Was Jeremy Wells right about Mike Hosking all along?
- Grant McLachlan
- 7 hours ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 5 hours ago
A decade-old radio parody is now Exhibit A in a High Court defamation case — and the media company trying to bury it owns the target, the impersonator, and the columnist covering the trial.
Twelve years ago, Jeremy Wells stood in a Radio Hauraki studio and did an impression. This week, that impression stood before the High Court at Auckland, with lawyers for NZME — owner of Hauraki, Newstalk ZB and the New Zealand Herald — arguing that it should never reach a full hearing. The case, first reported by NZME’s own Shayne Currie, turns on a 2014 Like Mike sketch — Wells’ long-running impersonation of Newstalk ZB and former Seven Sharp host Mike Hosking — and a Waiheke Island woman who says it defamed and identified her.
Like Mike was never simple mimicry. It was a bet that Hosking’s on-air persona — the certainty, the grievance, the casual contempt for whoever he’d decided was in the wrong that week — was a caricature broad enough to parody.
In the decade since, that caricature has repeatedly turned out to be closer to documentary than joke, upheld more than once by the country’s own broadcasting regulator.
The real question this case raises isn’t only whether Wells defamed a stranger on Waiheke Island in 2014. It’s why, twelve years on, the parody is the one in the dock — and the pattern it mocked is not.
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A voice built over twenty years
Wells’ satirical instincts predate Like Mike by nearly two decades.
He first made his name in the late 1990s as “Newsboy”, the deadpan sidekick to DJ Mikey Havoc, before hosting Eating Media Lunch, the TVNZ 2 satirical news show that ran for eight series between 2003 and 2008 and became notorious for its willingness to turn the same scrutiny on the media itself, journalists included.
Here is an example:
Like Mike grew out of that lineage on Hauraki’s breakfast show, where Wells pitch-perfectly aped Hosking’s vocal tone and boundary-pushing style so closely that the Broadcasting Standards Authority began fielding complaints from listeners who could no longer tell the impression from the original.
It became a regular feature of the Hauraki breakfast through the mid-2010s and eventually grew into a video series complete with a Hosking puppet.
When the joke turned genuinely ugly
The format’s willingness to go further than its target is exactly what got it into trouble in May 2015, when a Like Mike rant drew accusations of racism for its stereotyping of Maori.
Radio Hauraki apologised publicly, insisting the segment had been aimed at satirising conservative Pakeha attitudes rather than endorsing them — a defence then-Race Relations Commissioner Dame Susan Devoy rejected, saying the satire had “fallen flat” regardless of intent.
That episode matters for what it shows about the format’s central risk: a parody built on exaggerating someone else’s prejudice can end up delivering that prejudice at full volume to anyone within earshot, whether or not they were the intended target.
It is the same risk now sitting at the centre of the Waiheke Island case.
Twelve years later, in the High Court
The claim now before the High Court traces back to a specific Like Mike broadcast on 30 July 2014, when Wells — in character as Hosking — commented on a dispute between former sports star Marc Ellis and a Waiheke Island neighbour over a driveway consent, and speculated crudely about the neighbour’s sexuality.
The neighbour, still unnamed in reporting on the case, says she only discovered a transcript of the segment on an anonymous blog in October 2023, nine years after it aired, and argues its continued availability there means the alleged defamation is ongoing.
Here is a transcript of the segment in full:
If there’s one thing that annoys me more than even Green voters it’s silly do-gooding neighbourly nosy parkers, in particular the ones that stop you doing things on your own property. Marc Ellis knows all about them – he’s trying to build a driveway to his practical, unpretentious 5-bedroom family batch on Waiheke and some neighbour is getting in the way. The council has granted consent so what’s the problem?
My guess is that the complainant is either a lesbian or bi-curious, both of which spell danger. Most people who block progress on Waiheke Island are lesbians. You see, lesbians are often lesbian and by their very nature they complain. They’re often jealous, they own dogs, and make bad fashion decisions involving cargo pants and hiking boots. Occasionally you’ll get a good lesbian, one that plays sports. But in my experience, which is zero when it comes to lesbians because I’ve never met one, they’re potentially terrible neighbours.
Gays, of which I’ve also never met, are a far better neighbour as they have parties and enjoy wine and food. They wear designer clothes and have smaller more practical dogs. You won’t see a gay man getting in the way of the building process. Gays are generally about progress, economic optimism and sound fiscal choices which may or may not include diversification of investment.
Marc Ellis is a great New Zealander who has brought a lot of joy to the hearts of the public, firstly through solid running rugby and lately home ventilation systems and delicious fresh juices. Leave the man alone to modestly enjoy his success.
Happy days. We’ll see you tomorrow.
NZME is seeking to strike the claim out before it reaches trial, arguing the woman was never identified, that the Hauraki audio itself came down in 2021, that the limitation period for defamation has long since expired, and that the segment — sarcastic, in-character and aimed at a public dispute — was not defamatory in the first place.
Her lawyer, Willy Akel, wants the chance to cross-examine Wells over a sworn statement that he did not know her sexuality when he wrote the piece, telling the court that claim “should be subject to cross-examination” rather than accepted on the papers.
Associate Judge Nick Malarao has reserved his decision.
The referee owns the team
The only detailed public account of this case comes from NZME’s own Media Insider column, written by NZME editor-at-large Shayne Currie — who, by his own column’s standard disclosure, holds a shareholding in NZME and has previously held the roles of managing editor, Herald editor and Herald on Sunday editor at the company whose subsidiary is the defendant in the case he is reporting on.
