When the journalist is the target
- Grant McLachlan - Column
- 1 day ago
- 28 min read
Updated: 5 hours ago
How a year-old apology became a two-week pressure campaign — and how the architecture of New Zealand’s astroturf industry was used to take out a wahine Maori political editor in election year, while the Prime Minister smiled.
For decades, a New Zealand political hit-job had a politician as its target and the media as its weapon. The Maiki Sherman affair has inverted both. The target was the country’s most senior political journalist. The weapon was a Substack post written by the General Manager of a public-affairs firm whose business is the manufacture of fake grassroots opinion. The delivery vehicle was the mainstream press itself, which has spent the last decade recycling these operators’ output as if it were news.
The beneficiary was the smiling Prime Minister whose proxies did the dirty work, and whose major fundraising drive proceeded under the cover of the operation. This is the Nicky Hager playbook from 2014, executed with fresh names and the same architecture against a wahine Maori political editor in election year.
That is how far we have come. This is how it happened.
Eleven days that took a political editor
Keep the timeline in your head, because the chronology is the argument.
In May 2025, at a pre-Budget drinks function in Finance Minister Nicola Willis’ office, Sherman used the word “faggot” toward Stuff political journalist Lloyd Burr. She has said throughout that this was in response to “deeply personal and inappropriate remarks” directed at her. Burr and Stuff deny he used any slur. The next morning Sherman apologised — to Burr, to Willis, to her manager. Burr told the minister he did not want to escalate. Willis respected his decision. The matter was resolved.
In late February 2026, Sherman fronted a 1News story by political reporter Benedict Collins reporting that gang members now outnumber police officers — a promise Christopher Luxon had personally made would not happen on his watch. Police Minister Mark Mitchell attacked the story on Facebook. Broadcasting Minister Paul Goldsmith rang the reporter. TVNZ’s board chair Andrew Barclay rang Goldsmith. Sherman, in emails later released under the OIA, apologised to Mitchell. The gallery calls this GrunterGate.
On 19 April 2026, the 1News-Verian poll landed showing the coalition would, on those numbers, lose the November election. Sherman wrote up the analysis under the headline “Poll spells big trouble for Christopher Luxon” and the on-air word “Goneburger.” Two days later, National caucus held a confidence vote in Luxon’s leadership. Chief whip Stuart Smith was absent. Sherman pursued him at his office for comment about his absence. National’s campaign chair Simeon Brown lodged a complaint with TVNZ and publicised it on social media the same day. On 30 April, Speaker Gerry Brownlee suspended Sherman from Parliament for five sitting days. Luxon cancelled his weekly slot on TVNZ’s Breakfast with co-host Tova O’Brien, who had been giving him a torrid time in interviews.
On 28 April — with Sherman publicly weakened, suspended, isolated from her broadcaster’s leadership corridor — Ani O’Brien’s Substack post landed. On 1 May, three days later, while Sherman’s parliamentary suspension was still running, the Free Speech Union republished the post in full on its institutional website, expressly tagged “Reposted with permission.” On 7 May, the Electoral Commission released the 2025 party donation returns. On 8 May, Sherman resigned.
The Substack post was a year old in everything except the publication date. The slur was a year old. The apology was a year old. The internal resolution was a year old. The only thing fresh was the timing — precisely the fortnight in which Sherman’s usefulness as a target was at its peak.
Massey University’s Professor Mohan Dutta has described the post as not journalism but “a strategic communication artefact.” The Standard called it Dirty Politics 2.0. Whether the timing was coincidence is a question reasonable people can decide for themselves.
The three-strikes architecture
There is a structural pattern to how these campaigns work that is worth naming explicitly, because it is the operational technique. A modern political hit-job that needs to last longer than a single news cycle is built around three discrete strikes, each calibrated to extend the story by generating a fresh news peg.
Strike one: the seed. Someone surfaces an allegation, usually anonymously and usually through a partisan or fringe outlet — a Substack, a friendly blog, a social-media post by a sympathetic minister. Strike one only needs to force the subject and the mainstream press to respond.
Strike two: the official information. Something documentary surfaces that appears to validate the seed — an OIA release, a court filing, a leaked internal email, an official statement. Strike two converts the original allegation from “claim” to “documented,” giving the mainstream press permission to run the story as news rather than rumour.
Strike three: the killer blow. New material — a fresh witness, a fresh detail, a fresh angle — elevates the story from “controversy” to “untenable position” and forces the outcome the operators wanted in the first place.
The architecture works because of an alignment that neither the audience nor, in many cases, the journalists running the resulting stories can see. Working political journalists are, by the structure of their careers, rewarded for stories that develop rather than die. An operator who arrives at a political reporter’s door with strike one in hand, and the quiet assurance that strikes two and three are coming, is not offering that reporter a smear campaign. The reporter does not experience it that way. The operator is offering exactly what the reporter’s professional life is structured to reward: a pre-paced story with legs.
