by talking about regulatory impact statements.
It can be closed by assembling niches. A candidate for the farmers. A candidate for the firearms owners. A candidate for the charter schools. And now a candidate for the people who want somebody in Parliament to annoy the right people.
Thirty years ago that would have been a liability. Mainstream media punished Henry: TVNZ suspended him over the Satyanand question, and his Australian breakfast venture failed inside a year. A niche could not be reached without going through a broadcaster who would eventually make you pay.
That constraint is gone. The Platform and Reality Check Radio will carry it. The Taxpayers’ Union has the email lists, the stunts and the billboards. The audience can now be reached directly, and the people who used to impose a cost are no longer in the loop.
While Henry is calling the Climate Change Commission a pack of twats, ACT’s donors are getting deregulation. That is not a side effect. That is the trade.
What the noise is for
Follow the money and the distraction makes sense.
ACT declared $2.44 million in donations in 2025, overtaking Labour to become the second best-funded party in the country. By the start of September this year it had passed $2 million in large donations alone — more than it raised that way across all of 2023.
Nick Mowbray. The Zuru co-founder gave ACT $100,000 in February and National $250,000 in August. His political giving since 2022 exceeds $600,000, almost all of it to ACT and National. A plastics manufacturer with 5,000 staff across thirty countries is not buying a newsletter. He is buying a tax and regulatory settings environment.
GMP Environmental. The Greymouth Petroleum subsidiary gave $100,000 each to National, ACT and NZ First over two days in February — identical amounts, near-identical dates, nothing to anyone else. Six months earlier the coalition had repealed the trailing liability regime for offshore petroleum decommissioning, the provisions written after taxpayers spent roughly $293 million cleaning up the abandoned Tui field.
Brian Cartmell. The tech entrepreneur gave ACT $200,000 in 2025, National $201,993.91 and NZ First $204,999 — three almost identical cheques. He has since given $100,000 each to ACT, NZ First and the Opportunity Party. That is not conviction. That is covering every table at the casino.
Steve Brooks. The Wolfbrook co-founder funded a “rogue” advertisement promoting Christopher Luxon in 2019, months before Luxon stood. His company was later found by Justice Owen Paulsen to have caused the substantial delay in a case brought by Upper Hutt pensioner Pam Bright, put the subsidiary into liquidation, and settled confidentially. Seven years on, Wolfbrook bought the Pegasus golf course at a mortgagee sale and donated $40,250 to National in the same fortnight.
Matthew Horncastle. The Williams Corporation managing director donates to National, ACT and the Taxpayers’ Union, and paid $10,000 to sit beside the Prime Minister at a National fundraiser. His firm gave National $58,000 this year. He posts the breakfasts and the lunches with the minister who signs off his sector’s settings. He says he wants to be Prime Minister.
Lloyd Budd. The former chief executive of Bayleys’ Auckland business is now National’s candidate for Whangarei. His former colleague Paula Bennett, on Bayleys’ payroll since 2020, ran the fundraising drive that raised $1.8 million for National’s 2023 campaign. The firm sold the Pegasus course, employed the party’s chief fundraiser, donates to the party, and now supplies its candidates.
John Harrison. The Hawke’s Bay businessman donated to ACT in 2011, during the period when John Ansell’s billboard campaign was asking whether New Zealanders were tired of what he called the Maorification of everything. The link between the donation and the campaign rests on timing documented in my own reporting. He was among those who later mobilised against my reporting on the party’s internal culture.
Not one of these donations is illegal. That is the point.
Louis Crimp looks quaint now
In 2011 the Invercargill businessman Louis Crimp was ACT’s largest donor, at $125,520.
“All the white New Zealanders I've spoken to don't like the Maoris, the way they are full of crime and welfare”- Louis Crimp, Weekend Herald (quoted on Stuff)
Crimp told the Weekend Herald he had given the money to Don Brash and John Banks to end what he called special treatment for Maori. Asked whether that was racist, he said he did not care what he was called.