A senior executive and shareholder of the defendant company is the primary journalist covering its own strike-out application — and no outlet outside NZME’s stable has offered an independent account of the hearing.
This is not a claim that Currie’s account is inaccurate — nothing here suggests it is, and the direct quotes attributed to both counsel read as a fair record of an adversarial hearing. It is, in honest opinion, a structural problem rather than a personal one: when the company defending itself in court is also the only outlet reporting the hearing, and the reporter doing so has a financial stake in the outcome, readers are entitled to know that before they take the framing on trust.
Before NZME's Media Insider columns started in 2023, RNZ's Media Watch had been running since 2001. Currie's focus has been predominantly about internal strategy and industry competition to provide a strategic counterweight as NZME became the focus of Media Watch and The Spinoff.
Total war, quietly
That same column records, without any apparent sense of irony, just how far NZME has gone to close the case down.
Its barrister told the court NZME would seek security for costs if the case proceeds — costs he estimated at “hundreds of thousands of dollars” — while stating he did not believe the woman had the means to pay if a costs order went against her.
That is a dual-listed public media company, with the balance sheet to absorb that risk many times over, using litigation economics to test whether an individual litigant can afford to keep going, in the same breath as arguing her claim has no realistic prospect of success.
None of that is unlawful, or even unusual in civil litigation. But it is a useful corrective to the idea that this is simply an old joke being relitigated. It is a well-resourced media company deploying its legal, reputational and reporting resources simultaneously against one individual — and reporting on its own conduct as it does so.
Let’s not overlook that one of NZME’s largest shareholders, Jim Grenon, was “jointly and severally” ordered to pay costs to TVNZ after he was revealed as the backer of a “wholly unsuccessful” defamation case against the broadcaster on behalf of Julian Batchelor.
Lawfare is a weapon that cuts both ways.
The satirist as prophet
The deeper irony of Wells’ career is that television eventually decided his impression was closer to the truth than the man himself was comfortable admitting.
In February 2018, TVNZ hired Wells to co-host Seven Sharp — the same chair Hosking had vacated two months earlier. Wells later called it “the strangest thing in the world,” noting he had inherited Hosking’s car park, computer and desk along with his audience.
What has aged less comfortably is Hosking’s own record for accuracy since Wells first sent it up.
The Broadcasting Standards Authority has upheld complaints against Hosking’s on-air claims on at least three separate occasions:
in 2017, for wrongly telling viewers days before an election that only Maori-roll voters could vote for the Maori Party;
in 2020, for misleading commentary on Covid-19 death statistics; and
in 2023, for falsely telling listeners that striking teachers were being paid in full by their unions.
Each ruling found the same thing Wells’ parody had joked about years earlier — a broadcaster stating things with total confidence that were not, in fact, true.
Why the parody is on trial and the pattern isn’t
None of this excuses what actually happened to the Waiheke Island woman at the centre of the case.
Whatever Wells intended, the effect of the 2014 segment — like the 2015 one before it — was to turn a private citizen’s presumed sexuality into a punchline for a satire aimed at someone else entirely.
That is the format’s real cost, and it is one the woman bringing this claim is entitled to have tested at trial rather than struck out on a technicality.
A parody aimed at a powerful broadcaster and a joke landing on an uninvolved bystander are not the same act, even when they happen in the same ninety seconds of tape.
But the asymmetry in this case is still worth naming plainly.
Mike Hosking has been found by an independent regulator, three separate times, to have told his audience things that were not accurate. He remains on air, unsued, unstruck-out, still hosting New Zealand’s most listened-to breakfast show.
It is not Hosking, or the network that profits from him, facing a courtroom over words spoken twelve years ago. It is the man who impersonated him — reported on, at every stage, by the impersonated man’s own employer.
The pattern finds a new host
A decade on, Like Mike reads less like satire and more like documentary, and the resemblance did not end when Wells swapped Hosking’s microphone for his chair.
The asymmetry Wells caricatured, certainty on air and comfort with the right host, has outlived both Hosking’s original targets. Through the 2010s, John Key’s government avoided RNZ’s Morning Report, the toughest slot on offer, while keeping the friendlier weekly booking with Hosking intact. Jacinda Ardern later cancelled her own long-standing Monday slot with Hosking rather than face it every week.
Chris Luxon has kept the same selective instinct. When he scrapped his weekly Monday interview with TVNZ Breakfast’s Tova O’Brien in April 2026, his office confirmed the softer, longer-running bookings with Newstalk ZB’s Hosking and RNZ would remain untouched. Q+A’s Jack Tame has fared worse still, with TVNZ confirming Luxon had declined every interview request put to him since December 2024.
What Wells’ parody understood is what that comfort produces. In August 2026, Luxon used a Newstalk ZB talkback answer to commit to an MMP referendum, a captain’s call so unscripted it blindsided his own caucus and set off a fresh round of leadership speculation. The slip dominated the news cycle for days, exactly the kind of unscripted certainty Wells had been mimicking on Hauraki more than a decade earlier.
It is the same trait in a different chair: total comfort with one interviewer producing the very unguarded moment that dominates the week.
It is worth people taking a closer look at what Wells said in character all those years ago. The insight is subtle enough that, by the time anyone notices it has been proven right again, the news cycle has usually already moved on.
Twelve years on, Mike Hosking is still on air, still uncorrected in real time — and it’s the impression of him, not the man, that has to explain itself to a judge.
