Will backlash against donors decide this election?
- Grant McLachlan
- 1 day ago
- 11 min read
Imagine gloating about donating tens of thousands of dollars to National, ACT and the Taxpayers' Union. Imagine paying thousands more for a selfie at the Prime Minister's table. Then imagine becoming the reason voters can't stand the government you paid for.
You don't have to imagine it. Christchurch property boss Matthew Horncastle lived it.
“I donate to National, Act and the Taxpayers' Union,” he told the Herald in April, in the same interview where he called Christopher Luxon “a great Prime Minister” and confirmed he'd see him again soon, at a National Party fundraiser in Christchurch.
Three months later, the Electoral Commission referred him to police over his own billboards.
Horncastle isn't alone, and he isn't even the worst of it.
I examine how six people who have spent 2026 turning New Zealand's donor economy into a spectacle — and the one man National keeps sending in to clean up after them.
Contents
The fair go, inverted
New Zealand runs on a fair go.
Effort and merit are meant to matter more than family name or a seat at the right table. A level paddock, not a private box. An egalitarian secular society.
The pattern in this piece — donor, fast-track, backlash, repeat — cuts against that story directly. It's worth saying plainly why it offends people who have no interest whatsoever in planning law or fast-track panels.
As I've set out in The Bullshit Economy, too much of New Zealand's economy already runs on connections and access rather than on making anything. Political donations are just the newest way to buy a seat at that table.
Voters don't need a bribery conviction to feel that. They just need to notice the same names clearing the same hurdles, again and again, and conclude the game itself has changed.
A level playing field, once voters believe it's gone, is not something any single election gets back.
Meet the unclassy donor class
The American-style campaigning that John Key introduced doesn’t come cheap, and he attracted donors that expected status.
Paula Bennett and John Key, who were key to attracting the tradie vote in West Auckland, became central to fundraising from property speculators. Working as Bayley’s Real Estate’s head of strategy, Bennett then endorsed her CEO as a candidate for Whangarei, which Key described as “a very natural progression.”
Key and his son Max even traded on their profile to enter joint ventures with property developers with dubious reputations.
Setting such an example, what could possibly go wrong?
Steve Brooks co-owns Wolfbrook Property Group. In April it bought the Pegasus golf course north of Christchurch through a mortgagee sale, then donated $40,250 to National the same fortnight it confirmed it would seek fast-track approval to rezone the course for housing.
Brooks has form: in 2019 he was the man behind an unauthorised half-page newspaper ad promoting Luxon as a future leader, placed while Brooks ran a payday lender and lobbied against a bill to cap its interest rates.
Polly Clague runs communications and government relations for Santana Minerals, the company pitching a gold mine at Bendigo-Ophir. While she managed the message, a supporters' Facebook page tied to the campaign carried bomb and death threats against opponents including Sir Sam Neill.
Canadian-New Zealand businessman Jim Grenon built a near-10 percent stake in NZME, publisher of the Herald, to try to clean out its board. He settled for a seat at the table himself. He also secretly bankrolled a defamation case a judge called wholly unsuccessful — and was ordered to help pay the bill.
Talley's sued TVNZ for defamation over 1News reports on its safety record. It lost in December 2025, after a five-week trial commentators at the Integrity Institute called a textbook case of “lawfare” — using a big company's legal budget to punish a Newsroom rather than win on the facts.
Winton Land founder Chris Meehan gave more than $210,000 to National, ACT and NZ First. Two of his company's projects got fast-track approval. Then he resigned this year amid a board-led employment process — and the board turned to a familiar face to steady the ship.
Donate, take the selfie, lodge the application — and if it goes wrong, National sends in the same man to clean it up.
The fixer
That familiar face is Steven Joyce.
National's former campaign manager and finance minister now chairs Winton, brought in to steady the board after Meehan's departure. He also sits on the NZME board that absorbed Grenon after his takeover bid failed.
Two boardroom rescues, inside the same few weeks, both involving men who bankrolled National.
I've mapped the full picture — the National Foundation, the astroturf network, the whole donor ecosystem Joyce still anchors — in “Is Steven Joyce still running the show?”
The short version: nobody in National's donor world seems able to clean up their own mess without him.
The numbers are not in dispute
National raised a record $10.4 million in the run-up to the 2023 election, more than double any other party.
ACT added $4.3 million.
NZ First $1.8 million.
Seven of the twenty-four projects approved so far under the Fast-track Approvals Act 2024 belong to donors who gave more than $1 million between them.