This is why the same operators can take down a senior journalist using the same architecture they used to take down a senior politician a decade earlier, and the press gallery covering the second operation does not recognise the first. The audience cannot see the architecture because the journalists writing the stories cannot see it either.
Look back at the Sherman chronology and the three strikes are visible:
Strike one was Mark Mitchell’s February 2026 Facebook attack on the gang-numbers story — the seed planted publicly by a senior minister with a documented Dirty Politics record.
Strike two was the March OIA filed by “Paul Barlow,” naming Newstalk ZB and the Taxpayers’ Union as the source of the apology claim, producing emails released through April; the Herald’s Media Insider column laundered those documents into front-page coverage.
Strike three was the 28 April Substack, given institutional weight by the 1 May FSU republication, given mainstream credibility by Stuff’s legal letters defending Burr, and given media saturation by the NZME-Stuff-RNZ wave that followed.
Winston Peters' superannuation leak
Now look back at the Peters 2017 superannuation leak:
Strike one was the anonymous phone calls to Newshub and Newsroom in late August, with Tim Murphy’s tweet seeding the story to Paddy Gower.
Strike two was Burr’s recorded call and Peters’ Sunday-evening press statement confirming the overpayment — Peters himself, under press pressure, became the documentary confirmation.
Strike three, two days later, was the disclosure that Anne Tolley and Paula Bennett had known about the overpayment under the “no surprises” policy, which converted the story from “Peters’ personal mistake” to “which National ministers leaked it.” Three news cycles. One designed political outcome.
There is a variant of the architecture worth naming. The standard form is operator-driven: leak, documentation, killer blow. The variant is target-driven: accusation and denial, then the lie caught out, then a further revelation that compounds the original. The two are not mutually exclusive — once a target denies strike one, the operator’s pre-prepared strike two arrives ready-made as “evidence the target lied.”
Mark Mitchell's Rodney candidate selection
The 2011 Mitchell selection campaign is one of the clearest three-strikes operations on the New Zealand documentary record. Slater and Lusk's own Facebook Messenger exchanges from January and February 2011 show them planning it explicitly. Mapped to the architecture in your article:
Strike one — the seed. 17 February 2011. Slater's Whale Oil post "Followup on Rodney selection" — "Branch stacking may or may not be constitutionally valid, but it is highly unethical." A partisan/fringe outlet planting the allegation against electorate chair Cehill Pienaar and branch chair Brent Robinson, anonymously sourced. Forces the subject and the mainstream press to respond. Exactly the strike-one definition.
Strike two — the official information. 19 February to 4 March. Slater's escalation posts ("Knowing me, knowing you — Cehill Pienaar") outing Pienaar as a former South African right-wing politician; the Dominion Post on 21 February using phrases lifted from Slater's posts but attributing them to "a high-ranking National source"; the Herald on 4 March formalising "both frontrunners now perceived to have indulged in dirty pool." The party hierarchy postponed the delegate vote from 2 March to 14 March to 26 April — institutional confirmation that the allegations had purchase. The original Whale Oil seed converted into mainstream news through "a high-ranking National source" backgrounding journalists — the strike-two architecture without a formal OIA, because the operators don't need one. They manufacture the documentary validation by feeding mainstream reporters from the same well.
Strike three — the killer blow. 27 March 2011. The Sunday Star Times feature-length puff piece on Mitchell — fourteen years in the police, eight years as an international hostage negotiator, a five-day Iraq siege, and a story "set to feature in a movie made by Brad Pitt." No movie ever resulted. By that point Pienaar and Robinson had been discredited; the puff piece was the fresh angle that elevated Mitchell to the inevitable choice. Slater then "went silent" between 30 March and 26 April so Mitchell could "charm delegates" without taint. Mitchell won the candidacy on the first ballot on 26 April. Three strikes, ten weeks, operation closed.
The Slater-Lusk hitjob on Penny Webster
And look back at the 2016 destruction of Penny Webster's Auckland Council seat — the other Rodney-area precedent. Same operators, same architecture, more economical execution. The operators did not need to manufacture their own documentary validation; they timed the operation to ride a Serious Fraud Office prosecution that was already moving:
Strike one was Cameron Slater's 25 January 2016 Whale Oil post calling Webster "the most disappointing councillor on the Auckland Council" — and Greg Sayers's Facebook share of it the next day, adding the line "Political commentators say it's time for Penny Webster to go or she'll get voted out — for very transparent reasons!" where the Whale Oil post had made no such allegation. The framing was added in the share, and "transparent reasons" became the code for the year of whispered rumours about Webster that had been spreading at Rodney pubs and SBRRA events through 2015: a Bali holiday paid for by accused Auckland Transport manager Murray Noone (Webster had not been to Bali since the eighties); then, when the Bali rumour was contradicted, Fiji on a Times FM promotion (a discount package on the public record); then bankrupted twice (she had not been); then the campaign's eventual catch-phrase, "she must have known something was going on."
