The octopus that turned on National
- Grant McLachlan
- 1 hour ago
- 13 min read
Jordan Williams started as an apprentice to the men who wrote the playbook. Twenty years later he runs the octopus they trained him to build — and its tentacles now reach into National’s own polling and the Prime Minister’s “captain’s calls.” This is how the apprentice became the thing his masters never controlled.
Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury, described Williams as “manipulative”, a “political sadist”, and like “a venomous spider.”
He was right about the number of limbs.
Winston Peters once gave broadcaster Patrick Gower four words of advice: “Be like an Octopus.” Gower says he is still working out what he meant.
Jordan Williams did not need to work it out. He was trained by one, and has spent twenty years building another — an organism with a head office in Wellington and tentacles in every party, every newsroom board and, increasingly, the Prime Minister’s own office.
This is the story of how that octopus grew.
It started as an apprenticeship: Nicky Hager’s The Hollow Men and Dirty Politics show the men who trained Williams and the tactics he learned from them.
It became an organisation: the Taxpayers’ Union, the Free Speech Union, the Campaign Company, each one a tentacle doing work the parties could not be seen doing themselves.
I named the whole apparatus myself in 2020, in three columns no mainstream outlet would run — and which the octopus answered by turning a tentacle on me.
And it has now grown past the point where any one party controls it.
It owns the polling National reads about itself.
It has started dictating National’s own “captain’s calls.”
Here is how the apprentice became the thing his masters never tamed.
Contents
The octopus’s teachers: the Hollow Men
Nicky Hager’s 2006 book The Hollow Men named the operators who built the model. Don Brash’s young strategist Bryan Sinclair ran Brash’s office alongside Havelock North campaign manager Simon Lusk, coordinating the party’s covert relationship with the Exclusive Brethren church during the 2005 campaign.
The book cost Brash the leadership within days of publication, and set the template every generation since has followed: seed an issue through a front, let it run as if it were spontaneous, and keep the party’s own fingerprints off it.
The making of an apprentice
Eight years later, Hager’s second book, Dirty Politics, returned to the same names — and showed the apprentice arriving.
Simon Lusk and blogger Cameron Slater were shown mentoring a new recruit: a young lawyer named Jordan Williams, who interned for Brash and worked at the law firm of former ACT MP Stephen Franks.
At 25, Williams was the public face of Vote for Change, the failed 2011 campaign against MMP.
Two years later he and National pollster David Farrar founded the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union — the first tentacle of the organisation Williams would go on to build himself.
My own investigation into what that apprenticeship became, Astroturfs: Act Three of ‘Dirty Politics’, set out the pattern that follows.
Building the octopus: the pattern I named in 2020
In September 2020 I published three pieces naming the organisation Williams had built for ACT — since its 1993 founding as the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers — to do the work it could not be seen doing itself: the Sensible Sentencing Trust, the New Zealand Initiative, and above all the Taxpayers’ Union.
The claim was specific, not impressionistic.
The Union’s founding chairman, John Bishop, was ACT’s former constituency services manager under Richard Prebble. Its campaign manager from 2019, Louis Houlbrooke, was the son of ACT’s own deputy leader, Beth Houlbrooke.
I set the Union’s budget against ACT’s election spending and polling and showed them moving together: as the Union’s coffers swelled from roughly $400,000 to over $800,000 between 2018 and 2019, ACT’s support climbed back to 2008 levels.
Not one of those three columns was published by the outlets I sent them to. ACT grew from one MP to ten anyway.
Atlas Network: from silence to “of course”
In 2020 I compared the Sensible Sentencing Trust’s ‘Three Strikes’ campaign to the American Legislative Exchange Council’s prison-sentencing template — a foreign import dressed up as local concern. At the time the Taxpayers’ Union would not confirm any comparable overseas affiliation on the record.
That reticence is gone. Asked directly by RNZ’s Guyon Espiner whether the Union belonged to the Atlas Network — a Washington-based consortium of roughly 500 free-market and libertarian think tanks — Jordan Williams answered, “of course,” and said he found it “totally bizarre” that anyone treated the connection as news.
By then Williams had also co-founded the Free Speech Union and become president of the World Taxpayers Associations — two more tentacles, run from the same Wellington office as the first.
What was deniable in 2020 is brochure copy today.
Tentacle one: the Houlbrooke pipeline
Beth Houlbrooke’s own career was the clearest live test of the 2020 thesis, which I tracked in real time in Beware of List MPs Hiding Behind Leaders.
