Who is paying Ben Thomas?
He is introduced as a political commentator. He is also a director of a lobbying firm that does not name its clients — and whose newest recruit ran ACT’s last election campaign.
Every week, Ben Thomas tells New Zealanders what their politicians are up to — on RNZ’s Nine to Noon, in The Post and The Press, and on the panels in between. He is also a director of Capital, a lobbying firm paid to influence the same politicians he analyses. Its associate director is Stuart Wilson, who ran ACT’s 2023 campaign and advised David Seymour until August 2025.
I have never met Ben Thomas. In 2020 he told the world I was an idiot anyway. Last week I watched him work the launch of Nicky Hager’s Dirty Work alongside Taxpayers’ Union staff, before he filed a column telling readers the book was a damp squib.
That raises a question no audience is ever given the means to answer: when Ben Thomas speaks, who is he speaking for?
Contents
The tweet
In October 2020, the leader of ACT called me an idiot on Twitter. Three days later, a man I had never met volunteered to agree with him.
I had pointed out that the NZ Herald declined my column on ACT’s list candidates days before deputy leader Beth Houlbrooke was demoted from number two to number 13. The column is here. David Seymour replied:
“Total coincidence. We all think you’re an idiot.”
The insult did its job. It moved the conversation from why Houlbrooke had been demoted to whether I was an idiot. I knew why she was demoted. I had said so. As I later set out in Unleashed, Simon Lusk had warned an ACT powerbroker that Houlbrooke was a risk to their investment.
Seymour did not answer the message. He attacked the messenger. Two people liked his tweet. One of them was Stuart Wilson.
A left-leaning account, Nick, set Seymour’s reply beside an ACT spokesperson’s complaint that same week about a Green candidate’s personal attacks. Thomas then weighed in:
“In Seymour’s defence Grant McLachlan is an idiot, as well as the ‘brains’ behind the proto-Hobson’s Pledge ‘save our beaches’ campaign from 2010 when we repealed the Foreshore and Seabed Act.”
Nick later admitted he had no idea who I was. He just wanted to dunk on Seymour. Thomas claimed to know exactly who I was. He was wrong.
Thomas had no reason to join in. The exchange was not about him, nobody had tagged him, and Nick had been mocking Seymour, not me. Thomas chose to reply anyway, three days after the fact, to reinforce the insult that had buried the question of Houlbrooke’s demotion. That raises its own question: who prompted him?
The campaign against the repeal was run by the Coastal Coalition. Its spokesman was Hugh Barr. Its iwi-Kiwi billboards were designed by John Ansell. Both were named in the press at the time. Attorney-General Chris Finlayson called the group clowns. Thomas was Finlayson’s press secretary, and by his firm’s own account handled communications on the repeal. If anyone knew who the brains were, it was him.
The nearest thing to a fact in his tweet was something I had disclosed myself, three weeks earlier, in Astroturfs: Act Three of Dirty Politics. In 2011, after Don Brash took over ACT, I formatted an advertisement Brash and Ansell ran. Formatting is not strategy. 2011 is not 2010. ACT is not the Coastal Coalition. Whoever mangled that detail had read my article, or had been briefed by someone who had.
The scare quotes around “brains” were not an accident. Beth Houlbrooke, her son Louis Houlbrooke and Stuart Wilson circulated a rumour that I was a liar, a hacker, brain-damaged, a bully and a violent idiot. I set out that campaign in Unleashed and in How a right wing racket unleashed on me, and I hold the evidence.
It is not my characterisation. Information eventually released by Auckland Council shows Houlbrooke describing me as a bully, liar and hacker, which gave the council an excuse to stall and redact my requests. Local police recorded the same stigma in their National Intelligence Application database. Thomas’s single sentence carried two of its motifs: the idiot, and a sneer at my brain. A man who had never met me had somehow learned the script.
The brain-damage rumour was central to the Houlbrooke strategy from the moment I published my 2020 articles. Its purpose was simple: a man with a damaged brain is an idiot, his word cannot be trusted, and his memory of events is unreliable.
Tell enough people of the malicious rumour and they dismiss him before he speaks.
It was one of many rumours about me that ended up in those council and police files. It formed the environment for a series of stitch up attempts that followed.
People who actually believed the rumours under-estimated me. I documented everything. I filmed vigilantes and officials committing crimes. They had the audacity to abuse their connections with politicians, police, and officials.
In the most serious incident, I photographed the mother of a senior cop attack me, breaking my nose. Her husband managed campaigns for the National Party. She then had the audacity to claim that I had attacked her. In the 111 call, the coordinator of volunteers at the police station could be heard coaching her what to say. The police doctored evidence to support that false allegation. I was charged, on bail for years, then acquitted in minutes after I produced the photographs.
While all this was going on, Jenny Bartlett was stigmatising me. Bartlett’s neighbour was a local police sergeant, ran Neighbourhood Support in the area where I lived, and also ran Beth Houlbrooke’s community Facebook groups. She went around telling people I was a violent, brain-damaged man who had been arrested for beating up old ladies and robbing them. She put it in writing on 18 March 2022:
“This once sharp legal brain was smart enough not to name me.”