None of it is illegal.
The disclosure threshold dropped from $30,000 to $20,000 under the Electoral Amendment Act 2022, and every donation named in this piece was declared exactly as the law requires.
Nobody is being asked to judge legality. They're being asked to judge the pattern — and the six people above are the pattern with faces on it.
How we got here
Before 1996, a party only had to win electorates. Since MMP, it has to win the whole country's party vote.
That costs money nobody had to spend under First Past the Post.
Nationwide advertising, polling, list strategy, campaigns that barely stop between elections.
That shift is a large part of why “Party and Member Support” budgets have grown to $122 million a year across Parliament — and why the parties chasing that nationwide vote are also the ones chasing donors hardest.
MMP also makes every government a negotiated coalition, and New Zealand negotiates them with almost no rules at all.
No fixed timetable, no legal requirement to even produce a governing agreement, what one academic study calls a “free-style bargaining environment.”
The first MMP coalition collapsed within two years: Winston Peters was sacked from Cabinet in 1998 and eight of his own MPs defected to keep National in office.
Instability isn't a bug in this system. It's baked in.
That instability is what puts minor parties under so much pressure. They live or die on one number: five percent of the party vote, or a single electorate seat. Miss it and the party disappears — NZ First has crashed out of Parliament entirely twice since MMP began.
That threshold pressure is exactly why minor parties end up captured by whichever industry can keep them funded and visible enough to survive. NZ First's ties to fishing, mining and tobacco. Act’s to business.
That isn't incidental. They're survival.
Layered on top of that is the shortest realistic runway of almost any Parliament on Earth.
New Zealand is one of only nine legislatures worldwide, out of 190, with a term of three years or less.
The common description of that cycle is blunt: a year settling in, a year on policy, a year campaigning for the next one.
That leaves almost no time between a donation landing and a decision being made — and almost no time for select committees, courts or the Official Information Act to catch up before voters are back at the ballot box.
None of it works, though, unless the money buys something back.
Donors don't give to political parties out of civic duty. As the Integrity Institute puts it, they're making investments — and the returns come straight out of everyone else's pocket.
Considering the scale of New Zealand’s economy dependent on government decisions and the amount of donations spent on campaigning, our democracy is the cheapest money can buy.
Every case in this piece, the receipt that follows a decision and the down payment that precedes one, is what that return looks like in practice.
MMP made the money necessary. A three-year term made it urgent. What donors expect back is the part nobody wants to say out loud.
The tip of the iceberg
Declared donations are just the tip.
Underneath sits a structure nobody has to disclose at all.
Taxpayer-funded “Party and Member Support” budgets came to $122 million across Parliament in 2022-23 — mail-outs, advertising, staff — and that spending is exempt from the Official Information Act, so nobody outside Parliament sees the receipts.
Party foundations sit below that.
The NZ First Foundation collected close to $500,000 the Court of Appeal found should have been declared as donations. Give to a foundation instead of a party, and your name never appears on an Electoral Commission return.
Third-party promoters sit below that again — their spending is capped and disclosed, but their donors are not, letting people “aid a political party without having to make their support public knowledge,” as Victoria University's Sean Whittaker puts it.
And underneath all of it sits lobbying, entirely unregulated.
The OECD ranks New Zealand fourth-worst of its 38 members for regulating it. Unlike Australia, Canada, the UK or the US, there's no public register, no disclosure of who's paying who, and no cooling-off period before a minister walks straight into the industry.
The donations you have to declare are the tip. Underneath is a structure nobody has to disclose at all.
The architecture around it
The Taxpayers' Union, the Free Speech Union, Groundswell and Hobson's Pledge all call themselves independent. They draw on much of the same money that funds National and ACT directly.
Two former senior NZ First staffers now do corporate comms for Philip Morris, the tobacco company whose own policy language later turned up almost word for word in a ministerial document.
On the mining side, Cosgrove & Partners represents OceanaGold, and in 2025 flew Resources Minister Shane Jones over a proposed gold mine near Waihi courtesy of the mining company's own senior vice-president.
Same people, different letterhead, whoever's in government.
Pegasus: the deal in fast motion
The Pegasus deal is worth slowing down for.
Wolfbrook's purchase of the golf course sits almost exactly where the Christchurch Northern Corridor motorway extension is due to land — an extension already in the fast-track pipeline. The donation to National was disclosed the following month, in the same fortnight as the rezoning bid.
A motorway extension, a mortgagee golf-course sale, a $40,250 donation and a rezoning bid — all inside the same fortnight.
