Media Insider interview: Paul Henry on his new political stand - inside the broadcaster’s bombshell move to the Act Party

Broadcaster Paul Henry spoke to Act leader David Seymour only a week ago about a position on the party’s list. Henry opens up on that decision, his concerns about the current ‘vibe’ in New Zealand, and the Prime Minister’s performance. Is one of life’s great mavericks ready for Parliament - and vice versa?

Paul Henry has described Sir John Key as his best friend. But even best mates keep things from each other.

“He found out when you found out,” Henry says, which is to say the former Prime Minister and National Party leader only discovered the broadcaster was relaunching his political aspirations as they were announced at a lively and sometimes loose hotel rooftop press conference in Auckland on Tuesday.

The pair were soon in touch – Key was one of many who sent Henry congratulatory texts. He followed that up with public comments fully endorsing Henry’s candidacy for the Act Party.

Henry’s wife, Diane Foreman, was also “very supportive – she’s a political animal”, but he had only told his three daughters, Lucy, Sophie and Bella, that he was about to announce a career change earlier on Tuesday. Interestingly, in those conversations, two of them predicted politics.

“I had been a bit more obvious about my desires and concerns about politics than I thought I’d been.”

All of that spoke to the level of secrecy and pace of Henry’s decision to enter politics. Yes, he’d been mulling the idea for some time – the germ of it originated two years ago, when he was a guest speaker at the Act Party conference – but it was only upon his return to New Zealand a week ago from the United States, a country he also adores, that he took action.

At that time, he called Act leader David Seymour; on Monday night, the Act board ratified his candidacy; and he resigned as a TVNZ board member yesterday morning, less than half an hour before the press conference.

Henry’s star power was on show in front of the assembled press pack and in the aftermath. He had no script, answered questions off the cuff, charmed his way through tougher queries and was in hot demand for the rest of the day – interviews with RNZ’s Guyon Espiner, Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan, and Three News’ Samantha Hayes, and more time for this sit-down interview. He and his team also fired through an NZ Herald opinion piece.

He’s also scheduled to appear on Ryan Bridge’s Herald show and Mike Hosking’s ZB show this morning, before other media engagements this week.

All of that speaks to the importance of Henry and Act’s belief that he is a game-changer as it strives to reach double-figure party vote percentages.

Act secured 8.6% of the party vote at the last election, and is generally polling at between 6% and 8% in most polls right now. Henry and his new party know that it’s not enough to have the influence they want.

“I personally would be disappointed if we were under 10% [at the election], but I know there are others who have expectations much higher than that.”

Henry’s own reasons for a sudden and quite dramatic career turn at 65 - he’s in line for a parliamentary swipe card at the same time as a SuperGold Card - are twofold.

He’s “alarmed” at the prospect that the country might swing back to the left, with the return of a Labour-led coalition, and he doesn’t think the National-led coalition of the past three years has done enough.

He also knows he can’t be an electoral flash in the pan. He’s figured he’ll need to be an MP for six years. “Of course it’s not entirely down to me, but I’ve determined that it’s ludicrous to think that if I go in and three years is successful, then would I pull out? No.”

Can one person truly make a difference? “No, but I think one party can. As an influential party, Act can. If Act has enough negotiating power in coalition talks and around the Cabinet table, we can make a huge difference.

“We already have in the last three years made a difference, but by no means enough.”

He also realises there’s limited time. He says this is a “pivotal” election. “I only have so many heartbeats, so I wouldn’t be standing unless I thought I could really make a difference.”

Where will he be on the list? He’s made clear his expectation that he’ll be in an electable position. Top three, I ponder?

“No, no …” he replies, before adding, “I mean that doesn’t mean I won’t be in the top three. I can’t say enough: I’m not doing this to waste my time.

“I’m doing this because there is a real need to cement in the changes that have been put in place in the last three years. I described it as a nudge in the right direction. You can overturn a nudge very, very easily, and we just can’t let that happen.”

‘This country should be really humming’

Henry describes a “general malaise” throughout New Zealand.

“That’s one of the greatest shames with this country when you think about our extraordinary potential. For people like us who’ve travelled, we know how lucky we are to live here. It’s such a shame that we’re squandering any of our life mithering over the spoils.

“This country should be really humming. There is no fundamental reason why we are not one of the most valued countries on earth, why we are not one of the countries on earth that people desperately want to come to and live in and be part of, but we’re not.”

He believes a lot of it is a hangover from the Covid years and even earlier.

“I’ll be honest with you, I think it started to change when John Key stood down [in 2017]. I think there was a slight uncertainty, and during Covid, it took a very nasty turn. In many ways. Economically, it took a very nasty turn.”

He’s talked of his disappointment with National. That extends to its leader.

Christopher Luxon, he says, “doesn’t seem to be clicking with the country and that’s a real problem”.

