Written By:
- Date published:
9:47 am, May 10th, 2026 - 38 comments
Categories: act, Christopher Luxon, david seymour, Dirty Politics, Media, media abuse, national -
Tags:
This is a bit of a slow burner of an issue and relates back to the time that Luxon’s reign was in turmoil.
Last month the news broke that Luxon had ghosted senior National Party whip Stuart Smith after Smith wanted to tell him how disgruntled the National Party Caucus was with his leadership.
This Thomas Coughlan article set out all of the details.
This occurred shortly after the cabinet reshuffle that was not originally planned that put the boot into Chris Bishop.
Then there was the release of diabolical polling and talk about a group of five National MPs wanting a change of leadership.
And the story fermented for days because Smith refused to say anything. The Senior Whip even missed the Caucus meeting where Luxon put his position on the line because he had something else that he had to do.
And it took Smith days to deny that he wanted to talk to Luxon about Luxon’s flagging support as claimed in the Coughlan article and supported by others.
Maybe he wanted to talk to Luxon about the weather or rugby or something else. But taking four days to say this suggests either gross incompetence of the reinvention of history.
Then there was the Ani O’Brien attack on Maiki Sherman who had just been suspended from Parliament for seven days for knocking on Smith’s door and wanting to ask him questions.
O’Brien blogged about a drinks session around budget time LAST YEAR where Sherman allegedly used the f* bomb in response in response to something said to her by something said to her by Lloyd Burr. I am not aware what he said but clearly she was upset by it.
This was an interesting thing for a member of the Free Speech Union executive member to blog about. After all you would expect a FSU adherant to support and celebrate the exercise of free speech, even if it involved an empthet.
A timeline helps focus the mind however on what happened here.
March 31 – reshuffle announced
April 9 – Smith tries to talk to Luxon
April 17 – Coughlan reports on failure to meet
April 21 – Luxon calls leadership vote. Smith denies the Coughlan report
April 23 – Sherman tries to interview Smith
April 24 – Brown complains about Sherman to Brownlee
April 28 – O’Brien publishes her Substack article on Sherman
And fast forward to Friday of last week when Sherman announced her resignation as TVNZ’s chief political reporter.
To add to the sense of unease David Seymour has recently made threats against John Campbell and the head of Radio New Zealand for apparently not being right wing enough.
From Laura Crimp at Radio New Zealand:
The deputy Prime Minister and ACT party leader spoke to The Platform last week, taking swings at both state broadcasters’ management.
He criticised the appointment of RNZ’s Morning Report host John Campbell and suggested RNZ’s chief executive Paul Thompson could lose his job, adding “it’s really critical that we are ensuring that we get better people on the board, and those people will change the management.”
He also accused TVNZ of being “politically motivated”.
Seymour is a shareholding minister in both RNZ and TVNZ, and the law says ministers cannot give direction to the state broadcasters.
Seymour told RNZ he had not done that.
“Decisions around staffing, presenter line-ups, and editorial matters are for boards and management. Anyone who thinks RNZ is taking editorial instructions from me clearly does not listen to RNZ.”
He said editorial independence did not, however, mean “freedom from accountability”, adding ministers are entitled to comment “when publicly owned media organisations are losing audience, relevance, or public confidence”.
Seymour’s statement clearly breaches Ministerial obligations not to give directives. And his desire to stack the RNZ board is terrifying. Imagine Sean Plunkett being appointed to the board.
And Paul Goldsmith announced plans to disestablish the Broadcasting Standards Authority the very authority that the Platform’s Sean POlunkett has railed against because it wanted to make him comply with the BSA’s rather modest standards
This is all pretty terrifying, especially in an election year.
As said by Richard Harman:
The Maiki Sherman lynch mob is frightening. This is the most hostile environment within which to be a political journalist I have known in my 55 years as a journo. The mob is ruling at the moment. They have tasted blood. Who will they turn on next?
And there is talk that Jason Walls is being lined up as the next Chief Political reporter. If he achieves this role then there will be some quite back slapping in the Government’s ranks.
This is Trumpian culture wars style attacks on the media clearly with the intent of moving the narrative to the right. They do not want a media that seeks the truth. They want a weakened report both sides media that will faithfully trumpet their spin without questioning it.
