His mates think he's 'mad': Former politician's new hidden off-grid life

Sunday, 14 June 2026

Russell Judd thinks New Zealand is on a path “to destruction” and says we should stop our reliance on oil.

The former politician is living with his family in a tiny house in a forest north of Wellington.

They are entirely self-sufficient, providing for their own food, energy and water needs.

He’s a self-confessed son of luxury - but he decided to live in a tiny home in the forest with five kids under seven. Steve Kilgallon explains why Russell Judd chose a very different life.

On a hillside, somewhere north of Wellington, dappled sun shines through the pine branches and on to five small children, running barefoot in the dirt. An open fire smokes behind them. Roosters and goats roam.

This is former Rotorua district councillor Russell Judd’s new life. You could call him an off-grid guru. His mates hold a different view: “They think I’m an idiot and mad; but I’m happy and a lot of them have got issues they’re grumpy about.”

Everything he’s done here on this hillside, from the solar panels, the hydro-electric scheme, the 500 square-metre vegetable patch and the animals to the converted Skyline garage his family live in holds a dual meaning.

On a pragmatic level, they allow him to live a life untouched by a society which frustrates him and which he believes is stumbling towards disaster.

But everything he has done also serves, to him, as evidence this is what New Zealand should be doing on a much grander scale.

“I’ve just come out here to show people what I used to preach to corporate New Zealand actually works in real life … you can do it, all you need is the desire,” he says.

“I’m proving the New Zealand model on a micro scale … but I don’t expect people to come and do what I’m doing.”

To get to Judd’s place - and he doesn’t want his location specifically identified - you take a long drive from the capital. He meets us at the end of a driveway, and we follow him through a couple of gates to where the gravel abruptly halts at a river crossing.

Here, the option is to ford the river in his truck, or take a gentle 15-minute ascent, past the first clutch of goats chewing on blackberry canes, over a swingbridge (“ an incredibly dangerous playground” from which, he says, you can see eels and trout, although today’s viewing is a dead possum) and across a neighbour’s field to the edge of his property - an old forestry block which climbs steeply upwards.

We’re here because earlier this year, as fuel threatened to reach $4 a litre, as conflict flared between the US and Iran, he emailed me to say he’d re-read a story I wrote 14 years ago and felt “there’s a jolly good list of What-Ifs in there for New Zealand”.

Back then, I had interviewed Judd for the Sunday Star-Times. He’d just finished a spell running the Clean Energy Centre in Taupo, a kind of showhome for clean-living initiatives (“Have you seen what it is now?” he asks. “A sushi bar between two fast-food chains”) and was giving green energy advice to businesses.

He explained then how New Zealand’s coal-and-oil reliance meant, he believed, we were always three days from anarchy and how we should cut our dairy dependency, plant more trees and build a wood-fuelled future.

He intended to insulate himself from such insecurity by becoming the first citizen of an entirely off-grid town, with wind turbines, solar panels, wetback fireplaces and natural sewerage and water systems: “A modern day Noah’s ark, if you will.” That plan was stymied. “ The council actually actively stopped us progressing New Zealand's thinking in the right direction,” he says.

So instead, he’s now one of seven citizens of his own little world, modelled on some unchanging principles: divorcing ourselves from the mercy of climbing oil (and gas and coal) prices, planting more trees, and using this “brown battery” biomass as both export earner and the fuel for everything from electric cars to dairy factories.

“If there was an earthquake in Wellington, and SH1 and 2 shut down, we wouldn’t blink an eye,” he says.

In 2012, Judd was a separated father-of-one, only just out of a brief political career which saw him run for United Future and flirt with National (he says he lost their Taupo nomination to Todd McClay by one vote). Politics would have taken him down a different, unhappier path, he reckons. “It would have been a very different life.”

Nowadays he’s re-married, to Cecile, a Frenchwoman from urban Toulouse whom he met at a rave, and who says of her hillside life: “It is a balance between freedom and convenience … the more freedom you have, the less convenience you have.”

Judd bought the forestry block cheaply a decade ago but there was some hard graft to make it habitable.

