A play-by-play of Ray Chung's train wreck interview with Sean Plunket
Wellington mayoral candidate Ray Chung was under fire in a way he had never experienced before. Donors were abandoning him, and his support was cratering. The root cause: An email he sent to council colleagues two and a half years ago detailing salacious and unverified rumours about Wellington mayor Tory Whanau having a drug-fueled sexcapade with his neighbour's son.
It was a wildly inappropriate topic for a work email and almost certainly defamatory. Whanau has denied the claims and said she can prove she was at a different event on the night in question.
Instead of apologising, Chung doubled down. 'There has been a concerted campaign against me,' he said in a video released on Sunday. 'An email I sent privately over two and a half years ago was passed to the media. This was done deliberately to discredit me.'
After being deliberately discredited with his own words, Chung desperately needed a way to shore up his base of support and focus everything in the right area. So, on Monday morning, he spoke to Sean Plunket live on The Platform. Chung would have fairly expected this to be a friendly interview, given that Plunket has previously broadcast an entirely different unfounded rumour about Tory Whanau. But as the interview went on, Plunket grew frustrated at Chung's complete inability to grasp why he was in trouble, and his repeated insistence on making everything worse.
It was 17 minutes of mayhem and majesty. Here's the lowlights.
'It sounds like you've had a rugged weekend,' Plunket begins, lending a sympathetic ear.
'I have had a very rugged weekend. I've never had so many days in a row like this,' Chung replies.
'Joel MacManus [hey, that's me!] tells me you're a windbag and you've never been fit for office,' Plunket says. 'Have you seen The Spinoff's piece this morning? It's pretty remarkable. I'd have to say it's one of the most blatantly biased pieces of political writing I've ever seen in all my life, and coming from such a pimply faced little stuck-up millennial, it's amazing.'
For the record, Windbag is the name of my column, not a comment on Ray Chung. But I stand by the rest. Also, I'm now feeling self-conscious about my skincare routine. Open to any and all recommendations from Plunket.
Plunket wants Chung to go back to the start and explain the whole ordeal to his listeners: 'OK, three years ago, you're approached by a next-door neighbour of yours who tells you what?'
Having just got himself into trouble for repeating an unfounded and probably defamatory story in an email – and trying to play the matter down because it happened two and a half years ago – you might think Chung would be smart enough not to repeat the same allegations live on air. But that's giving him far too much credit.
'We were walking with our dogs and [my neighbour] stopped me and as usual, you have a bit of a chat with your neighbours and he said 'oh, let me tell you about something',' Chung begins.
'A good story's a fast story, Ray,' Plunket urges, already losing patience.
Chung continues: 'He said they met up with two women in a bar and went back to their apartment.'
'This guy did, your neighbour?'
'No, no, his son. They went back to the apartment and had a fun night.'
Plunket can't resist calling bullshit. 'It seems odd that your neighbour would come up to you and say, 'Hey, my son scored the other night and here are the details. ''
Ray's brain seems to short-circuit here. '….um…. weeeelll….. It was nothing that I expected.'
Chung then fluffs around for a while until he finally gets to his big reveal that one of the women his neighbour's son supposedly slept with was the mayor of Wellington.
'Ray, what's wrong with that? She's not married,' Plunket says. At first, it seems like he is playing devil's advocate. But then it becomes clear that he is genuinely exasperated.
'Well, when we walked back, we thought 'My god, if this hits the news media…'
'What? That the mayor of Wellington is sexually active and she's a single woman, and she decides occasionally to have sex with people? Why is that a scandal?' Plunket is incredulous.
Then, Chung decides to do the political equivalent of tripping over your shoelaces directly into a cow pat: 'Well it wasn't just sex, it was drugs as well.'
That thumping you hear is Chung's lawyer concussing himself against his own desk.
Plunket appears to roll his eyes and gives a barely audible sigh. 'Tell us about the drugs,' he says.
Chung stumbles on. 'OK, as I was told, when they were at the pub, [Whanau] asked the two boys if they were interested in some drugs.'
'When you say boys, can we define boys?' Plunket says.
'I think about 21.'
'That's not a boy, that's a grown ass man,' Plunket says, crossing his arms. Chung argues for a while about the definition of a boy. Plunket is having none of it. 'Doesn't matter. 21. Get a beer, fight and die for your country, and sleep with who you want to.'
Time to bring things back on track. 'OK, so she offered them drugs?' Plunket asks.
'Yep. And they went back to the apartment and, um, you know, had a good evening.'
'And did they do drugs, Ray?'
'Well, I don't know, but I assume they did because that's what they went back for.'
The key quote there, of course, is: 'I DON'T KNOW.'