Once sharp. The rumour, dressed up as a compliment.
The rumour’s purpose was tested in court. After a vigilante network in Rodney set out to catch me in a “three strikes” sting, I was charged with assault and robbery. My account stood only because I had photographed every incident. I was acquitted in February 2024. As Tudor Clee put it during R v McLachlan:
“If Mr McLachlan hadn’t taken those four photos, would anyone even consider his version of events?”
As I concluded in Unleashed, Beth Houlbrooke and Stuart Wilson provided the material for the script. The brain-damage rumour existed to make sure nobody believed mine.
What Thomas did not mention was that he had been a campaign adviser to ACT in 2017. That year, RNZ’s Mediawatch reported that Thomas, then at Matthew Hooton’s firm Exceltium, did not deny having a political party as a client, and that the arrangement was obvious from his tweets praising ACT and its leader.
In September 2023 I replied to him. I had researched him and the circles he moves in, and still could not form an opinion of a man I had never met. He had formed one of me. He never answered.
He did not need to know me. He only needed to know whose side he was on.
The firm
Capital sells relationships with whoever holds power. It does not hide that. It just does not say who is buying.
Capital Government Relations was founded by Neale Jones, former chief of staff to Andrew Little and Jacinda Ardern. When Thomas joined as a director in July 2022, the NZ Herald reported he was the firm’s first hire from the right, brought in to cover the conservative side of politics for its clients. He became a shareholder that September. The Integrity Institute now describes the firm as owned by Jones and Thomas.
When the government changed in 2023, Capital shuffled right. Thomas moved from opposition relations to heading government relations. Former NZ First deputy leader Fletcher Tabuteau joined as a director, and accepted that his NZ First history was a significant reason he was hired. Archived snapshots of the firm’s team page from September 2024 and May 2025 track the roster bending towards whoever governs.
What Capital does not publish is a client list. Its case studies page offers two: a Pacific child-wellbeing charity and a study tour for Sri Lankan women MPs. One commercial client surfaced only because the Democracy Project reported it: Countdown retained Capital during the Commerce Commission’s grocery study.
In 2023, then Prime Minister Chris Hipkins asked lobbyists to adopt a voluntary code that would include naming their clients on their websites. Capital’s code of ethics promises to disclose conflicts of interest — to clients. Not to listeners. Not to readers.
A job title is not a disclosure.
The same code commits Capital’s consultants to reasonable endeavours to ensure that what they tell the public is true. Keep that in mind when you reread the tweet.
The colleague
Of every operator Capital could have hired out of ACT, it chose the one whose methods I have spent years documenting.
Stuart Wilson advised Local Government Minister Rodney Hide alongside Andrew Falloon (who resigned as a National MP years later for sending a dick pic to a teenager.) As I record in Unleashed, when Hide felt threatened by his own caucus in 2010, Wilson and Falloon circulated rumours selected from the dossiers Hide kept on potential rivals. When I pressed a complaint about an under-performing council in 2009, Hide’s advisers told me Rodney “didn’t want to rock the boat” — as I set out in Why we should have zero tolerance for Act. In 2011 ACT made Wilson its campaign manager, a move The Dominion Post said fuelled talk of further turmoil.
As I reported in The octopus that turned on National, Wilson spread the rumour during Brash’s takeover of ACT that Jordan Williams was Brash’s love child. Brash called it a smear campaign designed to discredit him. Williams went on to found the Taxpayers’ Union.
By 2023 Wilson was running ACT’s campaign again. Insiders told Tova O’Brien it was a “train wreck” that took a party polling 12–13 percent early in the year to 8.6 percent on election night.
Wilson's reward for that campaign was a job as David Seymour’s specialist ministerial adviser, where by Capital’s own account he drove the creation of the Ministry for Regulation and the Regulatory Standards Bill.
In August 2025 he walked through the revolving door to lobby the government he had just served. Thomas issued the welcome:
“We’re delighted to be able to welcome Stuart to the team.”
The Post’s Andrea Vance reported insiders’ view that Wilson’s intel would be gold to clients.
Wilson is one of the three people who circulated the rumour behind Thomas’s “brains” jibe, and his name is on the file. When RNZ put my astroturfing thesis to air in April 2021, Louis Houlbrooke called it “tantalising journalism” and Chris Penk called it “weird and ridiculous”. Days later, a baseless complaint about me was lodged with the Law Society. It was ignored. After Beth Houlbrooke's new boyfriend tried to provoke a physical altercation with me, Beth Houlbrooke shouted at me in a busy bar:
“The police will believe me! I’m Beth Houlbrooke!”
An independent witness has sworn to it. On 2 July 2021 I applied for a restraining order, and she was served on 6 July. Two days later, the same complainant went back to the Law Society, which this time wrote to me.
On 21 July, Houlbrooke emailed two local police officers from her personal address. The seven paragraphs of her email are redacted. The attachments are not: “Stuart Wilson re Grant MacLachlan.pdf” and a file about an incident on my last day of high school in 1993. The full sequence is in Unleashed and How a right wing racket unleashed on me. Police are still obstructing the release of the dossier’s contents.
