The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor
On the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine, and the danger it poses to a democracy heading into 2026
There is a particular cadence to the afternoon on which the career of a senior Māori journalist at TVNZ is finished. It is unhurried. It begins with a tweet — in this case, a single image of a typed statement, posted by Maiki Sherman, the now-former political editor of TVNZ, on the afternoon of Friday, 8 May 2026, announcing that she had parted ways with the broadcaster. The post was terse, dignified, and final. As RNZ later reported, Sherman wrote that the scrutiny of the previous week had placed enormous pressure on her and rendered her role "untenable." The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster's political team was gone. The story that finished her had not, ten days earlier, existed in any newspaper, on any wire, on any website you would consider mainstream. It had begun on a Substack, written by a woman who has held a seat on the Council of the Free Speech Union and who once ran digital communications for the National Party's Leader of the Opposition. To understand how a private, year-old altercation at a parliamentary drinks event became, in the space of a fortnight, a national scandal that ended a senior journalist's career, one has to understand the machine that built it. And to understand the machine, one has to read the Substack alongside the X feed of its author. They tell, in the end, two different stories about what this episode was for.
The events themselves are not in serious dispute. On 13 May 2025, Finance Minister Nicola Willis hosted pre-Budget drinks for the parliamentary press gallery in her ministerial office. As RNZ later confirmed, Willis "was out of the room for a few minutes" and returned to find offensive language being used. She ended the function. The next morning, she checked on the welfare of the journalist at whom the language had been directed; he indicated he did not wish to take the matter further; she respected that. According to Sherman's own subsequent statement, she apologised at the time both to the journalist, Stuff's Lloyd Burr, and to the Minister, and the apology was accepted. She informed her manager. By her account, her words came in response to deeply personal and inappropriate remarks made to her that evening — context that, in her words, did not excuse her actions but might explain them. For nearly a year, the matter sat where workplace incidents are usually settled: in the private register of apology, acceptance, and onward life.
It re-entered public time on 27 April 2026, when Ani O'Brien, a Wellington-based commentator, published a long Substack essay under the masthead Thought Crimes. The piece is, in its own framing, a serious essay about journalistic accountability in Aotearoa New Zealand. It cites Official Information Act responses. It quotes the Rules of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. It dwells on the apparent contradiction between TVNZ's stonewalling of OIA requests and the broadcaster's own Harmful Conduct Policy. It argues, in language that reads like editorial-page prose, that "the parliamentary press gallery exists, by its own rules, to 'hold those in power to account.'" It is, in short, written to be quoted in court — and within twenty-four hours, it was being quoted everywhere. By Tuesday afternoon, RNZ had it. Mike Hosking on Newstalk ZB, who told listeners that TVNZ had previously sent NZME a "broad-based fat letter" from corporate lawyers when his producer began making inquiries, treated the Substack as the breaking of a dam. By Wednesday, David Seymour, the Deputy Prime Minister, was on the floor of Parliament declaring that "we should all just be glad that one woman with a Substack actually made it a story." Within ten days, Sherman had been suspended from Parliament for five days by the Speaker — for an unrelated, contemporaneous matter involving the pursuit of a National whip during the leadership confidence drama — and had resigned.
To leave the story there would be to leave it where the Herald, in its account of her departure, and Stuff, in its piece quoting O'Brien rejecting the suggestion of a "political hit", have been content to leave it. To leave it there is to mistake the foreground for the picture. The picture is a manufactured crisis — and the question worth asking, in the lead-up to the 2026 election, is who manufactured it, by what means, and to what end.
The Culture-Centered Approach to communication, which I have spent two decades developing through the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation, holds that meaning is produced at the intersection of structure, culture, and agency. Crises are not natural phenomena. They are produced. The far right, in particular, has refined a method for producing them — what the literature on right-wing populism increasingly recognises as the "manufactured outrage" cycle, in which a private incident is curated, narrativised through a cultural register of grievance ("woke," "elites," "double standards"), and amplified through an interlocking apparatus of think tanks, lobby groups, podcasts, and friendly columnists until what began as a Substack post is being read out in the House. The genius of the method is that each individual node in the network can plausibly deny coordination. The Substack is just a blog. The lobby group is just a charity. The podcast host is just asking questions. The MP is just commenting on what's already in the news. And yet the aggregate behaviour is unmistakably coordinated, and its political effects are precisely calibrated.