Strike two was the Serious Fraud Office's prosecution of Murray Noone, Stephen Borlase and Barrie George — charges laid April 2015, George's guilty plea on 3 August 2016 eight weeks before the election, the Borlase and Noone trial opening on 27 September 2016 inside the postal-voting window, with Crown Prosecutor Brian Dickey describing the council and Auckland Transport culture in open court as one where "corruption flourished and was normalised, with no questions asked." Webster, never interviewed, never charged, never implicated, was attached to the corruption framing in voters' minds because the operators had timed the smear to coincide with the trial. The documentary validation was not manufactured. It was an institutional event the operators rode.
Strike three was the cumulative pressure of the September–October 2016 voting window itself — the 19 September 2016 SBRRA event at which organiser Maurie Hooper announced "Penny Webster will be given a real challenge this time"; Sayers's "Make Rodney Great Again" Whataboutism at the candidate meetings; the limited election coverage from a declining local press; and the SFO trial proceeding in open court as voting closed. On 8 October 2016, Webster received 6,073 votes to Sayers's 9,252. The local press reported the result as an upset. It was not an upset. It was a delivered seat.
And the operation's why points to one further feature of the architecture worth naming. Webster was not removed for a 2016 policy reason. She was removed for a 2013 service rendered. In October 2013, Mark Mitchell had alerted Webster — in a private business meeting on electoral and council matters — to "scuttlebutt floating around for a while about the mayor having a skeleton in his closet." Webster passed Mitchell's name to Mayor Len Brown's chief of staff Phil Wilson five days before voting closed in the 2013 local-body election. The post-election Bevan Chuang scandal — designed by the same Slater-Palino-Wewege network to force Brown's resignation in disgrace — was defused because Brown had been pre-warned. Three years later, the same operators removed Webster's seat. The Webster case is the documented New Zealand example of the three-strikes architecture being used not for political gain but for personal retribution.
David Garrett's 'Three Strikes'
The iconic New Zealand example is the September 2010 destruction of David Garrett, the ACT MP who had drafted the literal Three Strikes legislation passed into law that May:
Strike one was the disclosure of Garrett’s 2002 Tongan assault conviction; Garrett admitted it but minimised.
Strike two, two days later, was the disclosure that Garrett had in 1984 used the birth certificate of a dead baby to obtain a passport — MPs in the House literally shouted “strike two!” as he confessed at the despatch box.
Strike three, the following night, was One News’ disclosure that Garrett had misled the court during his 2005 discharge proceedings — a finding the Law Society subsequently formalised by suspending him from practising law.
Three strikes in four days. The author of three strikes was destroyed by three strikes. The architecture predates 2026 by decades.
The architecture is not theory. It is what these operations look like every time. Knowing the architecture means knowing what to expect when strike one drops next time. There will be a next time.
The operators do not stop because one of their targets has resigned. They are, based on publicly available information, running a fundraising drive on the strength of having taken her out.
The operators
When the mainstream press ran its first wave of Sherman stories, they described Ani O’Brien as a “political commentator,” a “Substack writer,” a “women’s rights advocate.” On her own LinkedIn and on the Companies Office record, O’Brien’s day job is General Manager of The Campaign Company — a public-affairs firm whose sole director and shareholder is Jordan Williams.
Williams runs more campaign vehicles than anyone else alive in this country. He runs The Campaign Company, the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union, and the international World Taxpayers Associations. He co-founded the Free Speech Union. Until 2021 he also ran the Auckland Ratepayers’ Alliance, which graded mayoral candidates while his separate firm ran the campaigns of some of those candidates — an arrangement he has denied creates any conflict of interest.
The firm’s published client list is the tour. The Campaign Company has been contracted by Hobson’s Pledge to run the anti-co-governance “We Belong Aotearoa” website, called “really offensive, insulting, and quite deceitful” by Maori cultural advisor Karaitiana Taiuru. The same firm took $135,733 across the 2023 election cycle from Hobson’s Pledge, Groundswell, and the Taxpayers’ Union — three separate “third-party” groups, all clients of the same firm, all advocating positions convenient to the same coalition of parties. The same firm registered saveourstores.nz for a tobacco-industry astroturf commissioned by Imperial Brands NZ and BAT NZ to attack smokefree retail policy.
This is not a commentator with a Substack. This is the General Manager of the country’s most prolific manufacturer of fake grassroots opinion using her personal blog — and within seventy-two hours her organisation’s institutional website — to take a scalp her firm’s clients had a direct political interest in seeing taken.
Both Williams and O’Brien sit on the council of the Free Speech Union, which exists on its own stated terms -
“to defend the free exchange of information and educate New Zealanders on the importance of free speech.”
The FSU was founded out of the Taxpayers’ Union office in 2018 to defend the right of Auckland to host alt-right speakers Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux. Its entire public brand is built on the proposition that giving offence, especially in heated or private contexts, should not be career-ending, and that apologies accepted at the time should resolve a matter.
