Election campaigns are always learning opportunities for political parties. This year, it seems as though ACT is learning the lesson that it is not good practice to take on people with sections of their Wikipedia pages labelled “controversies” to run for List MP.
While I wouldn’t put it past ACT voters to look beyond former broadcaster Paul Henry’s checkered history, there’s no denying he has a record of making himself look less-than-favourable on national television. See:
- Making fun of Stephanie Mills for her facial hair while she was advocating for compensation for those suffering from health issues due to nuclear testing
- Calling homosexuality “unnatural”
- Calling Susan Boyle (vocal icon, often found in CD stacks in op shops) a slur used towards people with intellectual impairments
- In 2010, asked John Key if Governor-General at the time Sir Anand Satyanand was “even a New Zealander” (Satyanand was born and raised in Auckland)
- Purposefully mispronounced and mocked the name of longest-serving chief minister in Indian history Sheila Dikshit
- Said asylum seekers should “starve to death” in reference to a 2012 hunger strike
Shockingly, this same charming gentleman has recently made quite the fool of himself in an interview with Jack Tame on Q+A. Being a very experienced journalist, Tame possesses the ability to use Wikipedia before interviews, and asked Henry if it was “a bit rich” of him to say that Te Tiriti o Waitangi divided New Zealanders based on race. Henry immediately shut down the notion that he could ever possibly do or say anything that could be perceived as racist, telling Tame “there is not a racist bone in my body”. The jury’s still out on that one.
Like all #cancelled celebrities, Henry would probably want me to leave his troubled past behind. Luckily, he went on to make even more of a fool of himself in that interview, so there’s still plenty to write about.
To really play up the white boomer stereotype, Henry did not hesitate in his candidacy to reminisce on the “paradise” that New Zealand was in the 1960s before the gays could marry. What he did not do in preparation for his interview on Q+A was research exactly what rebuilding that paradise would look like. One of Tame’s first questions was if Henry knew what the tax rate was around that time. Spoiler alert: he did not. The tax rate around that time was 60% for New Zealand’s highest earners. If you weren’t sure, the ACT party is built on not really liking that.
Even after learning this fun fact, Henry doubled down on his stance of simultaneously being against people receiving financial aid from the government and being in favour of a time during which the government taxed the rich and redistributed it to welfare services. His justification? Henry was actually talking about an “aspirational vibe” and said that “when I was growing up in this country, nobody was giving me an excuse for my own failures”.
By the way, Henry spent most of his adolescence (11-19) living in a council flat in the UK. Look back a few paragraphs to his comments about Sir Anand Satyanand to have your mind boggled.
For the rest of the interview, Henry did a whole lot of avoiding questions, but nowhere near as smoothly as most other politicians (the tall dwarfs of answering questions). By the end of it, the public didn’t seem to agree with David Seymour’s previous assertion that Henry is “an exceptional communicator”. Because while Jack Tame is known for ripping politicians to shreds, but Paul Henry has never made it quite so easy.