The party did not return the money. President Chris Simmons called the comments extreme, would not rule out taking more, and Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres said a statement of principle was not enough. The following week Crimp said he would buy a gun.
Seymour later defended keeping a donation from a man who had threatened to destroy mosques on Facebook, calling the criticism a pile-on.
Crimp was slammed, and rightly. But here is what fifteen years has done. Crimp was at least telling the truth about what he wanted, and it cost him his reputation.
The 2026 donors want a consent, a rezoning, a repealed liability clause, a lower tax rate. They are wealthier, more organised, and more consequential. Nobody calls them extreme. Nobody calls them anything at all.
Crimp wanted a grievance indulged. The donors who replaced him want a decision — and unlike him, they get one.
The ledger nobody audits
New Zealand has no cap on political donations.
Under Electoral Commission rules a donor’s name only surfaces above $6,000, and only above $20,000 in an election year does it have to be declared within twenty working days. There is no register of lobbyists. There is no independent anti-corruption commission, and its absence is not an accident — the coalition partners keep vetoing one. I drafted the legislation a decade ago.
The parties are not hiding any of this. They do not have to. A disclosure threshold is not a character test, and policy has a habit of following donations rather than the other way round.
Which is why the clown act matters. Every hour spent arguing about whether a 66-year-old broadcaster should be allowed to say twat in the House is an hour nobody spends asking why a petroleum subsidiary wrote three identical cheques six months after a liability regime was repealed.
That is not a failure of the strategy. That is the strategy working.
ACT began in 1993 as the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers, a vehicle for the people who had run the reforms and wanted them finished. It has spent thirty years finding louder ways to sell that to a public that never asked for it.
Henry is only the latest and best-known salesman.
The Bob Clarkson precedent
There is one more thing, and it is the part ACT either has not thought about or has and does not mind.
Henry has been recruited to do a single job. Not to write policy, which he has told us he will not do. To generate attention, and convert it into party vote.
That has been tried here before, recently enough that we know how it ends.
In 2005 National recruited the Tauranga property developer Bob Clarkson — stock car champion, dragster racer, builder of a stadium, holder of a CNZM — for exactly one purpose: to take Tauranga off Winston Peters. Under MMP a party needs five per cent or an electorate seat, and Peters had held Tauranga for twenty-one years. Remove the seat and you remove New Zealand First’s floor.
It worked. Clarkson won by 730 votes, and survived the electoral petition Peters brought against him.
And then Bob Clarkson was a Member of Parliament, which was not the job he had been hired for.
One term produced controversial remarks about Muslims and gay people, and a sexual harassment complaint from female staff over his repeated habit of wagering a testicle on the All Blacks. On his way out he told the Sunday News that Labour favoured “hairy-legged ladies”. He quit after a single term. His valedictory statement was two words, and he did not bother saying them. He held up a sign reading “BYE BYE”.
The party got the seat. The country got three years of that.
Henry has already told us, more honestly than any of his critics ever have, what he is. In 2013 he said he would rather a viewer thought “that arsehole, what a prick” than have formed no opinion of him at all.
That is not a man who wants to legislate. It is a man who wants to be noticed, and who has never pretended otherwise.
So here is a forecast that costs nothing to make. Henry will be elected. He will not hold a portfolio for long, if he is given one. He will discover that a select committee room is not a studio, that the job is mostly reading, and that nobody in it finds him funny on a Thursday afternoon in a submission hearing on the Building Act. He will make up the numbers for a quorum. He will take the salary and the travel entitlements. Then he will go.
By that point ACT will have had what it paid for. The party vote is banked on 7 November. Everything after that is somebody else’s problem, including his.
Wairarapa worked Paul Henry out in 1999. The donors worked him out in 2026. They are not paying for what he says — they are paying for what nobody notices while he says it.