That, exactly, is what Sherman did. She used a word in a private after-hours setting. She apologised the next morning. Burr accepted. Willis respected the decision not to escalate. By every applicable FSU principle, the matter was closed.
On 1 May 2026, three days after O’Brien’s Substack version, seven days before Sherman resigned, the Free Speech Union published the entire article on its own institutional website. Not a link. Not a comment. The whole article, expressly tagged “Reposted with permission from Ani O’Brien’s Thoughts Crimes Substack Blog,” formatted under the FSU masthead, with images of Sherman, with editorial bolding of “Maiki Sherman repeatedly shouted the homophobic slur ‘faggot’.”
That republication destroys, completely, any defence that O’Brien was acting in her personal capacity. The FSU has now demonstrated, in writing, on its own letterhead, that none of its stated principles apply when it is one of its own council members doing the cancelling.
The amplification chain
The Campaign Company supplied the Substack. The FSU supplied the institutional cover. What pushed the story from partisan blog post into front-page mainstream news was the amplification engine no one is talking about: the corporate structure of NZME and the bipartisan commentariat ecosystem that surrounds it.
NZME owns both Newstalk ZB — the country’s biggest commercial talk radio station, where Mike Hosking and Barry Soper run drive and morning-time politics — and the NZ Herald, which publishes the weekly Media Insider column by Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie. Currie discloses at the foot of every Media Insider column that he “has a small shareholding in NZME” — the company whose corporate affairs he covers as a journalist.
The OIA chain shows how the laundering works. On 3 March 2026, an OIA was filed on FYI.org.nz seeking communications between TVNZ executives and the Police Minister’s office. The request itself states the source of the underlying claim:
“Recently hosts on Newstalk ZB and individuals connected to lobby group the Tax Payers Union made claims that an unnamed TVNZ Executive reached out to Police Minister Mark Mitchell to apologise.”
The Taxpayers’ Union — Jordan Williams’ organisation — and Newstalk ZB, owned by NZME, are jointly named on the Ombudsman’s site as the original source. The journalist who then wrote it up was Shayne Currie, who works for the same NZME that owns Newstalk ZB. Currie’s 4 March 2026 piece named Sherman as the apologetic “senior leader” citing Barry Soper’s reporting on Newstalk ZB and “Media Insider understands” — before the OIA had even been responded to.
The polling layer is the same architecture. NZME, like every gutted newsroom in the country, can no longer afford independent political polling. The Herald and Newstalk ZB now publish, as their headline political polling content, the monthly Taxpayers’ Union–Curia poll — conducted by Curia Market Research, owned by David Farrar, who co-founded the Taxpayers’ Union with Williams and is described by John Key as “the best pollster in New Zealand.” In August 2024, Curia resigned its membership of the Research Association of New Zealand after RANZ upheld complaints about its Family First puberty-blockers poll, its Golden Mile poll, and its 2023 Academic Freedom Survey commissioned by the Free Speech Union. The Herald and Newstalk ZB nonetheless continue to publish Curia’s monthly numbers as the country’s primary public political polling.
This is not a media ecosystem. It is a feedback loop with a press card.
On the day after O’Brien’s Substack landed, the NZME amplification machine moved as one. Mike Hosking opened his ZB breakfast slot by revealing that his producer Sam Carran had been investigating the Sherman incident in late 2025, and that TVNZ had sent NZME a Russell McVeagh legal letter warning him off.
“TVNZ threatened to sue us,” Hosking told listeners.
The same evening, Heather du Plessis-Allan’s drive show hosted Jordan Williams on The Huddle — the sole director of The Campaign Company, employer of Ani O’Brien, given the country’s biggest commercial drive-time platform to discuss the Sherman story written by his own employee.
Within a week, du Plessis-Allan had written three columns on the affair, including one introducing a new and previously unreported allegation about Sherman “berating a much more junior press gallery member.” Her closing piece after Sherman resigned conceded the central thesis of this column:
“The politicians are coming for the media and Sherman’s case is an example of that. The National Party lined her up.”
That admission, from NZME’s most senior right-leaning drive host, is on the public record.
And the left-wing flank was paid by the same operators. In 2023, Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury — publisher of The Daily Blog, self-described “independent left-wing political commentator” — was contracted, together with Damien Grant, to moderate the Taxpayers’ Union’s series of seven 2023 election debates. The partnership was announced by the TU on 1 August 2023, tied to Curia polling releases, and produced as episodes of The Working Group podcast.
Here is how Bradbury had previously described Jordan Williams:
"Manipulative";
"A political sadist";
A "cancer on the body politics" of New Zealand;
A "venomous spider"; and
Part of a "pack of hyenas" that had launched a political hit job.
Bradbury, however, effectively normalized Jordan Williams by being on his attack machinery’s payroll. One wonders whether Bradbury’s supposed hatred of Williams that built both their profiles were a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Through GrunterGate, Bradbury published Daily Blog pieces openly calling for Sherman’s resignation:
“Maiki Sherman must resign as TVNZ Political Editor immediately!”,
“Maiki Sherman capitulated to NZ Police Minister to strangle fourth estate journalism,”
“Will Maiki Sherman roll over for National again?”