'Did you ever talk to the son to get the story firsthand?' Plunket continues.
'No, no, he wasn't there,' Chung admits.
Chung spends a few minutes giving a meandering account about NZ Herald reporter David Fisher calling him for the story. Plunket gets bored and steers things back to the juicy bits.
'Where did pendulous breasts come from?' he asks.
'Where did what come from?'
'Pendulous breasts. Where did that phrase come from?'
'Oh, I was just told exactly what they said and how they described it.'
'So your neighbour's son told you she had pendulous breasts?' Plunket says with the withering tone of Kim Hill in her prime. 'That doesn't sound like the sort of language a 21-year-old would use, Ray. That's one part of the story that doesn't stack up'.
Chung laughs. 'Heh heh, yep, I don't know, I was just repeating everything that I was told.'
Repeating everything you're told without doing any effort to verify is exactly the problem. But understanding that seems beyond him.
'Would you send such an email again?' Plunket asks.
'Never, never. I've learned my lesson,' Chung says, after spending 16 minutes repeating all the problematic information that was in the original email, live on air. 'But I've also learned another even more important lesson, and that's don't trust anyone.'
'Oh, Ray, you can trust me,' Plunket croons.
'Can I? Can I?' Chung asks. He certainly shouldn't have.
With that, Plunket ends the interview and turns to the text machine. He reads two messages from his loyal listeners:
'God, this Ray Chung sounds like a moron. Hopefully, Wellington has dodged a bullet.'
'Sean, Chung sounds like a loose cannon. He's the best the right have? God help you.'
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The Spinoff
a day ago
- The Spinoff
Ray Chung gets a woman to apologise for him
'Accountability really matters,' said the woman Ray Chung found to take accountability on his behalf. It was standing room only at the Miramar Community Centre on Monday night for the 14th edition of the Zero Rates Roadshow, the campaign event for mayoral candidate Ray Chung and his politicial-party-that-insists-it-isn't-a-political-party Independent Together. Chung has been feeling the heat of the media spotlight after revelations that he had sent an email to council colleagues spreading an unverified and likely defamatory rumour about Wellington mayor Tory Whanau – and repeating the rumour in a live radio interview. The controversy hasn't dulled his base of support, though. According to Independent Together candidate Ken Ah Kuoi, Monday's event drew the biggest crowd so far. Seven council candidates spoke, followed by an address from Chung and a Q&A session. Alistair Boyce from the campaign group Better Wellington (and owner of The Backbencher gastropub) MCed the event as if he was the party president; often stepping in to answer questions on the candidates' behalf, using the collective 'we', and at one point cutting Chung off when he started to answer a question in a way that Boyce didn't like. As the event began, Chung sat in the front row while candidate Paula Muollo made the first speech and addressed the elephant in the room: Chung's controversial comments. 'We believe that most people, if they reflect honestly, can recall moments where they exercised poor judgement,' she said. 'What matters is taking responsibility for it. We do not condone inappropriate comments or language, and Ray has acknowledged his deep regret for this lapse of judgement. Accountability really matters.' It was a much stronger apology than anything that has come out of Chung's mouth so far. He hasn't publicly acknowledged that his emails were inappropriate or admitted it was a lapse of judgement. The 'apology' video he released on Sunday included nothing of the sort. There was a brief reference to regret – 'I regret writing it and regret sharing it with people I thought trustworthy' – but the rest of the video was an attack on a 'deliberate attempt to discredit me' that was 'designed to undermine our campaign'. On Monday night, Tory Whanau said she had received an email apology from Chung, but he hasn't released this publicly. When Chung finally spoke to the crowd, more than 50 minutes into the event, there was no hint of the 'deep regret' he supposedly felt. 'The smear campaign against us this week has the Labour Party and Green Party all over it. They do not want to surrender control of the council coffers. They lost central government and now they want to keep their claws in local government money,' he said. 'The allegations have been thrown at us by a complicit media working hand-in-hand with political party lobbyists are designed to knock us out of the race. I say: give it your best shot… we don't be deterred, we won't be threatened, we won't be bullied.' That was the only time Chung acknowledged the scandal. Then, he was back to his stump speech about council spending. 'Every time I look at our finances, I stagger,' he said. He highlighted the cost of the Tākina convention centre and the temporary fencing around the waterfront. He honed in on the proposal to build a new regional organic waste facility, which would cost $35 million shared between Wellington, Porirua and Hutt City councils. 'Why not just get people to do their recycling at home? It's much, much cheaper to just get people a recycling bin and a composting bin and do it at home,' he said, apparently suggesting everyone own their own recycling plant. The questions from the audience were overwhelmingly supportive, often drawing applause at both the questions and the answers. There was one notable exception; an elderly man carrying a disorganised stack of papers who asked a long, rambling question about why he should believe the candidates' claims that a 0% rates increase was possible when councils nationwide had faced a 15% average increase this year. Boyce tried to cut him off, and the crowd shouted the man down, but he kept going until Chung agreed to answer the question. Chung's big idea was that he would ask other people for advice on how to save money. 