Recent revelations of Ray Chung spreading sexual rumours about Tory Whanau shouldn’t be a surprise to those who have followed his lone term on council.
Windbag is The Spinoff’s Wellington issues column, written by Wellington editor Joel MacManus. Subscribe to the Windbag newsletter to receive columns early.
Wellington mayoral candidate Ray Chung is a 75-year-old man who writes emails spreading rumours about his colleague’s “pendulous soft breasts” and “tempestuous sex”.
On Friday, the NZ Herald revealed that Chung sent emails to fellow city councillors in 2023 detailing salacious and unverified rumours about mayor Tory Whanau’s sex life. Whanau told The Spinoff she was considering legal action against Chung. “I believe we must take a stand against these kinds of false, sexist and personal attacks,” she said.
The issue here isn’t just that Chung has questionable morals. It’s that he has horrendously poor judgment. Multiple councillors and council staff told The Spinoff that Chung has a habit of making inappropriate comments in the workplace.
Councillor Rebecca Matthews raised a complaint to the mayor and deputy mayor in 2023 after a conversation in the council offices where Chung explicitly described the penis of a man who had died in a high-profile tragic event. Matthews wrote in her account at the time: “Ray said to me in the councillors’ lounge that he met with the police yesterday…[identifying information removed]…He went on to describe how the young man who recently died was found with his fly undone, but he reassured me that ‘he didn’t have a hard on’.”
Another council source recalled Chung making phone calls in the council offices where he loudly referred to Whanau as a “bitch”. Chung did not respond to multiple requests for comment on these specific claims.
Chung has a record of controversial public statements – including this comment on Scoop, where he compared a council action plan for food sustainability to the Cambodian genocide: “I’ve worked in Cambodia and visited the ‘killing fields’ often and I can see where this idea came from now! We have a council who are driven by ideology as much as Pol Pot.”
As a councillor, Chung has been erratic. He often loses his cool in meetings or goes off on unhinged and unrelated rants. After three years, he still doesn’t seem to have a strong understanding of council processes; he tries to give speeches at the wrong times or asks off-topic questions.
Operating in a non-traditional way would be fine if he were effective around the council table, but he isn’t. The intellectual heft on the council’s conservative opposition comes from Diane Calvert and Tony Randle, both of whom are detail-oriented, engaged and strategic. They write intricate amendments and play background games to disrupt Whanau’s agenda. Meanwhile, Chung is like the popular kid in the group project who volunteers to lead the presentation, but butchers it because he didn’t do any of the work and doesn’t understand what he’s talking about.
At this point, every journalist in Wellington knows Chung is a bunny. It’s easy to bait him into giving a stupid quote. Sometimes it’s completely unforced, like when he told Newstalk ZB’s Ethan Manera the mayor was “full of shit” during an interview that he apparently forgot was being recorded.
Chung became the leading mayoral contender on the right because he is an incredibly active campaigner. He’s always out and about, being outspoken and raising his profile. He capitalised on the rising tide of anger about rates increases, bike lanes, and the council’s perceived “woke ideology”.
Along the way, he amassed an enormous war chest (Chung told the NZ Herald he had received $200,000 in donations) through his campaign ticket Independent Together and its campaign surrogate, Better Wellington, with support from property developers Vlad Barbalich and Mark Dunajtschik (Dunajtschik withdrew his support after the revelations of Chung’s rumour-mongering emails).
That money will almost certainly go to waste. It was inevitable that the wheels would fall off Chung’s campaign once he faced any serious scrutiny.
Ray Chung is Trump without the tactics. Winston Peters without the wit. Wayne Brown without the brains. The human personification of the angriest and least-informed comment section on Facebook. He lacks the intellectual and temperamental qualities that we should expect from our elected officials.
The real tragedy in this ordeal is the state of the Wellington mayoral race. By sucking up so much early attention and financial support, Chung may have blocked better candidates from emerging on the right. It seems likely that Diane Calvert, a much more experienced and competent councillor, would have run if Chung hadn’t built such an early lead. Or perhaps a former MP or prominent business leader would have come out of the woodwork. Among current candidates, Karl Tiefenbacher is the only somewhat serious alternative for centre-right voters.
With Tory Whanau out of the race, the only candidate pushing frontrunner Andrew Little from the left is Alex Baker, a late entrant who has a lot of work ahead of him to build name recognition. Meanwhile, Little seems determined to run the most milquetoast campaign in the history of New Zealand politics. His recent policy announcements have included a promise to release yet another annual report and a commitment to protect the Brooklyn library, despite there being no suggestion that the library is actively under threat (its closure was mistakenly included as a cost-cutting measure in a draft document in 2024, but this was quickly withdrawn).
Wellington is a city with many problems, and Wellingtonians deserve a mayoral race that is a rigorous debate of ideas. Unfortunately, so long as Ray Chung is a major candidate, that’s not what they’ll get.
