New Zealand’s media-politics-lobbying revolving door keeps spinning. The latest turn is the most brazen yet.
On Monday, NZME announced that Hamish Rutherford would chair its Editorial Advisory Board. The news was first reported by Shayne Currie in the NZ Herald’s Media Insider column, which described the appointment alongside other editorial changes as a “real coup” for the company. The Herald announcement itself was revealing for what it left out: it described Rutherford as having “most recently worked as a government relations and corporate affairs consultant”, which is a sanitised way of saying he is a lobbyist.
It fell to Stewart Sowman-Lund at The Post, writing this morning, to spell out the full picture. And the full picture is quite something.
From journalist to lobbyist to editorial board chair
Rutherford’s career trajectory is a textbook example of the revolving door. He worked as a political and business journalist for Stuff and the NZ Herald. He then crossed into the Beehive, becoming Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s Chief Press Secretary in 2022. After leaving the ninth floor in late 2024, he moved into lobbying with the Wellington firm BRG, a company that boasts it is made up of “former journalists and communications specialists, ministerial staff, campaign advisors and political strategists.”
And now he will chair the editorial advisory board of one of New Zealand’s two major news publishers. While continuing to work as a lobbyist.
Let that sink in. A practising government relations lobbyist is now leading the body that provides “advice, support and constructive challenge” to NZME’s editorial team. The board advises on editorial standards, audience development, and — tellingly — “strategic positioning in New Zealand’s evolving media landscape.” Its charter covers editorial standards plus “commercial opportunities”, all of which is confidential, with minutes only to the board.
NZME insists the board is non-executive and advisory only. NZME Chair Steven Joyce told The Post that it “did not make editorial decisions.” Rutherford himself said he had been “upfront with chairman Steven Joyce about my other work and will continue to be.”
But the denials of conflict miss the point. As former NZ Herald editor Gavin Ellis told Sowman-Lund, Rutherford will have to “overtly distance himself” from any clients he may have had as a lobbyist. Ellis also made a more fundamental observation: “At the end of the day, editorial independence and integrity requires that any policies are determined within the editorial department, not at board level, because boards have other imperatives apart from the straight journalistic considerations that should dictate editorial policy.”
The Meta question
The Post’s reporting revealed that Meta (owners of Facebook and Instagram) is understood to be one of BRG’s clients. The social media giant is at the centre of one of the biggest policy fights in New Zealand media right now: the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, which would force platforms like Meta to pay local news companies for sharing their content. NZME, as one of the country’s largest news publishers, has a massive commercial stake in that legislation.
Sowman-Lund’s Post article says that it is understood that Rutherford hasn’t had Meta as a direct client while at BRG. But the optics alone should have killed the idea. You have a lobbyist working for a firm that represents Meta, sitting in an advisory role at a company that is trying to extract payment from Meta. Conflicts of interest don’t have to be proven to do damage. The perception alone is enough to erode trust, and plenty of people will perceive one here.
The Joyce connection
It is worth stepping back and looking at the broader picture at NZME. The company has gone through significant upheaval recently. Last year, Canadian billionaire Jim Grenon launched a bid to overhaul the NZME board, sparking fears for editorial independence. A compromise created this advisory board, now chaired by a lobbyist.
Joyce is the former National Party finance minister who also served as the party’s campaign chair for five general elections. Since leaving politics, he has operated Joyce Advisory, which is a consulting business that provides advice on, among other things, “government relations.” The University of Waikato paid Joyce Advisory nearly $1 million between 2019 and 2022.
So here is the situation: NZME is chaired by a former National cabinet minister who runs a consulting firm that advises on government relations. The editorial advisory board is now chaired by a former National government press secretary who currently works as a lobbyist. Labour leader Chris Hipkins summed it up at Parliament today: “So NZME, chaired by former National Party cabinet minister and campaign manager, has appointed an editorial board that’s going to be chaired by a former National Party press secretary?”
NZME is a private company and is entitled to appoint whoever it likes. But for a news organisation, public perception of editorial independence is not just a nice-to-have. It is not optional, as it’s the whole point of being a news organisation.
The Revolving door keeps spinning
What makes Rutherford’s case especially notable is the sheer breadth of his career shifts. Many people in New Zealand have moved between journalism and politics, or between politics and lobbying. But Rutherford has done all three: journalist, then press secretary, then lobbyist, and is now back working with a media company while continuing as a lobbyist. That seems like new territory for potential conflicts of interest in this country.
New Zealand’s always had a revolving door. But this case is different. It’s not just someone moving from job to job; it’s someone holding two jobs at once. That “dual-hatting” is where the alarm should be loudest. It’s one thing to allow movement over time. It’s another to normalise overlap.
This isn’t an argument about Hamish Rutherford’s character. It’s an argument about the integrity architecture of our democracy. The rules shouldn’t require saints to function.
Last year I published the only account of Rutherford’s initial shift from the Beehive into lobbying, in my column “The Revolving door from Luxon’s Beehive to lobbying.” At the time, neither BRG’s website nor Rutherford’s LinkedIn profile mentioned the move. The Ministerial Diaries eventually revealed him meeting with a Minister representing BRG’s client Freightways. The opaqueness was par for the course in an industry that operates without a lobbying register.