He used a digger to cut a track in, 500 tonnes of rock to widen a bike track into a passable road and poured concrete, barrow by barrow, on a tricky corner. After initially living in a 7.5m caravan, the Skyline was winched up over three days using pulleys.

It’s now a messy, cramped but homely space, converted with recycled plywood, iron and timber from building sites, second-hand windows and a composting toilet. He reckons he spent about $2000 all up, on a decent kitchen, copper piping and a wetback fireplace which he says keeps the place roasting in winter. He plumbed it himself with water from the nearby stream.

Poor home design, he says, contributes to our outsized electric bills - electricity should never be used for heating water. His place is fuelled partly by hydro, partly by the solar panels atop his woodshed, which feed two batteries (storing wood, he declares, is“an amazing investment - better than Apple shares. You know why? Because you put it in wet, and six months later it's dry and worth 50% more.”)

Judd does a bit of day trading and“some trades on some banks that are about to fail in America” but his main source of income is, of course, the trees.

A trained forester, he explains that he logs the place slowly and sustainably, taking every second tree and replanting as he goes. A truckload of logs will sell for $700 and two loads a week are more than enough for the restrained needs of his family, given they have their own water, power and (some) food.“I don't need to go any faster than I go, because I don't need the money.”

As Cecile produces homemade bread, olive and feta loaf and peach jam, Judd lights a small fire in an outdoor pit which itself is a model for his imagined future.

Right now, it’s a basic construction made with sand and rocks from the river, but as the twigs smoke, he explains how he intends to turn it into a permanent wood-fed stove. From there, a series of pipes would take the heat onto a modified barbecue (which his dog Koda is presently nuzzling in a search for mice) for smoking and roasting meat, and then on to a bread oven. Then onwards to a spa bath - currently parked up down the hill - which could bathe the kids before he and Cecile could sit in it and “look at the trees and listen to the morepork”. I can almost visualise a tiny power plant, chimneys smoking, growing before my eyes, because of course, this is a scale model for something much bigger.

That version would see 10 such wood-fired power plants nationwide, producing a cheap power base-load to supplement hydro and geothermal, the excess heat tapped off for local factories and domestic water heating, slashing power bills. He says you could chuck everything in there - leaves, branches, stumps. Overseas, they’ve managed to use sewage sludge.

In 2012, Judd’s wasteful-spending comparison was a $70m bike track mooted by John Key. This time, it’s the extra $79m pledged by the Government to the eradication of wilding pines. In both cases, he’d have spent that money on building 10 of these biomass power plants (which in turn would use up those unwanted trees).

He looks upward at the towering pines. “They are green solar panels, and they are brown batteries. And each one of those things is producing, in its lifetime, around 1000 litres of diesel, equivalent.” (Incidentally, he thinks carbon sequestration is futile.)

“New Zealand is a country covered in trees, and we grow trees really well, so we need to put our IP and our intellectual might behind doing wood well. Why are we buying it [oil] from Shanghai, when you’ve got it dripping off the hills?

“We should have no need for oil and gas, as a country. We are wandering into a disaster scenario … actively chasing ourselves into destruction, and we deserve it.”

There are multiple diversions as Judd expounds his theory of our best future. He probably wouldn’t argue with the label conspiracy theorist: “Conspiracies come true,” he says. He’s anti-1080, the Covid vaccine, some mainstream medical treatments, has dark thoughts about who really holds power (not politicians), population collapse (he thinks the human population is about to fall by two billion) and says he’s managed to convince the AI that he spends time arguing with that God indisputably exists.

He also expects huge oil and fertiliser shortages, famine in the poorest countries, inflation, and essentially the servitude of the working class as the rich get richer. None of this, he says, should be a surprise. We’re back to prophecies: “In five years time, look up this article … and you’ll go ‘that guy said what all the experts were saying’.”

Predicting his own next step is slightly harder. Judd recognises that the current arrangement is all getting a bit too small for so many kids.

There’s choices - to go to France and inherit Cecile’s family home; or bring in a shipping container, build a deck around it, and turn that into the boys’ bedroom. “We're right at this precipice of change,” he says, “which is kind of a metaphor for the world at the moment… Philosophically I'm right at that point where my family's too big for the size of the house, and I've nearly finished all my things to prove right. So, what do I do?”