Ani O'Brien's professional architecture deserves more careful description than the New Zealand press has given it. As her own bio at Newsroom makes clear, she is a former staffer for the Leader of the Opposition during Judith Collins's tenure as National Party leader — Press Secretary and Director of Digital. She is currently listed as a member of the governing Council of the Free Speech Union, the Wellington-based advocacy group co-founded and chaired by Jordan Williams, who is also Executive Director of the Taxpayers' Union and, per the Wikipedia entry on him that the Integrity Institute's Bryce Edwards has corroborated, the sole director of a private lobbying firm called the Campaign Company. Edwards, in his profiles of the Free Speech Union and the Campaign Company, has documented the overlapping personnel: Williams as a co-founder of the FSU and Council Member; O'Brien as a Council Member of the FSU and a "prominent advocate" working in Williams's firm. The point of mapping these relations is not to claim a conspiracy. The point is to observe that O'Brien is not, as her Substack would have it, "an outsider" or a "disagreeable woman who is devastated by the abdication of duty by the media so set up a Substack." She is a node in a dense network that includes a former Justice Minister's law firm, a transtasman free-speech franchise licensed from a UK organisation of the same name, a Taxpayers' Union with documented links to the tobacco industry, and a campaigns shop that — as the Daily Blog has chronicled in its coverage of the Hobson's Pledge anti-Māori-ward billboard saga — has been linked to astroturf campaigns dressed up as grassroots concern. To call O'Brien an outsider is, in the language of the Culture-Centered Approach, a communicative inversion: a discursive move in which the structurally powerful claim the rhetorical position of the marginal in order to launder their interventions as dissent.
The Substack post itself bears reading not as a piece of journalism but as a strategic communication artefact. It opens with the Willis function "in official records" — the diary citation a small but deliberate gesture toward documentary rigour — and proceeds to a careful sequence of OIA responses, internal-policy quotations, and corroboration claims. Its rhetorical posture is that of a public-interest investigator. But its load-bearing claims about Sherman's conduct rest on uncited, unnamed sources ("multiple attendees," "two people, one in media and one a staffer"); its account of what was said in the Willis office is presented in the Substack as definitive even as it concedes that "the precise factual dispute over what prompted the exchange remains unresolved"; and its treatment of TVNZ is a sustained insinuation that the broadcaster's privacy-grounded responses to OIA requests amount to a "closed loop" of impunity, rather than what they more obviously are — the standard, lawful response of any employer to requests for personnel data about specific employees. The piece ends with a moralised claim about democracy — accountability, double standards, the public trust — that, read in isolation, sounds reasonable. Read alongside everything else its author has published, it sounds like something else.
Which brings us to the X feed.
There is no polite way to put this: the Ani O'Brien who writes the Substack and the Ani O'Brien who posts on X are, on the page, two different writers. The Substack writer is sober, lawyered-up, structurally argued, given to phrases like "structural imbalance" and "professional standards." The X writer is, by her own choice of register, doing something else entirely. In a post from February 2024 — preserved in the screenshot record — she described seeing Auckland's annual Pride Bus and "rolling her eyes" at "all the rainbow washing," asking "why do people like me need a bus to say we are loved? Loved by who? The driver? The woke company who brags about how they funded the stunt?" In another, posted around the time New Zealand's Parliament announced it would no longer post House updates on X, she derided "woke cool girl Sinead Boucher" — the chief executive of Stuff — and accused government departments of being "so desperate to virtue signal that they would not use the number 1 news app in the country to communicate with the people." In a third, sharing a photograph of a poster for Endometriosis Awareness Month that used the phrase "those assigned female at birth," she wrote: "Imagine taking a serious women's health issue & rewriting it in dehumanising HR jargon... Activists have bullied even women's health campaigns into erasing our reality. Women aren't a paperwork category. So sick of this woke shit."