Houlbrooke was demoted from number two on ACT’s list to thirteen in June 2020, calling herself a “victim of her own success.” Her son had already made the leap from party payroll to Taxpayers’ Union payroll that I said the network depended on.
The pipeline kept running after the demotion, not before it.
Louis Houlbrooke went from ACT press secretary to the party’s Communications Manager — the title he now uses when he speaks for the party to the press.
None of it required the network I described in 2020 to be reinvented. It only had to keep running.
Tentacle two: Tim Jago and the cover-up
The clearest vindication is the one ACT tried hardest to keep buried.
My September 2020 column Why We Should Have Zero Tolerance for Act opened with a fact the party never disputed: ACT had no procedure to deal with complaints of bullying and sexual harassment. The ACT president presiding over that gap was Tim Jago, elected in 2019.
On 25 January 2023, Jago appeared in court on historical sexual offences against boys he had mentored through an Auckland surf lifesaving club in the 1990s. Two days later ACT announced he had resigned “due to other commitments.”
A jury convicted him in August 2024, the Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal in September 2025.
On 14 July 2026, ACT unveiled Paul Henry as its newest list candidate. Within hours the Herald confirmed Jago had pleaded guilty to a further charge of sexual violation, with sentencing due the same week. As I set out in Was Paul Henry Act’s Dead Cat?, every regular political poll that fortnight had already closed its fieldwork before the Henry announcement, meaning the timing could not move a single published number — it could only move the headline.
A party that spent two years managing one president’s suppression order, never published its own youth-wing inquiry, and picked the one week no poll was in the field to reveal a guilty plea, understands news cycles better than most.
When the octopus turns on critics
In April 2021, RNZ’s Ruth Hill put the astroturfing thesis to the people who would know.
I told her ACT “weaponised” these groups, and that the Taxpayers’ Union’s 2020 ‘Campaign for Affordable Housing’ against the Greens’ wealth tax was a contrived problem the party had asked it to create.
Jordan Williams disputed the framing, not the facts. He confirmed the founding chairman was a former ACT staffer and the campaign manager was Beth Houlbrooke’s son. Asked directly whether ACT used organisations like the Union to generate support, David Seymour declined an interview and answered in writing with one word: “no.”
That is when a tentacle turned my way.
As I set out in How a Right Wing Racket Unleashed on Me, within days of RNZ’s story running an anonymous complaint was lodged against me with the Law Society; it went nowhere.
What followed is on the record through the courts and Auckland Council’s own released correspondence: a restraining order application, a dossier passed to police, and series of similar stitch attempts where multiple people connected to Beth Houlbrooke coordinated a series of false accusations – one of which resulted in a malicious prosecution by police that had no success of a conviction. I was acquitted at trial in February 2024, my own photographic evidence unravelling the prosecution’s case.
The people who dismissed the astroturfing story as “tantalising” and “weird and ridiculous” in 2021 reappear throughout everything that came after.
I was not the only target of the network. I was just target practice. The creation of clandestine networks were more meticulously coordinated and unleashed on Jacinda Ardern, which I documented in this article.
Stuart Wilson’s promotion
Stuart Wilson is the constant across both stories, fifteen years apart.
Advising Local Government Minister Rodney Hide in 2009, he told me ACT “didn’t want to rock the boat” on a council complaint I had raised — while ACT was publicly attacking ‘little Hitlers’ in local government.
By 2020 he was ACT’s campaign manager.
Wilson’s modus operandi was spreading malicious rumours. During the Brash coup to replace Rodney Hide as leader, he spread rumours that Jordan Williams was Don Brash’s love child. When I applied for a harassment order against Beth Houlbrooke after she shouted “The police will believe me! I’m Beth Houlbrooke!”, Wilson prepared a dossier that Houlbrooke sent to the police she expected to believe.
By 2024, party insiders blamed Wilson for a campaign one candidate called a “train wreck,” dragging the party from 12–13 percent down to 8 percent by election night.
Wilson’s reward was a job as David Seymour’s specialist ministerial advisor, where he helped create the Ministry for Regulation. The man who spent two decades campaigning against government waste built a brand-new ministry, whose own early savings claims do not clearly outrun what it costs taxpayers to run each year.
In 2025 he joined a Wellington government-relations firm — one of a wave of Beehive staffers moving from advising ministers to lobbying them, the same revolving door ACT built its brand opposing.