BRG is run by Georgina Stylianou and Chris Wikaira, both ex-gallery journalists turned ministerial staffers turned lobbyists. Stylianou told The Post she did not believe there were any conflicts of interest. “If any perceived or actual conflicts of interest arise, we will manage them quickly and appropriately,” she said. Stylianou herself is a former journalist and press secretary — another product of the revolving door — and she continues to write a political column for The Post while running a lobbying firm.
Journalists who became lobbyists
Rutherford is far from alone. The traffic between newsrooms and lobbying firms runs one way, and the road is getting busy.
Jessica Mutch McKay was TVNZ’s political editor until 2024, when she became Head of Government Relations and Corporate Responsibility at ANZ, one of the country’s largest banks. Mike Munro spent a decade in the parliamentary press gallery for the NZ Herald and The Dominion before becoming Helen Clark’s Chief Press Secretary, later becoming Jacinda Ardern’s Chief of Staff, and now runs the lobbying firm Munro Church Communications. Mike Jaspers was Ardern’s chief press secretary before that, having previously been a journalist.
Ben Thomas worked as a press secretary for National minister Christopher Finlayson before joining and co-owning the lobbying firm Capital Government Relations, while simultaneously operating as one of the country’s most prominent political commentators, regularly appearing on RNZ’s Nine to Noon. His Capital co-owner Neale Jones was Labour leader Andrew Little’s chief of staff before becoming a lobbyist, and he too became a regular media commentator. Kris Faafoi went from being a journalist to an MP to a cabinet minister and then, less than three months after leaving Parliament, set up a lobbying company.
The list goes on. Former journalists and press secretaries populate the lobbying industry: David Cormack, a former Green Party media adviser, now runs the lobbying firm Draper Cormack. Clayton Cosgrove went from Labour cabinet minister to lobbying. Even Stuart Nash, after being dumped from cabinet, has resurfaced in various advisory and lobbying-adjacent roles.
Lobbyists as media commentators
Then there’s the reverse flow: lobbyists who serve as political commentators in the media. This means people whose day job is to influence government on behalf of paying clients are also shaping how the public understands politics.
Neale Jones and Ben Thomas are regular commentators on RNZ while running Capital Government Relations. Brigette Morten is a National Party adviser and a go-to political commentator for several media outlets, while also operating in the government relations space. The “Three Gals One Beehive” podcast features Stylianou, Morten, and Esther Robinson — all with backgrounds in parliamentary staffing and government relations. Tim Hurdle, a director at Museum Street Strategies has his commentary published in newspapers and he appears on RNZ. Conor English, a director of Silvereye, is also published as an opinion writer and is often on RNZ. And Trish Sherson, from lobbying firm Sherson Willis is often on political commentary panels.
As journalist Andrea Vance wrote back in 2023, “our comment pages have become the tool of the public relations professional. The vast majority of New Zealand’s written and spoken political commentary is now done by former party spin-doctors.” Columnist Danyl McLauchlan put it more bluntly in the NZ Herald’s Listener section: lobbyists “are deeply political actors” whose job is “to quietly influence policy no matter who wins.”
The public rarely knows who these commentators’ clients are. They appear on our screens and in our newspapers as neutral analysts, which they’re not.
Why this matters
New Zealand has essentially no rules governing any of this. There is no lobbying register. There is no mandatory code of conduct. There are no cooling-off periods between holding ministerial office and taking up lobbying work. The OECD has repeatedly identified New Zealand as an outlier on lobbying regulation, noting the country is “not close to the frontier of international best practice.”
The previous Labour government commissioned the Ministry of Justice to develop options for regulation, but the work has stalled since the change of government. A voluntary code of conduct was proposed but, it was so watered down through consultation with the very lobbyists it was meant to regulate that it became meaningless.
Meanwhile, the revolving door keeps turning. Every time a journalist becomes a lobbyist, or a lobbyist takes on a media role, or a press secretary moves from the Beehive to a government relations firm, it gets harder to tell who is informing the public and who is working them.
What Rutherford’s appointment to the NZME editorial advisory board represents is a new kind of entanglement. It is no longer just about lobbyists appearing on tv or radio as supposedly independent commentators. It is about a practising lobbyist being given a formal advisory role over the editorial direction of one of the country’s most important news organisations while remaining a lobbyist, working for a firm that represents clients with direct interests in the media policy decisions that same news organisation covers.
New Zealand’s political class has long treated the boundaries between media, government, and lobbying as more like suggestions than rules. The appointment of Hamish Rutherford to NZME’s editorial board is the latest evidence that our permissive culture around these overlapping roles is not serving the public interest. It is serving the interests of those who profit from keeping things cosy and opaque.
We’re past time for proper regulation: a mandatory lobbying register, a genuine code of conduct, cooling-off periods, and a serious conversation about whether lobbyists should have formal roles in our newsrooms at all.
Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project
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