These are not the registers of a public-interest journalist. They are the registers of a culture warrior. The word "woke" appears in all three posts — three times in the endometriosis post alone. The grammar is the grammar, almost line-for-line, of the American culture war as it has been packaged for export by Fox News, The Daily Wire, and the Heritage Foundation: rainbow-washing, virtue-signal, woke shit, activists bullying women's health campaigns. This is not a vocabulary that grew organically in Aotearoa. It is an imported template, transplanted onto local terrain, deployed across local controversies, in the service of a politics that — as we approach the 2026 election — increasingly mirrors the playbook of the Trumpian ecosystem in the United States: aggrieved white femininity weaponised against Māori sovereignty, queer and trans communities, "elite" public broadcasters, and any institution that gestures toward anti-racism, decolonisation, or LGBTQI+ inclusion. Place this voice next to the Thought Crimes essay's solemn invocation of journalistic accountability and the dissonance is not incidental. It is the architecture. The Substack is the lacquered face the X account cannot afford to show.
The Culture-Centered Approach has a name for this dissonance: communicative inversion. The dominant articulates itself as the dissenting; the privileged speaks as the persecuted; the operative performs the outsider. It is the rhetorical move by which the National Party's former Director of Digital, sitting on the Council of an organisation funded by donors aligned with the most powerful interests in the country, can describe herself in her own Substack as a "persona non grata" and "blackhole of news." It is the move by which a campaign run through Substack, X, Newstalk ZB, and the floor of Parliament can be presented as the lonely truth-telling of one woman against an entrenched media establishment. And it is the move by which a homophobic slur uttered in a moment of late-night provocation, apologised for the next morning, accepted by its addressee, and managed internally for a year, can be reframed as a national crisis of media accountability — and used to dispatch the first wahine Māori political editor of the country's state broadcaster from her job.
The transnational architecture into which O'Brien's local interventions plug becomes legible the moment one examines the sources she treats as credible. On at least two occasions for which screenshots survive, she has approvingly amplified content from @Visegrad24 — an X account that, as Wikipedia documents from a 2022 OKO.press investigation and a 2023 Visegrad Insight report, is a propaganda and misinformation hub whose funding has been traced to the office of the former Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, and whose operators include the Polish-South African PR strategist Stefan Tompson, a documented promoter of the "white genocide" conspiracy theory. As the VSquare investigative consortium reported in 2025, drawing on a Centre for Information Integrity in Africa (CINIA) study, the account's signature tactics are "hard-core anti-Muslim rhetoric, claims that Western countries are collapsing, a strong pro-Israeli propaganda, and a steady stream of sensationalism and misinformation." The Israeli outlet TheMarker described it, in December 2023, as the work of "a pair of Polish right-wing extremists who take an Islamophobic and xenophobic line." The disinformation researcher Marc Owen Jones, in written evidence submitted to the UK Parliament's Home Affairs Committee on the 2024 Southport riots, classified Visegrad 24 as a "dys/disinfluencer" — one of a small number of "quasi-news accounts" that, during the riots, "hastily reported in breaking news that the attacker was a Muslim or immigrant before there was evidence." This is the source from which a Council member of the New Zealand Free Speech Union has been taking, and recirculating, content.
The two reposts on the record are not generic. They are pointed in their selection. The first, from March 2024, is a Visegrad 24 thread mischaracterising the philosopher Judith Butler's remarks at a Paroles d'Honneur event in Paris — where Butler had argued, in a precise philosophical register, that the events of 7 October could be analytically described as armed resistance even by those who morally condemn them — as a flat endorsement of "the October 7 Massacre." On to that distortion O'Brien layered her own commentary: that Butler is "utter scum," "a monster attacking feminism her whole career," who "has attacked our language" and "pretended men can be women" and now "disgustingly uses her platform to be a rape apologist." Read structurally rather than as personal vitriol, the move is precise. In a single tweet, O'Brien collapses three of the most active fronts of the international far right's culture war — TERF feminism, anti-trans politics, and Zionist information warfare — onto a single Jewish queer philosopher who has been, in fact, one of the most rigorous critics of state violence in Gaza. The structure is the import: the same rhetorical operation by which Hungarian, Israeli, and American right-wing networks have for two years sought to delegitimise Butler is here being performed verbatim by a Wellington-based commentator with no apparent independent reason to be quote-tweeting a Polish state-funded Twitter account about a French academic event. The second repost, from April 2025, is more telling still. Visegrad 24 had crafted a video clip from the streets of Southall, in West London — a borough whose multi-generational South Asian working-class history is the inheritance of partition, of Caribbean and African migration, of decades of National Front violence resisted by the Asian Youth Movement — into the formula "the Indians side with Israel / the Pakistanis side with Palestine." This is the Hindutva–Zionist alignment in its purest social-media form, manufactured for export, ethnicising a position that is in fact ideological, and recoding decades of solidaristic South Asian political tradition as essentialised civilisational team sport. O'Brien's reply: "the world is in a bad way." The phrase is the laundering. It performs world-weary lament in order to circulate, without endorsement that could be quoted back at her, the same anti-Muslim, anti-Pakistani, pro-Hindutva, pro-Israeli message the Polish-government-funded propaganda account is being paid to manufacture.
