Paul Henry is running for parliament – and could be a bigger problem for Luxon than for Labour

The controversial broadcaster has announced he is standing for Act in the 2026 election, writes Henry Oliver in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.

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Veteran broadcaster Paul Henry was announced as an Act Party list candidate yesterday morning. The Spinoff’s Lyric Waiwiri-Smith reported the candidacy had only been confirmed by the Act board the night before, and Henry had signed the paperwork and resigned from the TVNZ board – he was appointed by Paul Goldsmith in mid-2025 – just that morning, phoning TVNZ’s chair “about 20 minutes ago.”

In an interview with the Herald’s Shayne Currie, Henry said he had returned from the United States just a week earlier, called Seymour, and the whole process – from call to press conference – took seven days. At the announcement, Seymour said he expected Henry to be given “an electable and respectable position” on the list.

In his 25-minute introductory speech, took aim at both National and Labour, propose a multi-billion-dollar cancer hospital (“you could easily get a bunch of wealthy New Zealanders to stump up $10bn, easily”) and refer to unspecified future colleagues as “twats”.

His questionable past (aka ‘low-hanging fruit’)

Over his long broadcasting career, Henry has courted controversy, turning a particular type of ‘charming’ offensiveness into his personal brand. In 2009 alone, while hosting TVNZ’s Breakfast, he mocked a Greenpeace guest’s facial hair, called homosexuality “unnatural” and described Susan Boyle as “retarded” (TVNZ upheld complaints about the latter).

In October 2010, he erupted into repeated fits of laughter over the name of Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit, mispronouncing it deliberately and sparking an international incident with India (TVNZ was later fined $3,000 by the Broadcasting Standards Authority). Just four days later, interviewing Prime Minister John Key, Henry asked whether governor general Anand Satyanand – Auckland-born and raised – was “even a New Zealander,” and whether Key would “choose a New Zealander who looks and sounds like a New Zealander this time.” TVNZ suspended him without pay and he resigned shortly after.

Yesterday, he acknowledged the inevitable media dredging of these incidents (“low-hanging fruit,” he told RNZ’s Guyon Espiner) and said he’d “still be me” in Parliament, though some edges might need to be “chipped away at”.

He’s tried this before – and it did not go well

Henry is not new to electoral politics. In 1999, he stood for National in the Wairarapa electorate, a seat National had held by nearly 8,000 votes at the 1996 election. His main opponent was Carterton mayor Georgina Beyer, standing for Labour, who if elected would become the world’s first openly transgender MP. Stuff’s Lloyd Burr unearthed a TV3 campaign profile that showed Henry telling voters “National will hold this seat.”

He lost to Beyer by 3,033 votes, having undermined his own campaign with a TV appearance in which he questioned whether Beyer’s gender identity made her a “serious person”. A bread delivery driver had told Beyer he switched his vote after watching Henry: “That prick last night on TV and the way he was talking about you… just isn’t on.”

Will he be a problem for Luxon?

That is the question Stuff’s Jenna Lynch asked this morning. And her analysis was pointed: at 28.7% in the latest Reid Research poll, National has no margin to give. Act has flatlined at 6–8% this term – plateauing, according to Lynch, partly because Seymour has adopted a more “statesmanly” tone as deputy prime minister, trading his former “reply-guy” style for governing-coalition decorum.

Henry gives Act what it has lacked recently: an outspoken, media-savvy figure capable of pulling the party back into double figures. Even a small shift from National to Act could dramatically change the shape of any future coalition cabinet. Henry was open about his view of Luxon on Tuesday, telling the Herald he “doesn’t seem to be clicking with the country and that’s a real problem.”

Seymour, meanwhile, looked briefly alarmed when Henry mused about spending “just three years” in Parliament. Act will need him to stick around – and fall in line. Act’s caucus is one of the most disciplined in Parliament, and a candidate who describes himself as someone who will “create policy on the hoof” and posts Instagram statements reading “New Zealand is in the shit… unless party vote Act” is a new variable in the coalition equation. “I can toe Act’s party line,” Henry told the Herald, “because I am completely in accord with Act’s philosophy.”