Heiress kidnapping, "Little Britain", and Sovereign Individuals
Or, a short exploration of the crimes of the New Zealand elite
This year has seen much discussion about the phenomenon of the “prominent New Zealander” headline. Those who have followed me for a while may have seen my multiple threads on former ACT Party president Tim Jago. However, instead of another op-ed about name suppression or the infallibility of the justice system, I wish to present a short history of “elite misbehaviour” in New Zealand. This piece is a triptych, ranging from before the Treaty of Waitangi, to a (nowhere near exhaustive) history of the New Zealand elite’s crimes, to the new “investor class” now increasingly calling Aotearoa home. This is an attempt at answering why the “prominent New Zealander” keeps on ending up in court, and why it seems like they keep on getting a slap on the wrist.
In 1826, Edward Gibbon Wakefield kidnapped 15 year old heiress Ellen Turner in an attempt to steal her family fortune. The subsequent trial was tabloid fodder in Britain, with newspapers and books covering every turn. He was sentenced to 3 years in prison, and began plotting other get rich quick schemes while incarcerated. He turned his attention to recently established colonies in the Antipodes.
Wakefield identified what he viewed as crucial flaws in these attempts: a failure to restrict primitive accumulation to those “worthy”, and a failure to recreate the British class system. Those who migrated had a chance at upward mobility unparalleled back in the motherland, at the expense of expropriated indigenous land and resources. In Capital, Marx covers a section of Wakefield’s 1833 book England And America, writing that
“Mr. Peel, [Wakefield] moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, ‘Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.’ Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!”
In books and pamphlets written in his cell, Wakefield laid out his strategy: through the strategic importation of certain classes, the mass acquisition of indigenous land for dirt cheap prices, and the controlled sale of said land to those deemed worthy, a wage-labour class could be created, ready to serve the new landed gentry of New Zealand.
While Wakefield’s main instrument of colonisation, the New Zealand Company, shuttered in the mid-1850s due to numerous difficulties, Wakefield laid the groundwork for what would become the British colony of New Zealand. The Company’s voyages, starting in 1839, forced the hand of colonial officials to sign the Treaty of Waitangi. The Company’s settlements in Wellington, Dunedin, and Nelson became some of New Zealand’s largest urban centres.
It is certainly interesting that the man most responsible for the colonisation of New Zealand made his plans while in a prison cell serving time for abducting a 15 year old in an attempt to accumulate his own fortune. New Zealand, from even before its official founding as a British colony, was already being dreamed up as a place for the elite to escape to.
From Wakefield to the mid-20th century, there exists little literature on the scale of abuse in New Zealand. The pasting of Britain’s power structures onto New Zealand certainly didn’t alleviate the issue of elite misbehaviour. Britain’s notoriously abusive school system was transplanted here, with the first ones opening in the 1850s and 60s. A number of the oldest have been mired in child abuse scandals, with many offenders operating under institutional cover for decades. A journal article on New Zealand’s “age-structured homosexuality” between 1920-1950 examined over 300 (surviving) records of men charged with sex with underage boys, while also noting that the men charged were predominantly lower class.
“Maybe wealthier men did not tend to come into contact with message boys or did not care to associate with them. Or perhaps police dealt with upper-middle-class men more leniently, and those cases did not make it to court.”
From the 1960s and 70s on, as the taboo on talking about abuse began to soften, stories began to circulate. Schools, borstals, psychiatric facilities, and religious institutions were rife with offenders, with the Abuse in Care Royal Commission finding that 250,000 people were abused in state and religious care between 1950-2000. Reports of heinous abuse at Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital emerged in 1976, primarily centred on head of the adolescent unit, Dr. Selwyn Leeks. The NZ Medical Council “investigated” before sweeping it under the rug and letting Leeks move to Australia, beginning a decades long cover-up that continued until his death in 2022.
The same Royal Commission also “found ‘deeply suspicious’ evidence of a paedophile ring involving politicians in the 1980s”. Just last month, a police review found that Muldoon’s Health and Immigration Minister Aussie Malcolm “likely engaged in coercive and/or criminal sexual conduct with ‘multiple young boys’” after allegations were raised through the Commission. The fact he was accused was only revealed 2 days after he died last year. Ron Brierley, a corporate raider who became one of the oligarchs to make a fortune through 1980s Rogernomics, was caught with 46,000 CP images in 2019.
This trend of sweeping abuse under the rug continued into the 21st century. A 2005 Time article opens with the question “is New Zealand a haven for pedophiles?” Dozens of New Zealanders who were found to have purchased child porn remained free months after US Customs agents handed over a list, and noted that “even if New Zealand authorities succeed in charging a person with possession of child pornography, the maximum penalty the suspect faces is a $NZ2,000 fine with no jail time.” The law was finally changed to make possession an actual crime later that year.
In 2020, it emerged that numerous staff at Dilworth, the largest boarding school in Australasia, had abused at least 233 students between the 1970s and 2000s. Both the assistant principal and head chaplain were among those convicted, with a victim describing the school as a “free-for-all of violent physical assault”. In 2021, meat packing fortune heir and arts patron Sir James Wallace was convicted for numerous sexual assaults, with 89 letters from prominent New Zealanders requesting leniency in his sentencing.
Now in 2025, it seems like another “prominent New Zealander” story drops into the news every few weeks. Whether getting name suppression, a slap on the wrist, or not charged at all, the country’s elite seem to be having an incredible run in the courts. You can take your pick out of stories just in this year alone.