These are dangerous times. As Harman notes the mob is currently ruling.
Trumpian says it all. And who can stop them?
Only the uncontrollable.
The people who are engineering all this; what are they desiring; control.
Once you control, you can decide what it is you want and how you are going to get it.
But first, control.
The unleashing of the far right trolls and the billionaire owned far right NZME on public owned media as part of a coordinated agenda ahead of the election has the dirty little evangelical culture warrior and newly minted National campaign chair Simeon Brownes grubby fingerprints all over it….
Early on in Brown's tenure in government he was largely disparaged by the left as an incompetent little boy in a man's job. Contraire, he's another very slick grifter in the same mould as Seymour.
The small ninja.
I thought Ani O'Brien's substack was well written and raised some important points. I disagree with some of her opinion and I think she crossed a line a few times. But there's nothing contradictory with that and her involvement in the FSU. Afaik she was writing as a member of the public, not a rep of the FSU.
Her piece was an analysis of standards in political journalism. I read it imagining it being written by a left wing opinionist about another journalist. Afaik she hasn't said that Sherman shouldn't have free speech, nor did she call for her to be sacked. She talked about her behaviour. As a moderator, I really want us to maintain this distinction (many people who get moderated on TS think they're being censored, but it's their behaviour that is the problem).
I also think that O'Brien's behaviour is a problem at times. Her substack is legitimate critique, but she runs over the line on her twitter account (most obvious example was during the RW attack on Benjamin Doyle).
We should be talking about that alongside expectations of behaviour of politicians, journalists, and the left (we aren't exempt from scrutiny).
One of the features of Dirty Politics was the two tracks, where the government was running certain lines, and there was another non-public group running attacks, and where those two were co-ordinated.
I don't know if that's happening in the way it was back then. Maybe this is normal networking. NACT don't need paid operatives if there are groups and individuals willing to do it for free.
I assume the left is networking around scandals and issues that harm the right. There is a difference between the left and the right on this, but we are in danger of losing our ethical edge.
It's been pointed out by people on the left and right that if we don't uphold standards when it's someone we don't like, we can't expect the other side to either. Mexican standoff.
Yes. The way the original Dirty Politics was carried out, as in Nicky Hager's book, was that a story would be seeded in a blog, usually the Whale Oil one, and then waited for it to be picked up by the mainstream.
It looks to me like this is what happened with Ani O'Brien's blog piece, and I find it hard to see it as just an independent blogger expressing their views.
O'Brien is not just an FSU council member, with a role as "Writer and political commentator, but works for Jordan Williams Campaign Company as General Manager. Jordan Williams was a central part of the original Dirty Politics 1.0.
This piece by Mohan J. Dutta, Prof of Communication at Massey Uni, goes into the network that O'Brien is part of, plus critiques the way her blog post is written:
Thanks, that was an interesting analysis by Dutta. I don't feel any need to critique it, other than suggest a flawed premise lurks within that worthy reasoning. Seems to me that media ethics hinges on a nature-based social ecology riven by competing sectorial interest-groups, so any analyst does need to draw attention to networking by special interests (whether of left or right). We inform each other via referring to various operational contexts. I call each an arena.
Thing is, players perform to any crowd since attention scales up their influence. This Deep Green view is where old hippies like me ground lengthy experience in a multitude of operating contexts over a life-time – where memes compete in social darwinism as much as group members do likewise. Contagion is both memetic and mimetic concurrently, part-biological and part-cultural in alchemic synthesis.
As regards the melodrama, I agree it's essentially a personal story so we must respect her right to privacy around that, but the issues around ethics are fair game. In a user-friendly world ethics are relative to both user and others involved. In an agentic world, ethics are determined by whoever employs agents. We need to be informed on both fronts. The old notion of citizens in a democracy lies in Trotsky's dustbin of history (and in the heads of those who can't keep up). The left (imo) would prosper if grounded on the commons, not factionalism…
I confess I haven't read Ani O'Brien's piece weka. Did she mention anything about the apparent distressing comments made to Maiki Sherman which provoked her [admittedly unacceptable] response? Of course O'Brien may not have heard them in the first instance, but she would have surely heard about them.
