PAUL HENRY: I’m doing this for my grandchildren

Today, I announced that I am standing for ACT at this year’s election. The media will have plenty to say about my decision but I wanted to tell YOU directly why I am standing.

New Zealand has extraordinary potential, but we are not living up to it. We should be one of the most prosperous countries on Earth. Instead, many families are struggling to pay the bills, businesses are being buried beneath red tape, and many of our best young people feel they have to leave in search of better opportunities overseas.

Too many good New Zealanders can see the managed decline of this country and say nothing. I’ve spent decades speaking my mind on television and radio. But speaking up is not enough.

Six years of Labour, helped along by New Zealand First and the Greens, left New Zealand in the shit and up to its eyeballs in debt. For a small country like ours, boggling debt.

Since 2023, the country has been nudged in the right direction, but nowhere near hard or fast enough. National treads too lightly. It is too often paralysed by the fear that meaningful change might upset someone. ACT has provided the Government with a spine, but it has not had enough MPs to deliver the scale and speed of reform New Zealand needs.

So this is the choice at this election. ACT can return to Parliament stronger, with the MPs and resources to force the change this country needs. Or Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori can drag us back to the failed ideas that put us in the debt situation we’re now facing. They can borrow and tax us more. They are great at it!

Do not leave that fight to somebody else. This is our fight and our time!

My wife and I have ten grandchildren between us. I want them to grow up in a country that rewards success, values freedom, and gives people every opportunity to build a better life through their own efforts.

Instead, government debt is being passed on to people who had no say in creating it. I don’t want my legacy to be servitude and missed opportunity.

Our economy is too small, our bureaucracy is too large, and the parties of the left, at the risk of repeating myself, offer only more borrowing, more tax, more regulation, more separatism, and more ways to divide New Zealanders into competing groups. I promise you, the result of all that will not land us at prosperity.

Without a productive economy, we cannot afford world class teachers, doctors, nurses, medicines, police officers, infrastructure, you name it. Business as usual is not the safe option. It’s not an option at all. Business as usual is what landed us here.

New Zealand will not succeed by squabbling over how to divide a shrinking pie. We need to grow the pie.

ACT has already achieved far more in Government than its size would suggest. It has saved the Budget twice, slashing billions in wasteful spending while delivering record medicines funding, improved school attendance, and 46,000 fewer victims of violent crime.

Corrosive race-based policies that infected every area of government have been seriously wound back. Businesses have been freed from layers of unnecessary red tape.

But the job is nowhere near finished and I’m not going to risk waking up on November 8 this year wondering what more I personally could have done.

I will be travelling the country during this campaign, making the case directly to New Zealanders that decline is not inevitable and timid change is not enough. I hope to be coming to a town near you soon. I’ve been told there’s a van with my face on it… I have arrived!

Do not go quietly into that dark night… Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori are preparing to take New Zealand backwards. I can sniff their diabolical plotting in the wind.

Back ACT to lock them out and unlock New Zealand’s potential.

And let me make this promise to you now. I’m not doing this to waste my time or yours. I’m doing it now before it's too late.

Paul Henry is a former broadcaster and current ACT list candidate