The octopus outgrows its makers
I called the 2020 piece ‘Act Three’ because the astroturf technique was, by my count, ACT’s third dirty-politics act.
Five years on, the octopus Williams built barely needs ACT anymore. The same money that built the Taxpayers’ Union now funds the polling the Herald prints, sits on the Herald’s own board, bankrolls defamation cases against the state broadcaster, staffs a coalition partner’s Cabinet, and has sat inside the Prime Minister’s own office.
Williams built a network of astroturfs. What he runs now owns the ground the grass grows on.
The same donors, a new fast-track
The astroturf mechanism I mapped in 2020 manufactured public consensus for whatever a donor wanted. Six years on, the donor relationships barely need the astroturf layer, because they are conducted in daylight.
In Will Backlash Against Donors Decide This Election? I set out how Christchurch developer Matthew Horncastle donates to National, ACT and the Taxpayers’ Union simultaneously, and how Wolfbrook’s Steve Brooks donated $40,250 to National the same fortnight his company sought fast-track rezoning for the Pegasus golf course.
As The Kids Who Lit Matches in the Mine set out, Horncastle had lunch with Building Minister Chris Penk — the same MP who called my 2020 astroturfing reporting “weird and ridiculous” and hosted the Taxpayers’ Union’s own award nights in Parliament — then called him “exactly the kind of person we want representing the country” on social media. Penk is the minister who signs off on the regulatory settings under which Horncastle’s company builds.
The astroturf and the fast-track are not two stories. They are one relationship wearing two hats five years apart.
The same donor logic runs through New Zealand First.
Fishing company Talley’s donated close to $27,000 to the NZ First Foundation, on top of further declared donations, while the party’s ministers set fisheries and coastal policy. And where ACT had Beth Houlbrooke’s son, New Zealand First has Casey Costello: a former ACT candidate who became Taxpayers’ Union chair and a Hobson’s Pledge spokesperson before entering Parliament as an NZ First MP and Cabinet minister.
Bennett, Bayleys, and the cheetah
If Williams is the octopus, Paula Bennett is the network’s cheetah.
She joined Bayleys Real Estate after leaving Cabinet and has since fundraised more than two million dollars for National. Bayleys has donated roughly $180,000 to National since 2022 and last year earned close to $2.5 million selling state houses for Kainga Ora — a contract Bennett says she had no involvement in.
I mapped the wider donor pattern behind that arrangement, and Steven Joyce’s parallel role moving between National-aligned boardrooms, in Is Steven Joyce Still Running the Show?.
The masthead: Grenon, Henry, and a boardroom
Start with the masthead.
Jim Grenon, who became a director and the largest shareholder of NZME, is an open supporter of the Taxpayers’ Union and the Free Speech Union. He was separately revealed at trial to have been funding Julian Batchelor’s defamation case against TVNZ and researcher Sanjana Hattotuwa. The claim was ruled “wholly unsuccessful,” and Grenon was ordered to pay TVNZ’s costs.
The Free Speech Union, co-founded by Taxpayers’ Union executive director Jordan Williams and run out of the Union’s own office, campaigns against exactly the kind of cancellation its own council members’ media practices practise on everyone else.
Broadcaster Paul Henry sat on the TVNZ board — appointed by Media Minister Paul Goldsmith in mid-2025 — until he resigned the morning ACT announced him as a list candidate on 14 July 2026, the same day Tim Jago’s further guilty plea broke.
A state broadcaster’s own director became a governing-party candidate inside the same news cycle his party was trying to bury.
None of this required a conspiracy. It only required the same small circle of people to keep holding all the seats at once.
When the journalist is the target
Contrast how the network treats its own with how it treats critics.
When Finance Minister Nicola Willis was accused of “fudging” the books, the Taxpayers’ Union ran a campaign against her and Prime Minister Luxon defended her as working “very, very well” through a “challenging set of circumstances.”
TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman — the first wahine Maori to lead the state broadcaster’s political team — got a different standard.
Her year-old, already-apologised-for use of a slur against a rival journalist was revived in a Substack post by Ani O’Brien, a Campaign Company staffer and Free Speech Union board member. The Free Speech Union then republished the piece on its own letterhead.
Sherman resigned within a fortnight, describing her position as “untenable.” I set out the full architecture of that operation in When the Journalist Is the Target: the same three-strikes technique used against me in 2021 was used against her in 2026.
A minister’s fudged books get defended as hard work under pressure. A journalist’s year-old apology ends her career in eleven days.