Let me assure you the political right-wing have used paid operatives to do their dirty work for them in the past. Admittedly it was a few decades ago now, but I can attest to it because I was the victim of two such operatives. We also saw it in the period 2010 to 2015 [at the least] under the Slater umbrella, and nothing since has assured me that it couldn't happen again. To the contrary, they have history of this type of behaviour.
I don't think she did, but that detail might not have been known by her at teh time she published. It is one of my criticisms of her piece though.
I know the right have used Dirty Politics, and I remember you talking about what happened to you. They re-invented it in NZ in the age of the internet. I started writing for TS the year after Slater tried to pay someone to hack TS to get details to attack Labour. That was 2016 (Slater was also convicted that year).
I joined twitter in 2014, and watched in real time how the left twitterati engaged in mob pile ons. I watch that happen to O'Brien, who at that stage was centre left. She was attacked by the liberal left for her views as a lesbian that lesbians shouldn't have to date trans identified males. It was brutal. The liberals stopped doing those pile ons eventually, in part because they cannabilised themselves. But O'Brien was forever ostracised. Later I saw people try and prevent O'Brien and her partner finding accommodation when they moved to Wellington.
This is important context, because we can scapegoat O'Brien now (happening on twitter as we speak), but if we don't look at our part in this, it will never end. The right have bigger guns than us, I don't see any way for us to win if we fight like this. Very few people on the left are willing to talk about this at a strategic level.
There are things to criticise O'Brien for, but we really need to have a conversation about our own side and our own ethics.
"Later I saw people try and prevent O'Brien and her partner finding accommodation when they moved to Wellington."
Links please 🙂
Much of twitter from that time has been deleted.
So….really just anecdata then.
Good tech point there. Data does tend to flow in 1 ear & out the other. Memories are formed from impressions, as per neuroscience & Trump's alt-reality theory. Media users choose which data to be impressed by.
The idea that links get us to a consensus reality has always had appeal, tho, so I suspect the notion will persist awhile yet…
there's nothing wrong with anecdata. We use it all the time. The issue is how to contextualise it. I'm not impressed be people weaponising it.
It's reporting from an experienced political blogger who was there and observed it happening in real time. You can call it anecdata but 'just' is an attempt to minimise and/or is a pejorative, that is unwarranted.
This is what I mean. Liberals choosing to do that kind of thing instead of engaging in good faith and exploring the deeper meaning of the dynamics we see repeated over and over again.
Mostly my frustration is that we don't have any kind of strategic thinking happening. What do you think the end game is? Do you think the left will prevail? How do you see that happening?
I also remember when Ani tweeted about the attempts by transactivists to stop her and her partner getting a rental in Wellington – it was several years ago. They eventually found a place rented in her partner's name.
Of course, the media did not report on any of that harassment and attacks on jobs, etc, that gender critical women received on and offline at the time.
It largely came from left wingers, and did drive some women towards the right wing.
Strategically, it was a very bad move from the political left.
I think that there’s way too much focus on the personalities and their back-stories in this saga. Mohan J. Dutta made that point very well in his excellent analysis. All this stuff about individual (media) personalities and their personal failings, motivations, and ‘victimhoods’ – the persons have become the story – is a dangerous distraction from the much bigger issue.
This wasn’t a ‘hitjob’ on Maiki Sherman, it was a politically motivated attack on a NZ public media institution carried out through “the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine” to put that institution in its place, control it, and shut it up, if necessary. This architecture, or network, is highly resilient and even if it were possible to remove one remove or neutralise one node, it wouldn’t lose any of its functionality to continue carrying out those attacks.
Lastly, I’m not convinced that ‘the Left’ played a major part, somehow, in creating and providing (‘manufacturing’, to stay with Dutta’s language) skilled professional operatives in this culture-war machine, as some seem to suggest. In any case, it’s neither a defence or explanation of the war-machine nor of its operatives, each with their own agency (and conscience). For example, as Dutta would say, Trump’s childhood didn’t give rise to the “Trumpian ecosystem” in the US, either accidentally or inevitably. Similarly, focussing on Trump leaves the vast majority of the ecosystem in the shadows, which is how it protects itself.
it's true, it's not a defence. It's not intended to be. The issue is given that the right have this machine, what is the left's strategic response? Do we even have one?