'Other councils are looking at different ways of actually reducing the cost of running their cities, so I will be meeting them to understand exactly how they go to see what we can actually use in Wellington. So there are ways of doing this.' Most of the other Independent Together candidates offered little more by way of specifics. Muollo said the council needed to cut 'ideological pet projects' so they could fund her own pet projects of saving Begonia House and repairing the City to Sea bridge. The clear standout was Andrea Compton, who is running for Independent Together in the Takapu/Northern ward. The self-confessed 'infrastructure nerd' is the Group Financial Controller at StraitNZ and has previously worked on iRex and Transmission Gully. She spoke at a level of detail far beyond all the other candidates, including and especially Chung. She proposed changes to the council's budgeting procedures, selling Tākina, and reducing the downtown development levy. She gave examples of how the Whanganui District Council had kept their rates increases to 2.2%. After Chung's idea that everyone should do their own recycling and composting, Compton tried to save him by proposing an actual alternative: the council could work with Lower Hutt-based company Earth Starch, which has developed a scalable organic waste processing technology called Rosie2500. And so Ray Chung's campaign continues. He got himself and his entire team in trouble by spreading baseless and defamatory rumours about a woman's sex life. Then a woman colleague apologised on his behalf. Then, when it became clear that he didn't understand his own policy, another woman did the work for him.
The Spinoff
a day ago
- The Spinoff
Weird men are driving people out of politics
Their smear campaigns are ham-fisted and grotesque. They're also working. Ray Chung seemed more annoyed than apologetic in what he'd billed as his ' unequivocal apology ' to Wellington mayor Tory Whanau. The Independent Together mayoral candidate said he regretted sending a florid email full of false rumours about the sitting mayor's sex life to several of his council colleagues, but stopped short of actually saying a word widely considered to be a key ingredient in an apology, 'sorry'. Perhaps he needed to save space in his video statement for bitter recriminations. Chung was annoyed at an as-yet unidentified councillor and journalists for collaborating in a scurrilous Dirty Politics-style campaign to accurately report his, and the Independent Together team's, real words and actions. 'Over the last week there's been a concerted campaign against me and my campaign for the Wellington mayoralty,' he said. 'This attack on me and our team of Independent Together candidates is designed to undermine our campaign.' Chung may have been befuddled at the chorus of boos he's been hearing, given previous attempted smears have met with a far warmer reception. Just 18 months ago, Whanau was seen going for drinks with friends at Havana Bar in central Wellington. Her night out became the subject of a digital chain letter from social media's pulsating swarm of weird men, who managed to churn out a rumour about her being videoed performing a sex act in public. The clamour got so loud and insistent, the alleged video was reported by RNZ and Stuff. Whanau was forced to release a statement based on the limited information put to her by the media. On The Platform, Sean Plunket described the alleged contents of the video in detail, before getting councillor Nicola Young to weigh in on why Whanau should resign for bringing the mayoralty into disrepute. Auckland councillor Maurice Williamson was overheard phoning a friend to gossip about the video during a council meeting. Whanau didn't resign, partly because the video didn't exist, and those who insisted it did were, to use the scientific term, 'full of shit'. But Young's career didn't suffer. Neither did Williamson's. More recently, Green MP Benjamin Doyle was the subject of a similarly toxic and defamatory chorus of accusations after posting what amounted to a joke caption on their private Instagram account. A group aligned with Chung's Independent Together ticket later gave the businessman behind that campaign, Rhys Williams, the task of finding someone to put together an opposition dossier on their left-wing rivals. These high-profile incidents are flare-ups against a background radiation of abuse. Just about every woman or gender diverse person in politics will tell you their job requires an ability to multitask between deleting insulting emails and blocking dehumanising social media posts. The noise from the weird men is relentless. It's so loud and vehement, it's hard to believe it's simply the product of a heady mix of fevered imagination, unalloyed prejudice, and easy access to the internet. Perhaps that's why the media keeps taking the bait. RNZ never saw the footage of Whanau's night out in 2023. That didn't stop it stating its existence as fact. 