On 8 May, the day Sherman resigned, Bradbury posted –
“Maiki Sherman had no choice but to resign — Ani O’Brien gets 2 for 4 as right wing political assassin,” in which he characterised O’Brien as a “far right hate troll.”
Bradbury’s post is structurally indistinguishable, in its political effect, from O’Brien’s. Both pieces argued Sherman had to go; both pieces emerged from commentators with documented commercial relationships to the same Taxpayers’ Union–Curia–Free Speech Union network; both pieces gave the operation bipartisan cover.
And the political beneficiary of all this is, by every appearance, the senior cabinet minister who set the chain in motion with his original Facebook post: Mark Mitchell.
Mitchell is not a naive bystander in this kind of operation. He is, on the public record, the subject of an entire chapter of Nicky Hager’s Dirty Politics, which documented how Simon Lusk and Cameron Slater coordinated a Whale Oil campaign through the 2011 Rodney selection to smear Mitchell’s rivals. Mitchell denied paying Lusk or Slater — a denial that the leaked Lusk-Slater Messenger exchanges directly contradict:
Lusk to Slater of Mitchell: 'I can sort out Mark no worries, he doesn't mind spending'
(Mitchell later acknowledged Lusk had provided 'guidance on speeches and brochures.')
Mark Mitchell knows exactly how this game works. He was the prototype.
The Speaker who suspended her
The asymmetry between Brownlee’s conduct as an MP and the conduct he punishes as Speaker is on the public record.
Gerry Brownlee has been a Member of Parliament since 1996 and Speaker of the House since December 2023. Before entering Parliament, he taught woodwork, technical drawing and Maori for twelve years at St Bede’s College and Ellesmere College. NZ First MP Mark Patterson, his pupil at Ellesmere, has recalled being caned by him on the floor of Parliament — the first strike landing on the hamstrings: “I think I can still feel it.” Earlier, in 1981, Brownlee had been on the pro-tour rugby side of the Springbok test at Lancaster Park, where police drew batons against anti-apartheid protesters. In 2004, after Don Brash’s Orewa speech, Brash removed his Maori Affairs spokesperson Georgina te Heuheu for refusing to endorse it, and appointed Brownlee — who himself acknowledged at the time he had only a “small understanding” of te reo — to take her place. Te Heuheu, contemporaneously, said it was “disappointing to have a Pakeha as Maori Affairs spokesman.”
In September 1999, at the National Party’s election campaign launch at Eden Park, Brownlee — then the party’s junior whip — confronted a Native Forest Action supporter named Neil Abel who had asked Prime Minister Jenny Shipley about her Government’s continued logging of native forests on the West Coast. Brownlee grabbed Abel from behind by the belt, lifted his feet off the ground, and walked him to a marble staircase. Abel feared he was about to be thrown down it. Police declined to prosecute. Abel took a civil case. In 2002, Auckland District Court Judge Fred McElrea found Brownlee had used “excessive and unreasonable force” and awarded Abel $8,500 in damages. Brownlee told the Herald the incident was “quite uncharacteristic and is something I will be eternally embarrassed by.”
Across twenty-seven subsequent years as a backbench and senior MP, he was never formally named or suspended.
In 2023, Brownlee was elected unopposed as Speaker. Three sets of his rulings since then are worth setting beside the 2026 ruling against Sherman.
First: in late 2024 and 2025, he supported what he himself acknowledged was the most severe disciplinary action against MPs since 1854 — 21-day suspensions of Te Pāti Maori MPs over a haka in the chamber during the Treaty Principles Bill debate. The previous maximum suspension since 1854 had been three days. Brownlee called the defence of the haka “complete nonsense”.
Second: in August 2025, he ejected Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick for calling government MPs “spineless” during a speech on Gaza, barred her from the House for a week, and demanded an apology before she could return. Parliamentary researchers could find no historical example of a Speaker demanding an apology before an ejected member’s return; the ruling contradicted a standing 2001 Speaker’s Ruling on the same point. Brownlee himself, as an MP, had described laws as “dopey” and “the worst kind of legislation we could possibly have” — well within the same register — and RNZ’s analysis of the ruling noted that “spine,” “guts,” “spineless” and “gutless” are routinely used in the chamber to describe political opponents without consequence.
Third: in April 2026, the same Speaker handed down a five-day suspension to Maiki Sherman — the first time in living memory a press gallery member had been suspended — while acknowledging in his own ruling that other journalists had committed the same breach the same night and that he could not identify them.
The targets of Brownlee’s three harshest rulings as Speaker have been:
the Te Pāti Maori caucus,
the Greens’ female co-leader, and
the wahine Maori political editor of the state broadcaster.