Waimakariri Mayor Dan Gordon and local MP Matt Doocey, a Cabinet minister, both oppose the rezoning. More than 15,000 residents signed a petition against it.
In the year before the donation, Wolfbrook had quietly settled a $110,000 claim out of court after a Wellington High Court judge criticised how it ran the case.
None of this proves the donation bought the rezoning — the fast-track panel hasn't decided yet, and a public meeting of more than 450 residents has already put council, iwi and both major parties' local MPs on notice.
What the timeline shows, at minimum, is a donor whose business interest and political giving landed in the same fortnight as the process that will decide his project's fate.
Bendigo-Ophir: when scrutiny turns personal
Santana Minerals' proposed open-cast gold mine between Bendigo and Ophir is going through the same fast-track process, with a decision due by 29 October 2026.
The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has warned the panel to decline it unless the environmental risks can be managed.
Sam Neill says he was “very shocked and disturbed” by the volume of personal abuse and threats of violence he received after speaking out against the mine.
The Crux investigation that documented the threats found them on a supporters' Facebook page run alongside Santana's own communications operation. The company told Crux the page was independent and that threats and abuse were “out of line, always.”
Whatever the mine's fate, the case shows how fast a planning dispute can curdle into targeted harassment of named opponents.
The vanishing briefing note
In June 2024, staff from Fonterra and Z Energy hand-delivered a briefing note to the Prime Minister's Office, arguing for a law change to block a climate-liability case against the two companies, Smith v Fonterra.
The Government soon announced it would make exactly that change.
The note itself was never handed over under the Official Information Act — it only surfaced when the High Court forced its release through discovery, and it turned out to have also gone to the private Gmail account of Luxon's chief policy adviser at the time.
Nicola Willis, Chris Bishop and Erica Stanford have all since admitted doing the same.
Tobacco's quiet win
In December 2023, Associate Health Minister Casey Costello sent officials a document proposing a tax cut on heated tobacco products, later telling Parliament she didn't know who wrote it.
RNZ compared its wording with tobacco-industry material and found close matches. She cut the tax in half anyway, costing the Crown up to $216 million, and the Chief Ombudsman twice found against her office for withholding information about it.
Costello is a former board chair of the Taxpayers' Union, which has itself taken money from British American Tobacco.
When the press becomes the target
It isn't only defamation suits.
Undermining mainstream media is a hangover from Covid.
The Wright Family bankrolled The Platform. Anti-vax movement Voices for Freedom set up Reality Check Radio. Jim Grenon set up The Centrist, then tried to take over NZME. Money flowed into the forming of The Free Speech Union, which has undermined the very thing you would expect it would stand for.
TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman resigned in May after eleven days of pressure built around a year-old, already-resolved incident, revived by a Campaign Company operative and republished by the Free Speech Union days later. Her resignation got more coverage than that week's donation returns, which showed National had raised over $6.2 million for the year.
I've traced the operators in “When the journalist is the target” and, on public broadcasting's exposure to the same pressure, in “How to take over TVNZ and RNZ with pocket change.”
The bill they killed
Not every fight goes the donors' way.
In March 2026, Shane Jones introduced a Fisheries Amendment Bill that would have let him set commercial catch limits without weighing environmental effects, and scrapped size limits for nine commercial fish species while keeping them for recreational fishers.
LegaSea organised opposition; more than 33,000 submissions opposed it.
Jones backed down on part of it in March after sustained public pressure, and on 18 June shelved the bill for this term altogether.
It's the clearest win this term for an organised public campaign over industry lobbying.
The playing field they will not level
None of that is an excuse. It's the machine that makes the behaviour rational.
Minor parties get punished at the ballot box for the very concessions the system forces them to extract in coalition, and third-party promoters increasingly exist to absorb that risk on their behalf.
There's a structural reason to expect this backlash outlasts one election. An independent anti-corruption commission has sat in NZ First's founding platform since 1993, and minor parties keep demanding one.
As I've set out in “An independent anti-corruption commission: who keeps blocking it?”, it has never once survived a coalition negotiation.
The two parties that have led every government since 1935 have no reason to fund a body that would investigate their own donors — and the minor parties who want it keep trading it away to stay above the five percent threshold.
Horncastle, Brooks, Clague, Grenon, Talley's, Meehan — six names, one pattern, and one man on speed dial to clean it up.
Voters don't need proof of a bribe to notice that. They just need to notice the pattern has a name, and decide, once, that the name is the problem.
