The tentacles of ACT: the lobbyists who never really left

A grocery lobbyist’s career move has drawn attention to one insider. Follow the money and the bylines and the network is much bigger, and it runs both ways through the Beehive.

  Kate McNamara’s recent column reported that Andrew Ketels, David Seymour’s chief of staff for almost seven years and his most trusted adviser through ACT’s rise from one MP to government, has joined the grocery industry’s lobbying effort.

  It is a fair story. It is also only one thread of a much larger fabric.

  The real question isn’t whether one former staffer now trades on his relationships with his old boss’s office. It’s how many of them do, on how many sides of how many issues, how much money sits behind the party they all came from, and how much of what looks like independent political commentary is written by people paid to want a particular outcome.

  Start with the money. ACT declared $4.3 million in donations in the 2023 election year, then $2.44 million last year — enough to overtake Labour as the second best-funded party in the country, behind only National. Its largest single 2025 donation, $200,000 from tech entrepreneur Brian Cartmell, sat alongside near-identical six-figure gifts from the same man to National and NZ First — the donor’s version of covering every table at the casino.

  I’ve written before about donors who expect particular decisions in return for that kind of money. A donor base this size, concentrated on eleven MPs, buys more than yard signs.

  Ketels has joined Sherson Willis, the corporate affairs firm run by Trish Sherson, a former ACT press secretary who rose to edit Richard Prebble’s weekly “Letter from Wellington”. The party’s outgoing chief of staff now sits inside a firm founded by one of its own press secretaries, pitching grocery clients to the government he just left.

  Sherson Willis’s own client roster runs across groceries, property investment, building, retirement villages, oil and gas, mining, medical marijuana, dairy and agriculture, forestry, ports, electricity and telecommunications. Yet for years Trish Sherson has appeared on RNZ’s political panel and Newstalk ZB introduced only as “from corporate affairs firm Sherson Willis” or a former ACT press secretary — never as an advocate for whichever client’s issue is live that week.

  In June 2024, Sherson was quoted dismissing fast-track protest action as “pejorative” and “silly”, the same year her firm’s client base included mining and resource-sector interests directly affected by that legislation.

  Political analyst Bryce Edwards flags exactly this pattern: Sherson is introduced by her job title, never by her specific client interests, which he warns risks a client’s messaging passing for neutral commentary.

  Ben Thomas runs the same play from the other side of the aisle. Formerly Christopher Finlayson’s press secretary, Thomas was a lobbyist at Matthew Hooton’s firm Exceltium while it worked for ACT, and is now a director at Capital. He has held a regular RNZ panel slot for over a decade, introduced each time only as a columnist and “director of public affairs firm Capital” — a job title, not a client list. RNZ’s own media desk flagged the pattern directly in 2020: audiences are usually left in the dark about which vested interests a lobbyist-pundit carries into the studio.

  Prebble’s private secretary in that era, Matt Ball, is now PR and Advocacy Manager for the New Zealand Property Investors Federation, effectively the frontman for a lobby that has opposed a capital gains tax and welcomed the coalition’s tenancy law changes. His wife, Fiona MacMillan, a former TVNZ producer, now leads communications for the poultry industry.

  Stuart Wilson, Seymour’s specialist ministerial adviser on regulation and, before that, ACT’s campaign director across multiple elections, has also moved to Capital, whose roster now spans Labour, National and NZ First alumni alongside Thomas and Wilson. Whichever coalition forms after the next election, Capital already has someone who used to run it.

  Inside the party itself, the overlap with the Taxpayers’ Union runs deeper still. ACT’s general manager and party secretary, Callum Purves, arrived direct from the Taxpayers’ Union’s top campaigns role. I’ve written before, in Unleashed’s account of ACT’s astroturf networks, about how Louis Houlbrooke moved from Taxpayers’ Union campaigns manager into communications work serving the party his mother, former deputy leader Beth Houlbrooke, once represented on the Rodney Local Board.

  Two organisations that present as independent of one another keep producing each other’s staff.

  That overlap matters because of how little the public gets to see.

  Under Electoral Commission rules, a donor’s name only appears once giving passes $6,000, and only a donation over $20,000 in an election year has to be reported within 20 working days.

  Someone could fund the Taxpayers’ Union to run campaigns aligned with ACT policy, and the public would be none the wiser.

  The same network has more recently turned its attention to the press gallery.

  The Free Speech Union, formed out of the Taxpayers’ Union’s own offices, published a lengthy attack on TVNZ’s political editor Maiki Sherman over a doorstop interview attempt.

  Whatever the merits of the complaint, it came from an organisation with the same donor base and staff pipeline as the party whose ministers Sherman covers.

  The traffic runs the other way too.

  Matt Burgess left the NZ Initiative think tank to become the Prime Minister’s chief policy adviser, and it was in that role that the Chief Ombudsman found his office had unreasonably withheld a Fonterra and Z Energy briefing note lobbying for a change to climate liability law, a change Cabinet then made.

  A former think-tank economist, sitting in the Beehive, held the document that helped his old sector’s clients get the law they wanted.

  None of this is illegal.

  Lobbyists are entitled to clients, and pundits are entitled to opinions. But the function firms like Sherson Willis and Capital perform isn’t disclosure, it’s softening — turning a client’s commercial interest in a consent, a tax rate or a piece of legislation into a reasonable-sounding public argument a minister can point to as proof the public isn’t as opposed as officials feared.

  I’ve dealt with lobbyists whose fingerprints are on columns and news items carrying someone else’s byline entirely, a service that doesn’t advertise itself because its value depends on nobody clocking it.

  Ordinary New Zealanders trying to reach the same decision-makers have to book a slot and hope for a few minutes. Lobbyists with the right surname skip the queue, write the talking points, sit on the panel, and sometimes draft the amendments themselves.

As New Zealand slips down the rankings in the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, proper lobbying controls has been identified as the key area where attention is needed. Despite an independent anti-corruption agency being a founding principle of the New Zealand First party, its coalition partners have repeatedly vetoed it. I drafted the legislation a decade ago.

  Kate McNamara found one door revolving. Follow the money and the bylines further, and it’s the same door, funded by the same donors, defended by the same commentators, turning in every direction at once.