The Speaker who in 1999 was found liable for using force against a citizen who tried to question the Prime Minister, who across twenty-seven years as an MP was never himself disciplined for his own conduct, is the institutional gatekeeper who in 2026 imposed the harshest available sanction on the journalist who tried to question a politician. The pattern is not inferred. It is on the public record of his own rulings.
The asymmetry
The asymmetry has multiple dimensions. They are documented, they are mutually reinforcing, and they all point in the same direction.
The political class.
Sherman used one word at a private after-hours function a year ago and lost her career. Te Pāti Maori MP and former TVNZ broadcaster Oriini Kaipara said the scrutiny had been “excessive and deeply uncomfortable to watch unfold.”
Nick Rockel itemised the contrast. Sherman has been pushed out for using the “f” word at a private social event, while –
Winston Peters used “retard” in Parliament in 2024 without consequence,
Brooke van Velden shouted the “c” word in the House in 2025 without consequence, and
“Shane Jones constantly uses racial slurs, inside and outside the house, all without consequence.”
Whose mistakes are rough-and-tumble and whose become two-week pile-ons is the question every working political journalist in the country should be asking themselves.
Her peer.
The journalist around whom the entire affair has turned, who has been protected throughout, whose employer issued two strongly worded legal letters when he was named in the originating Substack, is Stuff’s now-Explainer Editor, Lloyd Burr.
Burr was, in August 2017, the Newshub junior political reporter used by Political Editor Paddy Gower to call Winston Peters on a recorded line and elicit “the mother of all scandals.” Newshub’s nominal lead reporter was Jenna Lynch, who described being “contacted by… a… source” on the Newshub Facebook Live introducing the story.
But it was Burr who did the operational work.
In the recorded call, Burr pressed Peters across multiple successive questions —
“So it’s a no from you. That you haven’t claimed more pension”;
“Why not? If it didn’t happen, why can’t you just rule it out?”
— not the cautious framing of a junior reporter handed a tip, but the persistence of a journalist working from prior operational knowledge.
What Peters told Newshub’s own AM Show the following morning in a contemporaneous interview with Duncan Garner is consistent with that reading. Peters described Burr as “a junior inexperienced journalist who thought he had struck pay gold,” and stated that during the recorded call Burr had himself revealed that “the informant was IRD.”
Peters subsequently named Burr as a defendant in his first legal action over the breach of his private information before later dropping him from the list of defendants.
Lynch had the tip on paper, Burr ran the operation, and on Peters’ own account Burr already knew enough about the source of the leak to disclose it to its subject mid-call.
In the eight years since, Burr has held a Newshub Europe correspondent role, co-hosted Today FM, returned to Newshub as Three’s AM Show co-host until its 2024 closure, and now sits at Stuff Group as Explainer Editor.
One participant in the 13 May 2025 incident is out of work. The other is Stuff’s Explainer Editor.
The pattern within the pattern.
There is one more dimension worth naming. In each of the three episodes that have, between them, destroyed Sherman’s career, she is the only party whose conduct was placed on the documentary record. Each episode contains other actors equally implicated by the underlying facts; none of them appears on the record at all.
At the Willis function in May 2025, Sherman admitted using the word and apologised. Burr’s response, through Stuff, has been to say only that he never used “a slur” to Sherman or anyone, without addressing what he might or might not have said on the night that prompted Sherman’s reaction.
For the public version of events to stand, Sherman would have to have used a homophobic slur completely unprovoked at a junior colleague she had no documented prior animus with.
That reading does not survive ordinary inspection. But it is the only reading on the public record, because the only public account of conduct comes from Sherman.
In the Smith corridor in April 2026, Brownlee himself acknowledged in his suspension ruling that
“other media outlets also breached rules on the same day but he could not identify the individuals responsible.”
Parliament has CCTV. The press gallery has fewer than fifty members. Smith himself was the supposed victim of the breach. For the Speaker — the only person with the formal investigatory authority over press gallery conduct — to be unable to identify the other journalists who breached rules on the same evening strains credibility. Only the wahine Maori political editor was named and banned.
In the GrunterGate OIA filed by “Paul Barlow” on 3 March 2026, the request was surgically tailored to produce documentary evidence against Sherman. No equivalent OIA was filed seeking the communications of the Police Minister whose Facebook post triggered the chain, the Broadcasting Minister who rang the reporter, the TVNZ board chair who rang the Broadcasting Minister, the TVNZ chief executive, or the National Party officials who applied the pressure.
The OIA was deployed against the journalist who apologised; the ministers who organised the pressure were left untouched.
Three episodes. Three asymmetries. In each, Sherman is the only party publicly identified, the only party whose conduct was placed on the record, the only party whose career was at risk.
The cumulative pattern is not consistent with random selection. It is consistent with what it appears to be: an operation that, by design or by structural happenstance, had chosen its target before any of these “investigations” began.