'RNZ learned of footage circulating and put the allegations to her office,' its reporter wrote of the non-existent video, under a headline dubiously asserting that the mayor had engaged in 'drunken antics'. Doyle was the subject of dozens of media stories and misleading opinion pieces from people determined to misconstrue a caption that was clearly more about themself than about their child. When Doyle finally fronted the media about being 'attacked in such a baseless, personal and violent way,' nearly all the questions were about whether they'd admit to political misjudgement. Rather than step down for their own safety, Doyle committed to staying in politics. These flimsy scandals were egged on by a braying online crowd which urged journalists to conflate sound with substance. The weird men online have endless reservoirs of psychological dysfunction and large expanses of time to marshall their obsessions into people's mentions. More often than not, they win. Several former politicians have admitted that being subjected to monotonous daily abuse was a factor in their public breakdowns. Former prime minister Jacinda Ardern has moved to the US and still requires security escorts when she re-enters the country. Whanau isn't running for re-election. She's unequivocal that smear campaigns motivated her decision which will likely allow Labour's Andrew Little to sweep to office on a tidal wave of resigned shrugging. 'This harassment has been the main cause of me stepping aside from the mayoralty,' she says. 'I'm just glad it's now visible for others to see and we can make changes to ensure this doesn't happen to others. I'll commit to doing that in my role as a councillor.' At the end of his apology video this week, Chung vowed to fight on. 'I look forward to seeing you on the campaign trail as we build the momentum to take back our city,' he said. Despite the brave posturing, it seems his campaign is most probably over before it's begun. Not only is it unlikely he'll win the mayoralty; some now believe his ticket could cede winnable races to the left. If that's the case, it'll be a notable departure from the norm. For once, the consequences of a false, sexist rumour will fall primarily on the person spreading it and his allies, rather than the woman on the receiving end.
Otago Daily Times
2 days ago
- Otago Daily Times
Ray Chung's 'vile' email condemned across the political spectrum
By Lillian Hanly of RNZ Both the prime minister and the opposition leader have given scathing rebukes of Wellington councillor Ray Chung's email about Mayor Tory Whanau, saying it is "absolutely disgusting" and calling it "vile and unacceptable." Whanau has rejected the contents of the email, saying it is false and contains "malicious and sexist" rumour. The email - seen by RNZ - was sent to three fellow councillors, recounting a story Chung had been told by his neighbour about the neighbour's son allegedly having a sexual encounter with the mayor. The mayor received an apology from Chung earlier today over the email claims, which he sent to other councillors in 2023, but surfaced last week. Asked about the email in today's post-cabinet media conference, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said first and foremost it was "unacceptable" and "really pretty vile" stuff. Luxon said he did not know Chung, and did not remember meeting him. "I wouldn't be able to tell you who he is or point out who he is." With the upcoming local body elections, Luxon said "you get what you deserve" if you don't show up and vote, and "get good candidates in races". Asked whether Chung should stand down, Luxon replied: "I think the email was entirely inappropriate and utterly unacceptable. "But ultimately, it's up to the fine people of Wellington, who I'm sure will work through who they would like to represent them in that role." Chris Hipkins also criticised the councillor, saying the email was "absolutely disgusting" and there was no place for that content in "good, civilised, democratic debate". "Critiquing an opponent is one thing - those kind of personal, abusive, denigratory messages are just totally unacceptable." Asked whether Chung should stand down, Hipkins said it was a matter for Chung. "But I just think that kind of language should be called out in the strongest possible terms. "It denigrates an opponent. It's undoubtedly sexist, if not misogynist, and I just think there's no place for that in a fair election competition." Strained council relationships could undermine the 'good work' - observer Meanwhile, Lindsay McKenzie, the Crown Observer assigned to Wellington City Council, said he had made his concerns about the events known to Local Government Minister Simeon Brown as well as Mayor Whanau, councillors and council chief executive Matt Prosser. He said it was likely that the community perceptions of elected members "will be further harmed by what has gone on and will adversely affect the organisation". McKenzie said the strained relationships could undermine the "good work" the council had achieved over the eight months since he was brought in. He said the council still had significant decisions to be made ahead of implementing the amendment to the Long Term Plan and submitting the quality water services delivery plan. "Despite their focus on the election ahead, candidates who are councillors have been reminded that they are still elected members, are still being remunerated and should be focused on the duties and obligations that go with that status. "I have sought reassurances that elected members will stay focused on the interests of the community they are there to serve," McKenzie said. McKenzie said his role with the council would finish at the end of this month and he had no part in the "the formal pre-election period or in relation to electioneering". "I do have a stake in seeing that the gains of the past seven months or so are not lost and Council successfully navigates its way to the end of this term of office," McKenzie said. Prosser confirmed "a number of complaints" had been made against Chung following the revelations. "A number of complaints against the elected member have been received, including some complaints under Wellington City Council's Code of Conduct. Those complaints are currently being reviewed," Prosser said.
