Sir Mark Dunajtschik withdraws support for Ray Chung after ‘dirty politics' sex gossip email
Dunajtschik, a property mogul who has been described as one of the country's most successful developers and investors, was a notable attendee at Chung's recent campaign launch.
Philanthropist Sir Mark Dunajtschik addressing Wellington City Council at a 2024 meeting. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The Herald revealed last month Dunajtschik was a key donor of Ray Chung's, saying at the time he threw his weight behind the councillor 'because Ray has both commercial business and local body experience'.
The rich-lister said he had given Chung a donation 'in the range of $20-$25K'.
When contacted by the Herald this morning to ask whether his endorsement still stands in light of the explicit email, Dunajtschik confirmed in a statement that it did not.
'Assuming the recent media reports, about dirty politics, are correct, I am disappointed. I do not support that behaviour nor will I support any candidates who engage in it', he said.
'I urge all candidates to engage in a clean campaign and address the important and urgent issues facing the city, they should play the ball, not the person'.
The philanthropist's contributions to the city include a $50 million donation towards a new acute mental health unit at Hutt Hospital as well as $53m to build the city's new children's hospital.
He made his fortune in commercial property alongside partner Dorothy Spotswood.
The couple have an estimated net worth of $450 million according to the 2025 NBR List.
Whanau said Chung's email is an example of the 'dehumanising' personal attacks she has experienced during her term as Wellington's mayor - and part of the reason she is not running for the mayoralty again.
Mayor Tory Whanau during a Wellington City Council meeting at their chambers on The Terrace. Photo / Mark Mitchell.
'This sort of behaviour is unbecoming for a public official. It's creepy. It's gross. If he's going to stay in the mayoral race, he needs to commit to a clean campaign', she said.
Chung said he did no fact-checking of the claim but found it 'interesting' and thought his fellow councillors would agree.
Wellington mayoral candidate Ray Chung at his campaign launch. Photo / Ethan Manera.
He said it was a story he had heard from a neighbour while walking his dog and he intends to apologise to Whanau for passing it on.
'I passed on exactly what I was told. I would call it gossip.'
Asked if he would apologise to Whanau, he said: 'It was never intended to go actually to her.' When pushed on this, he said he would apologise.
Chung said he was not aware of Dunajtschik revoking his endorsement when contacted by the Herald this afternoon, but called the news 'disappointing'.
'This is the first I've heard of this, of course I'm very disappointed, but I need to explain to him how all this actually transpired'.
Chung argued it was a private email which he never intended to be shared publicly.
He said he agreed with Dunajtschik's comment that politicians should play the ball, not the person.
As to whether the scandal would damage his chances to lead the capital city, Chung was unsure.
'I talk to women all the time, but whether this would damage my campaign, I don't know'.
Ethan Manera is a New Zealand Herald journalist based in Wellington. He joined NZME in 2023 as a broadcast journalist with Newstalk ZB and is interested in local issues, politics, and property in the capital. Ethan can be emailed at ethan.manera@nzme.co.nz.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Spinoff
13 hours 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
16 hours 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.
NZ Herald
18 hours ago
- NZ Herald
Solar Group in liquidation: Kiwibank among creditors owed more than $3 million
The company, which provided installation and services of solar power, pool heating and hot water systems, has ceased trading and staff have been terminated. The first liquidator's report said Kiwibank holds a General Security Agreement – granting it security interest over the borrower's assets – and is owed $1.8m. Kiwibank had engaged Ruscoe and Keen to review the financial performance and viability of Solar Group in December last year, the report said. That review was extended in February to include the company's forecast performance and cash flow. Ruscoe and Keen said they were aware of nine potential employee claims. So far, they had received four employee claims totalling $102,336, including outstanding wages, commissions and holiday pay. Inland Revenue is owed approximately $933,675, with a significant portion expected to be preferential. There are also 118 unsecured creditors, which are owed $1,059,434. Creditors include ACC, Fuji Xerox, Meridian Energy, the Ministry for Primary Industries, NZ Couriers and Spark NZ. According to a statement of affairs, Solar Group has estimated assets of $2.5m, which is largely made up of intangible assets of $1.2m. The company has stock on hand with an estimated worth of $524,136. Ruscoe and Keen said it is unknown is any funds will be available to make payment to creditors. Solar Group is also a party in the disputes tribunal and district courts. Behind the ball Last year, Solar Group managing director Roeland Driessen told the Herald that solar uptake in New Zealand was slow compared to the rest of the world. 'The number of connections is about 3% solar,' Driessen said. 'In other countries like Australia, the United States, it's 30-40%. So we are way behind [the] ball.' Cost was one of the biggest issues. A solar system for the average New Zealand home comes with a price tag of about $25,000. In November last year, SolarZero was placed into voluntary liquidation owing more than $40m to over 700 creditors and staff. The company had 169 staff at the time of liquidation and about 15,000 customers. Cameron Smith is an Auckland-based business reporter with the Herald live news team. He joined the Herald in 2015 and has covered business and sports. He reports on topics such as retail, small business, the workplace, and macro-economics.