I don’t think ‘the left’ has a strategic response as such, at least not a coherent one that I’m aware of.
Did you read the Dutta piece?
I think that advice is as good as any.
I missed a fair bit of the original context (various attacks on MSM). What was the motivation for going after Sherman? She just happened to provide a mechanism for going at TVNZ political team?
Yes, Sherman provided a mechanism for going after TVNZ. It's indicated in Micky's timeline in his post above.
Sherman tried to interview Stuart Smith, the Nat chief whip in the Beehive, about Luxon surviving the confidence vote, and Sherman copped a week's ban from the Beehive.
In April there was the issue of a cabinet minister interfering in TVNZ, putting pressure on them cause the Nats didn't like the way they were reporting crime stats.
There's also Seymour going after RNZ and TVNZ.
It all amounts to attempts to put pressure on the state supported broadcasters to not be too critical of the govt, and probably also because the COC want to privatise the broadcasters.
Pretty much although she was a thorn in their thigh. She gave them an opportunity and they took it when the timing was right. Of course, fear & intimidation are part & parcel of the tactics – nobody is safe. This kind of psychological warfare is not experienced and hardly seen by ‘ordinary’ people. I think just about everybody in the Public Service fears for their job/career which is how the authoritarians want it.
I agree that there's too much focus on individuals, but, that tends to be how the Dirty Politics 1.0 and 2.0 machines work.
Part of the problem is that is the way mainstream media in the neoliberal age has been focused – on individuals, their dramas, emotions, etc, while failing to provided analysis and context.
The left does try to provide more of the analysis and context, often these days through blogs, politicians' press releases and media statements, aimed at both the media and social media. But it's very hard to get cut through among all the personality politics noise.
And there is some that gets into the MSM but the COC is clearly trying to undermine anything that gets through into the mainstream.
Exactly!
The coordinated media ecosystem of Dirty Politics operates through focussing on individuals who become pawns or vehicles (the means) rather than the primary target or cause (the end) – means to an end. Whether there is genuine coordination between the DP operator nodes is a red herring; in practice they act in concert and synchronised ways that resonate, i.e., the attack becomes prolonged, magnified, and multi-angle.
If it were only (!) about the individual personalities, the attack would stop at this point – mission accomplished – but it keeps reoccurring and astute observers all expect more to come!
Well that is interesting. I was not aware of O'Brien's personal back-ground and I can certainly imagine how distressing it would have been. In a way, she was probably responding to what she had previously experienced when she wrote the piece about Sherman who happened to be in the wrong place at the time.
I'm thankful I don't do twitter. There's enough bad acting in this sorry world of ours without seeking it out. But I'm in my 80s now so have an excuse.
it was absolutely brutal and imo it's a significant part of why O'Brien is who she is today. I'm not going into the details, because a lot has been deleted by many people.
For those worried about my anecdata, those kinds of cancellations and pile ons were a feature of twitter at that time and were witnessed by many people not just myself. It wasn't just AO that was treated like that, the left basically ate itself, and some of us saw that happen in real time.
Weka – I’m sure most people who regularly frequent this site would not doubt what you have said is true. While I may disagree with you on occasion, I would not doubt your honesty or integrity. You have been absolutely 100% correct in your comments on this subject. Unlike PSL….
I saw that starting to form on Twitter about 2014/5 and dropped off twitter as not being a useful forum (I was never a fan of the short-form format anyway).
If you ever need to see an archive of the right doing the pile-on short-form technique, there is quite a lot of it around 2008/9 in the comments on this site. Mostly initiated by the trolls from Kiwiblog and Whaleoil attempting colonisation.
There was some leftish and other groups who at various times tried similar 'purity' campaigns.
Personally I don't care who uses those techniques – I usually act to disrupt them. I didn't like those kinds of techniques when I was around on the bulletin boards and usenet in the 90s and early 00's.
I'd point out, that often the worst offenders at using those techniques are people who have been on the receiving end of them.
