Was Paul Henry ACT's dead cat?
- Grant McLachlan
- 6 minutes ago
- 4 min read
The same Tuesday ACT unveiled its newest star candidate, the Herald confirmed the party’s own former president had pleaded guilty to further sex offending. Coincidence, or convenient timing?
A “dead cat” (or “deadcatting”) is a political strategy where a politician introduces a shocking, sensational, or dramatic topic to divert media attention away from an embarrassing or damaging issue. The phrase was popularized by British political strategist Lynton Crosby, who explained that if you throw a dead cat onto a dining table, everyone will stop talking about the existing problem and start shouting about the cat. It is used as a deliberate media-management tactic to change the news narrative by forcing journalists and the public to focus on a new, provocative subject rather than the original scandal.
On Tuesday morning, ACT leader David Seymour stood on the QT Hotel rooftop less than a block away from NZME, RNZ, and TVNZ and introduced broadcaster Paul Henry as the party’s newest list candidate, sporting a Cheshire Cat grin.
Within hours, the NZ Herald confirmed that Tim Jago, ACT’s president for almost four years, had pleaded guilty to a further charge of sexual violation by unlawful sexual connection.
Two big ACT stories landed on the same day. One was literally on the QT, the other was figuratively 'on the QT.' Only one made the front page.
Henry later told the Herald that the whole process, from his first call to Seymour to the press conference, took just seven days.
With that much room to move, the question worth asking isn’t whether ACT could have picked a different day. It’s why it picked this one.
Contents
The numbers are not in dispute
Henry’s candidacy was ratified by the ACT board on Monday night. He signed his nomination papers and resigned from the TVNZ board the following morning, phoning the broadcaster’s chair about twenty minutes before facing the cameras.
Hours later, the Herald confirmed Jago’s guilty plea, with sentencing on the historical charge due today.
The preceding days were already dominated by other news.
Sir Sam Neill, one of the country’s most loved public figures, had died suddenly in Sydney the previous morning, an event that led every bulletin in the country. Grief over Neill was still very much the story going into Tuesday.
Nor was ACT boxed in by the calendar.
The FIFA World Cup final isn’t until 19 July, five days after the announcement, so no clash with the tournament’s finale was forcing anyone’s hand this week.
And when a scheduling problem really does arise, parties do move.
New Zealand First postponed its own unveiling of former All Black captain Taine Randell in April after Cyclone Vaianu forced the cancellation of the public meeting where he was to be introduced.
If a cyclone can shift a candidate reveal, an inconvenient headline should have been easy enough to work around, had ACT wanted to.
A resignation three months in the making
Jago’s own timeline undercuts any suggestion this was all sprung on the party.
RNZ has reported that the wife of one of Jago’s victims contacted Seymour directly, by Facebook message, in November 2022, telling him plainly that his party president was a “sexual predator”.
Jago wasn’t charged, and didn’t resign, for another three months.
He then held name suppression for two years, through the 2023 election that delivered ACT eleven MPs, and it did not lapse until January 2025 — only after Jago himself chose to abandon the fight.
The youth wing question
Jago’s presidency wasn’t only shadowed by his own eventual conviction.
In May 2020, Young ACT’s vice-president, Ali Gammeter, resigned publicly, saying she had been sexually harassed and ignored for months. ACT commissioned an independent investigation — and then never released its findings.
Gammeter called the outcome appalling.
ACT’s vote climbed from one MP to ten.
The 6% problem
ACT went into announcement week with less room to move than any other party in Parliament.
Its 6% in the 13–17 June 1News Verian poll was already the lowest reading of any recent poll for the party — well below Taxpayers’ Union-Curia’s 7.8% from early June, Roy Morgan’s 9.5% for the same period, and RNZ-Reid Research’s 7.8%.
Swings of a point or more between polls have been routine for ACT this year. A shift that size, on Verian’s own number, would put the party under the 5% threshold that decides whether it holds any list seats at all.
Nor was ACT exposed to an immediate test from any of the four regular pollsters.
Taxpayers’ Union-Curia’s next poll was fielded from 1 to 5 July and released on 9 July, putting ACT at 6.9%, and it would not poll again until August.
And the RNZ-Reid Research poll, fielded 2 to 9 July, was published at 7.43am that Tuesday — hours before Henry’s own reveal, and days after its own fieldwork had closed.
Every regular measure of ACT’s support that week had already been locked in before the day’s news existed to affect it.
Reading the dead cat
A party that spent two years managing one president’s suppression order, never published the findings of its own youth-wing inquiry, and picked a week when no poll was in the field, understands news cycles better than most.
Lawyer and commentator Tania Waikato made the same point within hours of the announcement, describing the Henry reveal as a classic “dead cat” thrown to bury the Jago story.
When I posted about Jago’s history on Facebook that afternoon, the trolling arrived fast — many from fake profiles accounts, then a flurry of posts about Paul Henry followed, burying any mention of Jago.
Every party manages bad news. But a convicted former president buried by an outspoken broadcaster — on the very same afternoon — is too convenient to be a coincidence.