The smiling beneficiary
The pattern is not new. In 2014, Nicky Hager’s Dirty Politics documented, on the back of leaked communications, how Prime Minister John Key maintained an unblemished public face while his proxies — Cameron Slater on Whale Oil, Simon Lusk on the consultancy side, the network of right-wing operators who passed material between them — did the smearing.
Key smiled, expressed concern, denied knowledge, won elections. The proxies did the work. The press was the delivery vehicle, sometimes wittingly, mostly not. Hager named it the New Zealand version of the politics of personal destruction.
Twelve years later, the formula is on the table again, and the names have rotated:
The operators this column has been describing — Williams, O’Brien, Bradbury, Hosking, du Plessis-Allan — sit in the same structural positions Slater and Lusk occupied.
Mark Mitchell, the cabinet minister whose Facebook post launched GrunterGate, was the subject of an entire chapter of Dirty Politics describing how the same Slater-Lusk network coordinated his 2011 Rodney selection.
The Police Minister who set the chain in motion against Sherman has personally experienced — and on his own evidence benefitted from — exactly this architecture before.
What does the Prime Minister do during all this?
He smiles.
He cancels his weekly slot on TVNZ’s Breakfast with Tova O’Brien.
He keeps his weekly availabilities to Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking and other outlets where the questions are softer.
He records optimistic videos about the economy turning.
He says nothing when his Police Minister attacks the state broadcaster on Facebook for accurate gang-numbers reporting.
He says nothing when his Speaker suspends the political editor of the state broadcaster for the first time in living memory.
He says nothing when his own campaign chair publicises a complaint against that political editor on social media before going through the formal Speaker process.
He says nothing when his coalition partners’ funded astroturfs publicise the post that takes her down.
He says nothing because nothing is required of him. The proxies are doing the work.
This is what I have been writing about for fifteen years.
The 2021 RNZ piece in which I described, on the record, how the ACT Party I had worked for as a researcher “weaponised” astroturfs — using groups like the Taxpayers’ Union to manufacture problems for ACT to then “solve” — set out the basic mechanic.
Unleashed, my 2023 book on a corrupted coastal community, documented how the same pattern played out at the local level, with vigilante groups standing in for the operators and police complicity for the press complicity.
The technique is now being executed at the national level against a wahine Maori political editor in election year. The architecture has not changed. The targets have moved up the food chain.
And the election-year context is what makes it urgent. While the operators worked Sherman over for eleven days, the coalition parties were on a major fundraising drive:
NZ First received $250,000 in declared donations on a single day, 17 April 2026 — the same week as the Verian “Goneburger” poll;
The Electoral Commission’s 2025 donation returns, released on 7 May, the day before Sherman resigned, showed National had raised $6,275,234 across the year — more than every other registered party combined;
ACT had overtaken Labour as the country’s second-best-funded party; and
Tech entrepreneur Brian Cartmell had donated almost identical six-figure sums to all three coalition parties: $200,000 to ACT, $201,994 to National, $204,999 to NZ First — a $607,000 trifecta whose tidy symmetry suggests something other than three independent decisions.
None of that funding data attracted significant coverage. The Sherman story dominated the news cycle that day and the rest of the week.
Whether the burial was coincidence or design is a question I leave to readers. The fact that the country’s biggest political-finance story of the year was almost entirely lost in the wake of a wahine Maori journalist’s resignation is not in dispute.
Luxon does not need to be in the room for any of this to happen. He does not need to be paying the operators. He does not need to be coordinating the timing. He needs only to be the beneficiary — and to keep smiling.
This is not the first time
What happened to Sherman did not happen in isolation. It is the third such episode in three years at the top of New Zealand broadcasting.
In April 2024, after a 22-year run, TVNZ cancelled its Sunday programme. Sunday’s host for that entire period was Miriama Kamo (Ngāi Tahu / Ngāti Mutūnga), 2019 Voyager Media Awards Best Reporter–Maori Affairs winner. Six weeks later TVNZ rolled out Sunday’s replacement: NZ’s Best Homes with Phil Spencer, a six-part property show fronted by the British presenter of Location, Location, Location, taking viewers, in the Spinoff’s framing, “inside the most unattainably lavish houses in New Zealand.” A twenty-two-year award-winning current affairs flagship hosted by a wahine Maori was replaced by property television fronted by an Englishman.
Kamo herself told RNZ’s It’s Personal podcast in October 2024 what working as a senior Maori woman at TVNZ had been like. She had been, she said,
“the lone Maori wahine on the team. Maori issues were of little consideration. Stories that didn’t associate Maori with crime or imprisonment didn’t get greenlit. I could not get a good Maori news story across the line.”
She described her earlier years at TVNZ as having involved “racial discrimination” she had had to work through.