Ani O'Brien in her protestations of, but "I'm just saying", shows all of those symptoms of exactly that kind of victim wanting to pass on the victimisation, using the same play book of Jordan Peters, Cameron Slater or Bomber or any number of other people I've observed.
Certainly I can't see her as being anything apart from running a s the deliberately manipulative campaign focus for a pile-on. Like Mickey, I don't trust her because she appears to be working closely out of a common dirty politics playbook. And as you have pointed out, she should know better from her past experience about why that is a problem.
She's dug a very deep hole that's very hard to get out of.
Fortunately the left stopped pile ons back in the day. But they also left twitter a few years ago for bsky, handing twitter to the new right who are adept at using twitter for the kinds of smear campaigns like that against Benjamin Doyle. Peters is in the thick of it.
Hard to fathom how much is dirty politics, and how much is normal networking. The attack on Doyle looked very orchestrated, the one against Sherman less so, but I might have missed who was involved.
The Spinoff has published a summary of events.
One might think that only 4 days passing between the Nats lodging their 24 April complaint with TVNZ about its parliamentary reporters, and former National Party staffer Ani O’Brien’s 28 April Substack post detailing allegations about the May 2025 incident between Sherman and Burr, suggests a degree of orchestration – I couldn't possibly comment.
Fully agree Mickey. Harman is one of the remaining fe4w with the longevity to measure hostility to media from politicians.
If we zoom out a bit it's obvious National was terrified of Maiki Sherman and angry with the way she amplified National's poor polling on 1News.
Now they are rid of her and it seems likely her replacement will be a very National Party friendly journalist in Jason Walls.
Job done.
It's fairly simple, no need to get into the weeds.
I hate to be a pedant, but the RNZ reporter’s name is Lauren Crimp, not Laura. She also happens to be a cousin of mine.
I also don’t think the right attacking the media, the opposition, or anyone else they perceive as hostile is especially new or revelatory.
Much like the attempts to tie Labour to the less popular or more controversial parts of TPM’s platform, the worst thing the centre-left can do is become psychologically consumed by it.
The better response is probably to recognise it as an aspect of political reality that needs to be managed rather than endlessly dissected. Shrug, keep moving, and keep prosecuting your own case.
If every provocation triggers a week-long panic spiral, then the attack has already worked.
Let them say shit and let them flail about. As John Key once said, “explaining is losing.”
Politicians come and go, but staff remain.
Or, that's how the saying went until desperate times for the coalition called for desperate measures.
I hope Sherman bounces back in another guise. Maybe a politician (or a new Maori party 😏will see the value in appointing her…
I hope Sherman hasn't forgotten that she's valued by the right people.
Double standards and the cover-up stuffed Sherman. Recall how the media hounded any number of National MPs, and Sherman's defenders had no issue with that approach. Also, if Israel Folau's opponents found his Christian/anti- gay views unacceptable, why was it okay for Sherman to use a gay hating slur?
This is what happens when the media moves towards American cable news propaganda and not covering the "news."
[lprent: As I vaguely remember it, Israel Folau was an rugby player born and raised in Australia who ran afoul of the standards required by Rugby Australia. He was (in my view) a stupid idiot dickhead who was warned multiple by RA, and proceeded to repeat statements that diminished the reputation of that organisation.
I never saw an orchestrated campaign against him here – just a lot of orchestrated trolls extolling his dubious virtues, and a general distaste at the stupidity of his views and those of his supporters – including you as I remember it.
I can’t see any relevance of that to New Zealand nor to a hounding of a outstanding member of our parliamentary media by what looks to me to be an orchestrated campaign of dirty politics.
Offhand, I can’t think of any campaigns of hounding of National MPs apart from Jamie Lee Ross, and that arrogant dipshit who wanked on to a waiter about how much of important dickhead he was. Both were dumped as MPs, effectively by their own party because of their behaviour. Admittably most political parties have higher internal standards than National https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360881222/history-expulsion-six-time-mps-got-given-boot-their-own-party
If you want to comment here, then it’d pay to actually link to events that you call on, and act like less of brainless troll parroting some one else’s bullshit lines. I’ve left your current handle in probation for the moderators future amusement.
Please learn to act less like an illiterate delusional parrot and learn to use your own brain. ]