Thomas does not merely sit near Wilson on a team page. He is a director and shareholder of the firm that hired him, and he said he was delighted.
The panel
Audiences hear Ben Thomas’s analysis every week. They are never told who else hears it.
RNZ introduces him as a former National government press secretary, a columnist and a director of public affairs firm Capital. That is a job title, not a client list. Bryce Edwards has warned that because lobbyists do not disclose clients, it is often impossible to know whose interests they are pursuing in their commentary. I made the same point about ACT’s alumni in The tentacles of ACT.
His byline in The Post and The Press on 26 September was thinner still: a public relations consultant and political commentator who has worked for the National Party. Not a lobbyist. Not a director of Capital. Not ACT’s 2017 campaign adviser. Not Wayne Brown’s 2022 campaign adviser, a role Edwards noted at the time. Not a colleague of ACT’s last campaign manager.
In New South Wales, a lobbyist in his position would appear on a public Register of Third-Party Lobbyists listing every client. The state’s lobbyists’ code also requires lobbyists to keep any party-political activity separate from their lobbying.
In New Zealand, he is bound by nothing but his own firm’s website.
The launch
On 22 September, Nicky Hager launched Dirty Work, his book on the Taxpayers’ Union, at Unity Books in Wellington. I was there. So was Ben Thomas.
I have described the room already. Thomas stood right next to me with four Taxpayers’ Union staffers. I overheard them talking tactics. When he noticed me, he moved to a spot behind me beside the counter. From there I could hear him talking about me — behind my back, literally. Two men in suits stayed with him. Two women spread out towards the speeches.
The Spinoff’s Lyric Waiwiri-Smith noticed Taxpayers’ Union and ACT people working the crowd and declining to chat. Steve Braunias’s live blog for Newsroom logged the moment:
“Oh look there’s that right-wing guy Ben Thomas.”
After the speeches, Braunias photographed Thomas on the footpath outside, huddled with the same group, leafing through the book.
A book about operators who work the room was launched. They then behaved just as Hager described in his book.
The column
Four days later, Thomas filed his verdict on the book.
Before it ran, I predicted how the right would answer Dirty Work, using the Ten Ds of opposition tactics I set out in Unleashed. Thomas’s column ran through four of the
Discount: the book seemed to offer little that was new.
Discredit: Hager’s earlier books rested on emails “(at best) mysteriously acquired, and hacked”.
Deflect: the real bombshell of the week, he wrote, was Chris Hipkins, who takes up roughly half the column.
Dulcify: a warm note of sympathy for the pressure Hipkins is under, and a joke about a $30 T-shirt.
To be fair to him, Thomas did take one swipe at the Union. He mocked its fundraising appeal and wondered whether it would pay for the stack of copies bought by its young staffers, perched in front of the retail counter during the speeches. He described them from a distance. He did not mention that he had been standing among them, or that he was photographed huddled with them afterwards.
ACT does not appear in the column at all. Yet Hager argues that once the Taxpayers’ Union showed the race card could be played and rewarded, ACT wanted in on it too. A reader of Thomas would never know the book says so — or that his firm employs the man who ran ACT’s last campaign.
Four of the Ten Ds in a single column, under a byline that disclosed none of it.
The questions
None of this proves Thomas was paid to be at Unity Books, or to write what he wrote. That is the point. Nobody can tell.
Capital’s office is at 26 The Terrace in Wellington. When Thomas joined, Jones said he would be based in Auckland. There are ordinary reasons a Wellington firm’s director might be in Wellington on a Tuesday night. But readers are entitled to know in which capacity he was in that room: columnist, lobbyist, or companion to the Taxpayers’ Union’s staff.
So here are the questions:
Who paid for the trip, and to whom was it invoiced?
Does Capital, or any of its clients, have an interest in how Dirty Work is received?
Has Capital ever acted for the Taxpayers’ Union, the Campaign Company, or any group in their stable?
Was Thomas’ 2020 tweet about me prompted or informed by anyone at ACT — including the man his firm later hired?
A commentator with nothing to hide can answer them in a sentence.
The fix
This is not only about one pundit. It is about a system that lets every lobbyist be a pundit without saying so.
The Ministry of Justice’s draft lobbying code of March 2024 was voluntary, required no sign-up and had no enforcement. Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith then put the reform work on hold. On the day of the Dirty Work launch, the Greens proposed a public register of lobbyists. It is a start.
The two bills I published in March go further:
an Independent Crime and Corruption Commission with the powers of New South Wales’ ICAC; and
rules that would drag third-party campaigners into the light.
Across the Tasman, a lobbyist who campaigned for one party, commented for the media and lobbied the government would have to register, list every client and keep the roles apart — and an anti-corruption commission would have the power to ask the questions above.
Until then, every panel is a shop window, and nobody has to say what is for sale.
Ben Thomas called me an idiot without ever having met me. I have since seen his work, his firm and the company he keeps. I still do not know who pays him. Neither do you.