The pattern within TVNZ itself runs deeper than Sunday. In 2020, Jenny-May Clarkson (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Kahu), the first wahine Maori appointed as a Breakfast co-host, took up the role. In 2024 she revealed her moko kauae on screen for the first time, having postponed the moment for years out of documented anxiety about audience response. She told her colleague Indira Stewart she had spent the night before the broadcast barely sleeping: “Just very real doubts started to creep in. What is everybody going to say? I don’t want to go back to work, you know. I can see the emails, I can see the responses already, and all of that was just going through my head.” She left Breakfast in November 2025 after six years. Her seat at the Breakfast desk was the seat that, five months later, Tova O’Brien took over — the same Tova O’Brien Luxon would cancel his weekly slot with at the start of the Sherman pile-on.
Two days after Sherman resigned, Miriama Kamo posted publicly about what she had watched at her former employer. Sherman, she wrote, was “the latest in a long line of Maori broadcasters to leave the company.” The hard work laid down to make TVNZ “a place where Maori can bring their whole selves is being decimated.” And the question, in Kamo’s own words: “Has there been any succession or recruitment planning as, one by one, its Maori workforce has depleted?” That question, from the broadcaster who hosted TVNZ’s flagship current affairs programme for twenty-two years, is the indictment. The fact that it was asked by Kamo — and reported, fully and on the record, by NZME’s own Media Insider — is the most important corroboration of this column’s central thesis to appear anywhere in the mainstream press.
Oriini Kaipara, the first journalist with a moko kauae to present a primetime news bulletin in this country, faced “relentless” complaints from viewers explicitly demanding she “stop” using te reo on air. Kaipara left mainstream broadcasting in 2023 and is now a Te Pāti Maori MP. TVNZ weather presenter Te Rauhiringa Brown faced the same wave for delivering one forecast in te reo — one complainant explaining “This is New Zealand not Rarotonga.” Brown is still presenting the weather, on a smaller and smaller weekend slot, on a network that no longer has Sunday.
These are the entirely predictable institutional consequences of a wahine Maori broadcaster reaching senior visibility in this country. The complaints come, organised in more cases than the press gallery cares to admit by the same operators this column has been describing. The broadcaster either internalises, pushes back, or leaves:
· Kamo’s show is gone, replaced by property television fronted by an Englishman;
· Kaipara is in Parliament;
· Clarkson left Breakfast for someone Luxon would not interview;
· Sherman has resigned; and
· Brown is on borrowed time.
The pattern is by now too consistent to be coincidence, and too sustained to be explained by any single newsroom decision. It is the structural default at the top of New Zealand broadcasting in 2026.
What the fourth estate is for
Readers deserve to know what my interest is. In September 2024, Maiki Sherman was the political editor under whom 1News ran the story headlined “Police ‘aghast’ unsupervised volunteers opened community station to public.” That story documented how a group of unsupervised volunteers had been running the Mahurangi Community Police Station in Snells Beach without training, vetting, supervision, or compliance with police volunteer policy. It quoted me. It took the substance of what I had written for years on klaut.media, set out in Unleashed, complained about to former Police Commissioner Andrew Coster in 2022, and buried by every official in the Rodney area for a decade, and put it on the six o’clock news. The day after the broadcast, the Mahurangi Police Station was emptied. The vigilante operation Sherman reported on was shut down.
Maiki is one of a diminishing number of journalists prepared to run stories the comfortable do not want run.
The pattern now is set. Tova O’Brien has lost her weekly slot with the Prime Minister. Jack Tame has been publicly attacked by ministers for asking them difficult questions. Maiki Sherman is out. The BSA is being disestablished. As one veteran journalist put it last week, this is the most hostile environment in fifty-five years to be a political journalist in this country. The mob has tasted blood.
The Campaign Company will be raising money off this victory. That is what campaign companies do. They take a scalp, they run a fundraising email pointing to the scalp, they pitch their next contract on the strength of having taken it. If I am wrong, Williams or O’Brien are welcome to publish their donor and client lists for the past six weeks.
Maiki Sherman is the first wahine Maori to have led the political team at the state broadcaster. She spent her career–
from Te Karere through Whakaata Maori and Newshub to 1News, doing the kind of journalism the operators who took her down explicitly do not want done;
She was one of only two Maori journalists in a press gallery of forty during Covid;
She ran the kaupapa Maori election debate;
She moderated polls that gave the Prime Minister worse numbers than he wanted;
She used a word she should not have used, at a private function, a year ago;
She apologised the next morning; and
She kept apologising on her way out the door.
By the only standards journalism has ever pretended to hold itself to, she has taken full personal responsibility for her own conduct — which is more than anyone else in this story has done.
The target was the journalist.
The weapon was the astroturf.
The press gallery were the delivery vehicle for their own colleague’s execution.
The beneficiary was the smiling Prime Minister whose fundraising drive proceeded under the cover of the operation.
Until they understand that — until we understand that — they will keep losing colleagues.
To Maiki: kia kaha. The fourth estate owes you. So do I. So does anyone who has ever had a story buried because the people with power preferred it that way.
There are still journalists in this country who will do what you did. There are fewer of them than there were last week. There will be fewer of them next week. We had better make some noise about that while we still can.
