The campaign to destroy Tory Whanau

Today a headline on Stuff stopped me in my tracks: “The issues so big that politicians will work together to fix them.” Finally, I thought, we’re going to talk about it!

But of course, I was way off.

The “issues” were the Interislander ferries, defence funding, and national security. None of them were: Don’t sexually harass the mayor. Or, more broadly: What can do to stop the brutal attacks on women (especially Māori women) in politics?

It seems politicians just can’t agree on the radical idea that maybe women in politics shouldn’t be threatened, abused, or sexually harassed. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt eh? Why would they speak up about Ray Chung’s three-year harassment campaign against Mayor Tory Whanau, when so few journalists are asking them to?

The Post and Stuff (owned by a woman who is in an anti-Tory Whanau lobby group) have managed to cover every breath Whanau has taken in three years.

They wrote more articles about Whanau selling her car* than they did about a convicted sex offender being a former president of the ACT Party. They have a reporter whose sole job seems to be just looking through her rubbish or trying to catch her jay-walking. They even got her dog evicted!

She has been followed everywhere by creeps with cameras. Any time she was seen with a drink it was reported that she’d been up to “drunken antics”.

At a time when the government was laying off most of Wellington, the region’s paper had a Whanau beat that covered every single thing she did - truth optional.

And yet, they’re barely covering evidence of a campaign of sexual harassment against her by her colleagues. And when they do, they simply add weight to a rumour they know isn’t true.

Tim Hunt describes a mayoral candidate sending an email full of sexual fantasies about the mayor as Ray Chung’s account of a ‘Whanau’s alleged ‘night of debauchery’’’. Alleged? Whanau’s night? I mean FFS. Language matters!

Imagine, just for a second, that a colleague who hates you sends an email to others who you work with saying you had an orgy. They want to humiliate you. They describe what they imagine your naked body is like. They claim you used drugs. They go into grotesque detail. None of it is true.

Now imagine they take it to the media. Then imagine people discussing the email, the rumours, as if they’re fact. There’s no evidence. There never was.

If this were about a white politician, the piece would open by saying the claims were unsubstantiated and false. They’d say there’s no proof. Hell, they probably wouldn’t even run the story.

Think about every rumour you’ve ever heard about a politician - how many made it to print? None that I can think of. And I’ve worked in newsrooms where we hear every rumour going.

It’s all so exhausting. every morning another deranged Post piece, written by some drooling journalist who seems to be operated by a lobby group sitting Ratatouille-style in his hair.

I keep thinking about how hopeful we were in the aftermath of Whanau’s mayoralty win. We had seen a sweep of the worst people possible elected into leadership roles across the country, so Whanau’s win - and Whanau herself - symbolised hope.

I door-knocked for Whanau and took tickets at the door for her events, I did interviews with her on social media (all voluntary, by the way), and my bestie was her campaign director. So when I say I was invested, I really was invested.

I saw people power in action. I saw the positivity of the campaign and I saw the horror of it too - I saw people scream at Whanau and call her n***r in a hall my children once did music playdates in.

I remember the moment we heard she’d won. It blew us away. We also had a bunch of Green wins too. We were all so happy – all of the hard work that so many volunteers did – it worked.

Wellingtonians saw that we can focus on the environment and we can bring change in the city. We can pedestrianise parts of the city to make it actually appealing to people instead of just a giant piss-soaked car park. We can have a leader with integrity. One who wasn’t bought and paid for. We can prioritise people who live in Wellington and good housing - not big business and rich pricks who don’t even live here.

We had so much hope. And then, almost immediately, the smear campaigns began.

It was like Whanau was never able to leave that hall full of furious old white men screaming the N-word at her.

It’s hard to fully describe just how absolutely brutal the campaign against Whanau has been. Radio New Zealand published a talk-back rumour so offensive that I cannot write it out - but it’s what men who hate women say women do in public, and buys into the racist myth of brown women being sexually insatiable. The bar in question insisted it was not true.

We now know without a doubt that it was clearly part of an organised smear campaign that began with Chung’s letter. So all of this ‘it was two-and-a-half years ago’ bullshit needs to be called out. It began two-and-a-half years ago and it never stopped.

It was such obvious misogynist rage bait. Totally something you would see on the ugliest parts of the internet, but astonishing to read on RNZ. It felt like our national broadcaster was joining The Post at the back of the hall, N-word at the ready.

Behind the scenes, a few women journalists got in touch to say how shocked they were and to share how astonishing it was that RNZ went ahead and published it.

It was relentless. And it was the demanded price for daring to have a young mayor who cared. A mayor who was human. A mayor who was actually known and liked in Wellington. A mayor who had no time for corporate interests and slumlords.

So transparent was the hate for Whanau that The Post’s owner openly admitted she was in a lobby group campaigning against Whanau. The Post ran a full-page advertisement for the lobby group, pretending it was a news story (without a byline, obviously, because it wasn’t a news story).

All the while, Whanau was dealing with racist and sexist attacks in public – while trying to do her job. She knew her own colleague was spreading sexual fantasies about her to other colleagues.

So no, it turns out politicians won’t work together on the big issues. Not when the issue is: Should a brown woman be allowed to lead without being torn apart? Not when the issue is: Should we believe misogynist rumours, or challenge them? Not when the issue is: Can we make space for wāhine Māori leaders - or are we just fine watching them be hounded out of public life?

Even Andrew Little can’t bring himself to post about all of this. He’s being pestered day and night by people begging him to stand up, but the Labour desire to punch left is too strong.

That there are no women in the mayoral race for Wellington for the first time since 1986 is a tragedy. It’s also not a coincidence it is a consequence.

If you lined up all the mayoral candidates right now, you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. Not in age, not in policy, and certainly not in courage.

So I keep thinking about the little Tory we’ll never get to meet. The little girl who might have believed there was a place for her in politics, until she saw what they did to someone who looked like her.

We owe her more than this.

Thank you for supporting my mahi. I will get so much hate for this. You becoming a paid subscriber allows me to keep speaking up despite that sh*t.

The Spinoff has covered this well: Windbag: Ray Chung has never been fit for office.

*In an interview with a radio hack, Whanau said, “I’ve just sold my car recently, to kind of help pay the bills. I walk to work again, my mortgage rates have doubled in the last few years.” It was an hour-long talk about the impact of the cost of living crisis, which the government was trying to deny at the time. The hack lost his mind completely.

The hack called it a “train wreck” and wrote multiple columns on it. When Whanau said the line was taken out of context, the hack began frothing so hard he turned his office into a foam party. He implied she “giggled” like a school student (I have to wonder if “schoolgirl” was edited out), didn’t have good advice, wasn’t up to the job, blah blah blah – all over a throwaway comment about a car. He talked about her salary, implying that because of it she couldn’t possibly empathise with Wellingtonians about the cost of living.

The Post wrote about 15,000 stories about the “sold car”. If there had been a nuclear war, the first question they’d have asked in the crater of the world, Luxon’s bald head covered in ash, would be: “Can you comment on Tory Whanau saying she sold her car?”