The PM’s deputy chief press secretary escaping prosecution for secretly taping sex workers. Deputy Police Commissioner McSkimming being caught with CP on a work computer. ACT Party president Tim Jago being convicted of sexually assaulting 2 boys, sentenced to only 2 and a half years in prison and receiving name suppression for almost as long. A 46 year old “rich-lister” charged with CSAM receiving permanent name suppression, thanks to a “good character” assessment and a five-digit donation to charity.
This coddling of the New Zealand elite and their crimes has been going on for decades and decades. Authorities will turn a blind eye. The court system will bend over backwards to ensure that they get a slap on the wrist. New Zealand media will run cover, as they have a “tradition of not reporting news on public figures’ sexual affairs.”1 Some of the rumours I’ve heard would blow up both sides of Parliament, a few major businesses, and numerous media careers. But what happens when that protection begins to extend to a new elite who are now arriving to Aotearoa’s shores?
In recent years, thanks in part to John Key’s efforts to further financialise the country for his banker friends, New Zealand has become a bolthole at the bottom of the world for those wishing to escape forthcoming societal collapse, or prying eyes. The new “investor class” buying up North Shore mansions or sheep stations in the South Island has resulted in a major shift of who New Zealand is “meant” for.
The 1997 book The Sovereign Individual (co-written by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father) outlined a post-capitalist collapse where technological development would render the nation-state obsolete, and libertarian city-states led by CEO kings would emerge from the wreckage. Sound familiar? Peter Thiel has cited it as his biggest influence. The book mentions New Zealand 13 times, including in a list of its most important takeaways:
Jurisdictions of choice in which to enjoy high living standards with economic opportunity include reform areas in the Southern hemisphere, such as New Zealand, Chile, and Argentina, which boast adequate to superior infrastructure and many beautiful landscapes and are unlikely to be targets of terrorists wielding nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.
Thiel, given a New Zealand citizenship in 2011 by Key’s government after spending only 12 days in the country, bought a 477-acre property near Wanaka in 2015. In 2016, OpenAI’s Sam Altman revealed he had an arrangement with Thiel that in the event of a “systemic collapse scenario”, they would both fly to New Zealand to wait it out at his property. While Thiel’s attempts at building a luxury lodge have been seemingly abandoned, other ultra-rich figures are heeding his calls to escape to the Antipodes. LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman told the New Yorker in 2017 that “saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more”. Google co-founder Larry Page attained residency, using it in 2021 to get around quarantine rules to get his son medical treatment. The coalition’s changes to the Active Investor Plus Visa earlier this year, where you can pay $5m in exchange for residency, will certainly help attract more. At least 386 Americans have already applied for the scheme, with PM Luxon saying during the announcement “we’re a safe haven in a very volatile and uncertain world”.
Besides the chilling question of what these people plan to do with this country in the event of a collapse, a more pressing question is what they are doing here now. What happens up those long driveways, on sprawling estates (or underground bunkers), behind closed doors? Thiel has long been subject to rumours about his fondness for towel boys, not helped by recent revelations about his relationship with Jeffery Epstein. Ex-NBC host Matt Lauer, fired in 2017 for multiple sexual assault allegations, began leasing a 6500-hectare sheep station near Wānaka the same year. Controversial British media personality Noel Edmonds moved from the UK to a 800-acre property near Nelson in the 2010s, where he built a “wellness centre” and commented on the area’s “spiritual freedom”. Author Neil Gaiman hired a homeless, vulnerable 22 year old to work as a live-in nanny at his Waiheke mansion in 2022, before repeatedly sexually assaulting her. Emmy Rākete wrote about the case in Overland:
“Scarlett Pavlovich endured what she endured because capitalism in New Zealand worked hard to make sure that she did. A rich man can rape a poor woman in a bathtub and, in some way, get some twisted satisfaction from doing so. But the rich — all of the rich, every last one — directly financially benefit from having built a world in which poor women have no choice but to submit to being raped.”
While some may argue that pointing to this as a wider pattern is speculative, after all of the revelations of the past decade about what elites get up to behind closed doors, is it out of the question? The current government is trying to sell off as much as possible to whoever’s bidding, and if they’re trying to attract a new “investor class” to move to New Zealand, would that not include catering to their desires? It’s not like this is anything out of the ordinary. They’re simply extending the same protection that powerful New Zealanders have to those who can pay for it.
Locked in his prison cell, Wakefield dreamed up plans for his country’s elite to forge Aotearoa into a “Little Britain”. He succeeded, with New Zealand taking on the pedocratic tendencies of the British state, where the depraved acts of the rich and powerful are covered up by the state’s institutions because those running the state are just as complicit. And now, the government is pitching these islands as a “safe haven” for the international elite, who are lining up to pay for boltholes here as the world outside begins to crumble. The colony of New Zealand is entering its next stage.
The next piece will conclude Exit From Affco’s series on the 1951 waterfront dispute, before moving to more contemporary topics that I’m sure will interest many of you greatly. Thank you again for reading, subscribe if you’re not already, and if you want to support the work I do here, you can shout me a coffee through Ko-fi. Ka kite.
Dirty Politics - Nicky Hager (p.111)
Brilliant work that needs a lot more views.
The Herald have mysteriously taken down the link to the Sir James Wallace article, wayback machine has it thankfully:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240925171741/https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/sir-james-wallace-the-film-stars-musicians-knights-and-dames-who-wrote-letters-of-support-for-disgraced-patrons-sentencing/Y5TTAST3K5HT5IMHKEBZXQ653I/