This is what it means to function as a far-right node. Not, in most cases, to author the propaganda — but to be the trusted local handle through which the propaganda is translated into a national vernacular and rendered shareable to an audience that would never knowingly subscribe to a Polish-funded extremist Twitter account. The same Council member of the Free Speech Union who, ten days ago, was being read out approvingly on Newstalk ZB and the floor of New Zealand's Parliament has, on her own X feed, been quietly performing the work of relay: amplifying Visegrad 24, attacking Judith Butler in the lexicon of the international gender-critical movement, and recirculating Hindutva–Zionist content to her New Zealand followers under the lacquer of "the world is in a bad way." When David Seymour, on the floor of the House, declared Aotearoa "should all just be glad that one woman with a Substack actually made it a story," the woman he was crediting was already a node in a transnational propaganda circuit that runs from Warsaw to Tel Aviv to Delhi and now to Wellington. The Maiki Sherman story is what the architecture produces in domestic politics. The Visegrad 24 reposts are the same architecture seen from the international side. There is no honest analysis of one that does not have to grapple with the other.
The interview that O'Brien gave to Duncan Garner on the Editor in Chief podcast — Garner himself a former TVNZ political editor with his own complicated history with the broadcaster — completed the circuit. A Substack post needs an amplifier. Newstalk ZB and a podcast network of former insiders provide it. The pattern is by now familiar to anyone who has watched the same architecture function in the United States or the United Kingdom: a commentator with deep institutional affiliations writes a "blog post"; a friendly broadcaster picks it up; a sympathetic minister offers a quote on the way to Question Time; the wire services run it as news; and within ten days the target is gone. There is, in this telling, no smoking memo, no leaked WhatsApp group, no Discord server. There does not need to be. The architecture is the coordination.
What is at stake, in 2026, is not merely whether a particular journalist keeps a particular job. What is at stake is the question of whose voices get to occupy the country's most powerful interpretive positions in a state-owned broadcaster, in the year before a general election in which the governing coalition is increasingly relying on the techniques of the international far right to manage public discourse. Sherman's appointment as TVNZ's political editor was a structural shift, however modest, in a press gallery whose composition has historically reflected the demographics of the institutions it covers rather than the demographics of the country itself. Her removal, however it is technically narrated, restores something that the architecture had registered as a perturbation. It is striking, in this regard, that the same week the Thought Crimes post appeared, the Coalition Government was moving to abolish the Broadcasting Standards Authority — a body whose function is precisely to adjudicate complaints about journalistic conduct of the sort O'Brien's piece purports to be concerned with. If you are genuinely worried about media accountability, you do not abolish the accountability mechanism. The architecture's actual interest is not accountability. The architecture's interest is leverage.
There is a further detail worth dwelling on. In her statement on resignation, Sherman wrote that her comment had been made "in response to deeply personal and inappropriate remarks made to me that evening." The Substack acknowledges, in a single line, that Sherman has claimed the exchange occurred in response to a racial slur from Burr — a claim Burr disputes — and then sets the matter aside as unresolved. It is not unresolved. It is unreported. The asymmetry of who gets the benefit of the doubt — whose denial is treated as definitive, whose context is treated as excuse-making — is itself a piece of the architecture. A wahine Māori journalist who, by her own account, responded to a racial slur with a homophobic one cannot, in the political grammar of contemporary Aotearoa, be permitted to occupy that position with any moral standing intact. A Pākehā male journalist whose alleged role in the precipitating exchange is sketched in a single contested sentence is not subjected to the same scrutiny. None of this excuses the slur. The slur is its own offence and Sherman has said as much, repeatedly, on the record. But the use to which the slur has been put — the apparatus into which it has been fed, the political moment at which it has been activated, the asymmetry of the discipline that has followed — that is the analytical object. That is the story.