Money dictating policy
The research-institute wing reaches directly into the Beehive.
Matt Burgess left the New Zealand Initiative to become Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s chief policy adviser, then received a lobbying document from Fonterra and Z Energy seeking a law change to shield major emitters from Mike Smith’s climate litigation — a document he also received on his personal email and never disclosed under the Official Information Act. The Ombudsman found the Prime Minister’s own office had unreasonably breached the OIA. The Government changed the climate law anyway.
Associate Health Minister Casey Costello followed the same pattern with tobacco. A leaked Philip Morris lobbying strategy named the Taxpayers’ Union and the New Zealand Initiative as positions the company could leverage to reach New Zealand First. Costello then cut the excise on heated tobacco products by 50 percent, and the Chief Ombudsman later found she had acted “unreasonable and contrary to law” in withholding related documents.
Two ministries, two donor-aligned outcomes, two tentacles doing the reaching.
The octopus and National’s own polling
The tentacle that matters most to National is the one it reads every month without knowing it is being touched by it.
The Taxpayers’ Union’s own Curia poll is run by David Farrar — who co-founded the Union with Williams in 2013 and has polled for National since the 1990s — and is still reported each month as an independent read of public opinion.
The organisation I said in 2020 existed to manufacture the appearance of grassroots consensus is now the source of the horse-race numbers the party itself, and the press gallery that covers it, treats as ground truth.
When a National strategist reaches for “where are we polling,” more often than not the answer comes from a company its own co-founder built alongside the man who runs the Taxpayers’ Union, the Free Speech Union and the Campaign Company.
National is not just sharing a tent with the octopus. It is checking its own pulse through one of the octopus’s own arms.
The octopus turns on National: captain’s calls
A Prime Minister who reads his own numbers through Williams’ network makes decisions that look less like leadership and more like reflex.
On 5 August, Luxon told Newstalk ZB he was “open” to a referendum on MMP if re-elected — a “captain’s call” that blindsided his own caucus, on the exact question Williams fronted and lost as Vote for Change in 2011. Within weeks Williams announced he would stand down from the Taxpayers’ Union to “fight for electoral change” full time once the legislation passes.
The apprentice who fronted the losing campaign fifteen years ago now has a sitting Prime Minister handing him a second run, apparently unprompted — or, at least, with no visible prompt anyone outside the octopus can point to.
Nine days later, on 23 August, came the next captain’s call: Luxon abandoned National’s proposed bed tax and bank tax, promising “no new taxes.”
Two days after that he confirmed a rates cap that alarmed councils he had promised to consult.
Each reversal matches, almost line for line, positions the Taxpayers’ Union has campaigned on for years.
Three captain’s calls in three weeks, each one a policy the octopus had already been pushing before Luxon announced it as his own.
Meanwhile, boundary changes have handed National electorates it may keep even as its party vote slides, risking an overhang in the party’s own favour that could strand its own list-only ministers — a risk that grows every time the party the octopus feeds on, ACT, gains ground at National’s expense.
Williams did not set out to run National. He set out to serve it. Somewhere in twenty years, the relationship inverted, and nobody in the Beehive noticed until the captain started taking his calls from the tank.
What the octopus proves
I let the cat out of the bag before the public was ready to connect an obscure Rodney board dispute to a Wellington press-gallery story.
The people named in that 2020 reporting had five years and the full resources of Williams’ network to make sure the story stayed obscure, rather than to rebut it.
Chris Penk became a Cabinet minister.
Louis Houlbrooke became ACT’s Communications Manager.
Stuart Wilson became the Deputy Prime Minister’s specialist adviser, then a lobbyist.
Tim Jago went from covering up a youth-wing harassment complaint to a guilty plea for sexually abusing children.
And the octopus itself outgrew the party it was built to serve, reaching into New Zealand First, into the Prime Minister’s own office, into the ownership structure of the country’s biggest news publisher — and, in the end, into National’s own polling and its Prime Minister’s own captain’s calls.
None of that record disproves a word I wrote in 2020. It is the closest thing to a paper trail the astroturf thesis will ever produce. Five years of promotions, cover-ups, and convictions that only make sense if the original story was true.
I was not wrong about the octopus. I was just early — and I did not yet know it would grow large enough to swallow the party that first fed it.
Winston Peters told Paddy Gower to be like an octopus. Gower still says he does not know what that means. Jordan Williams built one instead — and it has grown so large and as poisonous as the eight-limbed monster Bomber Bradbury described.