“There’s no point in the right vote just swapping votes with each other – he just doesn’t seem to be clicking. I think he’s finding his stride, but it’s a little bit late.

“Even then ... there is this issue that centrist parties have that they don’t want to offend anyone because in the back of their minds they think maybe everyone will vote for them one day. So they actually do as little as they can get away with doing.

“You can’t afford to do that when you’re up against a left bloc which will rapidly take ourselves backwards. You’ve got to be bold; you’ve got to do things while you can do them and cement changes in as much as you can.”

Henry once related to me, over lunch, a story about then Prime Minister Jenny Shipley making an incredible speech during an event at his home – only to be exasperated that the public did not see that persona in front of the cameras.

In the past, he has bemoaned politicians who say little when they’re in the spotlight, for fear of upsetting anyone. That centrist approach, again.

‘My life’s an open book’

Henry certainly isn’t taking that approach.

“That’s slightly dangerous because you know that in conversations we have, I’m very upfront. I mean, pretty much my life’s an open book. I suppose there are always skeletons; I’m 65 years old. There are skeletons in everyone’s closet, but pretty much I just say what I think.

“I’m going to have to be a little bit careful because I can’t speak for a party. So, I can’t create policy on the hoof, which I started to do today in the press conference,” he said, referring to his concept of a cancer hospital.

Did he get told off for that? “No, in fact, I think they’re working it up into a policy now,” he said, bursting into trademark laughter.

Henry also argued strongly on his first day as a political candidate “that you cannot find prosperity through borrowing, you can’t find it through taxing, and you can’t achieve prosperity through separatism and infighting”.

Co-governance, he tells me, is “diabolical”.

“We are fundamentally one person in this country. Every New Zealander should be treated as equal with the possible exception of criminals.”

He wants more of those New Zealanders locked away. “We do have to rehabilitate them, but in the first instance, we’ve got to get them out of harm’s way. No matter what stripes your Government has, the first responsibility is to protect your citizens. If there is a crime, the people that matter are the victims.”

The NZ ‘vibe’

Henry returns to his concerns about the “vibe” in New Zealand.

“I remember when I was growing up ... we just thought big. We knew there was a great future ahead of us. Our fathers were in work and in many cases, our mothers were [in work], but our fathers were building a country.

“I’ve been criticised in the past for harking back to this but ... why are we not still building the country rather than patching up a road because we’re hugely in debt?

“The thing that holds us back the most is our lack of challenge to ourselves, our lack of vision, not just a collective vision, but our lack of personal vision.

“We’ve had successive Governments – not in the last three years – but we’ve had successive Governments that have basically made excuses for people’s lack of performance.

“You can’t be expected to get that job; you’re not being looked after properly by the government, as opposed to when we were growing up, when the view was, ‘we’re going to go out there and take it’.”

‘I will still be me’

There have been occasional concerns about a lack of personalities in Parliament, or that people who have made very public (or private) mistakes are unlikely to want to expose themselves in the hurly-burly of politics.

Henry has certainly blown that hypothesis away. His television faux pas – the Governor General comments, the Sheila Dikshit comments and the moustache-on-a-lady comments – were all revived in myriad media reports yesterday.

Henry knew it was coming. “Low-hanging fruit,” he told Espiner on RNZ.

There is a risk Henry’s mischievousness will be somewhat quelled as a politician, not that there was any sign of that happening yesterday or even last night. He posted on his Instagram a Henry-like party political statement: “New Zealand is in the sh*t... unless party vote Act.”

Seymour and Winston Peters have been masters of soundbites for many years. In Henry, they may have met their match, even if he is far more unpredictable.

“I will still be me, but whether some of those edges are going to have to be chipped away at, I don’t know.”

For a man who has experienced myriad interesting and sometimes alarming life adventures - a television host, an intrepid broadcaster and journalist, a man who enjoys flaunting it all in Palm Springs or cruising Route 66 in his Ford Mustang or battling ocean elements between Auckland and Fiji - the formality and stuffiness of Parliament seem incongruous.

“I watch parliament sometimes and - you know - ‘point of order!’ How do they know the points of order? Does someone come up to you at the beginning of Question Time saying, ‘You could maybe bring this up?’

“I’m not the kind of person who will sit there at night with volumes of text flicking through points of order. I don’t think I’ve got it in me.”

Can this infamously independent life adventurer toe the line?

“I can toe Act’s party line because I am completely in accord with Act’s philosophy. Does that mean that there will be policies that are presented that I’m not completely in accord with?

“That’s entirely possible, but I’m completely in accord with the philosophy, and the thing I know about Act is that it is desperately consistent with that philosophy.”

Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie is one of New Zealand’s most experienced senior journalists and media leaders. He has held executive and senior editorial roles at NZME including Managing Editor, NZ Herald Editor and Herald on Sunday Editor and has a small shareholding in NZME.