It is tempting, when writing about the far right, to imagine that exposing the architecture is sufficient. It is not. The architecture has been exposed many times — by Bryce Edwards's Integrity Institute, by Martyn Bradbury's Daily Blog, by academics, by independent journalists, by the few outlets in the country still doing the work that the parliamentary press gallery, in its institutional comfort, has largely declined to do. Exposure is a precondition, not a remedy. The remedy, in a Culture-Centered Approach, is the building of communicative infrastructure that does not depend on the whim of a state broadcaster, the goodwill of corporate lawyers, or the bravery of individual journalists in a small market — communicative infrastructure rooted in the voices of those whom the architecture treats as objects rather than subjects. The remedy is to refuse the framing in which the question of what happened in Nicola Willis's office one evening in May 2025 is allowed to displace the larger question of who, in 2026, gets to hold a microphone in the Beehive's corridors and report on a coalition government that is rewriting the rules of its own accountability while the ink dries.
Sherman's resignation will be treated, in the immediate aftermath, as a personal story — one journalist's failure of conduct, one broadcaster's failure of management, one parliamentary protocol breached and adjudicated. That treatment will be wrong. It is, instead, a structural story — one Substack's success, one network's amplification, one election cycle's grammar. It is a story about the photocopy of the Trumpian ecosystem that is being assembled, in real time, in Aotearoa, by people who have spent their careers inside the National Party, inside the Free Speech Union, inside the Campaign Company, and who now appear on podcasts and Substacks describing themselves as outsiders. It is a story about what the Culture-Centered Approach calls the foreclosure of voice: the closing of the discursive space in which Māori, queer, trans, brown, working-class, and migrant publics can be heard speaking on their own terms, by means of culture-war proxies that translate every grievance into the same imported vocabulary of woke and anti-woke, every public-interest argument into the same monochrome of double standards, every political question into the same individualised drama of one woman's career.
The 2026 election will be fought, in part, in this register. Whether democracy in Aotearoa survives the architecture in good enough shape to hold the kinds of conversations the country actually needs to have — about Te Tiriti, about housing, about the climate, about the Pacific, about who belongs and on what terms — depends on whether enough people are willing to read the Substack alongside the X feed, to map the Council memberships and the lobbying firms, to ask who funds what, and to refuse the inversion that asks us to mistake the operative for the dissident. Maiki Sherman's departure from TVNZ is one data point. There will be more. The architecture has not finished building.
Mohan J Dutta is Dean's Chair Professor of Communication at Massey University and Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE).
Sources cited:
- Finance Minister shut down event after TVNZ political editor used alleged homophobic slur — RNZ News, 28 April 2026
- Mike Hosking says TVNZ 'threatened to sue us' over Maiki Sherman story — RNZ News, 29 April 2026
- TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman suspended from Parliament for five days — RNZ News, 30 April 2026
- TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman resigns — RNZ News, 8 May 2026
- 'No collusion': Author of Maiki Sherman alleged slur article rejects political 'hit' — Stuff
- TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman parts ways with broadcaster following scrutiny — NZ Herald
- Broadcasting Standards Authority to be scrapped — RNZ News
- Ani O'Brien, "Unreported for nearly a year: media misconduct in Parliament" — Thought Crimes (Substack)
- Ani O'Brien's biographical entry — Newsroom
- Free Speech Union — About Us / Council Members
- Bryce Edwards, "Free Speech Union" — Democracy Project / Integrity Institute
- Martyn Bradbury, "Jordan Williams and Detective Ani O'Brien up to their old Campaign Company tricks again" — The Daily Blog, 8 August 2025
- Duncan Garner interview with Ani O'Brien — YouTube