Who is Behind Independent Together? Whaling, Tobacco, and Conspiracy Theories.

By Darcy Lawrey (he/him)

With roughly 100 days to go until Wellington will elect a new council, it’s likely you’ve spotted Independent Together’s bright yellow billboards around the city. The group, which opposes “party politics” around the council table, has raised over $150,000 to promote nine candidates who share a policy platform. 

The group, led by mayoral-hopeful Councillor Ray Chung, is running on a “back-to-basics” approach to governing Wellington, focused on businesses and public safety. Their flagship policy is zero rates increases over the council’s next term, inflation be damned! Taking a leaf out of Elon Musk’s book, they propose an audit of council departments, as well as halting projects such as the Golden Mile and spending council funds “smarter”.

However, there are Wellingtonians who are willing to spend plenty in support of this fiscally conservative platform. While Independent Together’s campaign funding will not be made public until after the election, property mogul Mark Dunajtschik has publicly given over $20,000 to the group. Despite election rules capping campaign spending for individual candidates at $60,000, there is no limit on how much a third-party campaign group can raise. 

Independent Together is effectively the electoral wing of Better Wellington, a right-wing political lobbying group, with each groups’ website authorised under the same name. Better Wellington’s leadership has links to whaling, big tobacco, and conspiracy theorists.

A founding member of Better Wellington, Glen Inwood, formally lobbied on behalf of the Japanese whaling industry. In this role, Inwood allegedly chartered planes to spy on whaling protestors off the coast of Australia. He has also issued press releases for Imperial Tobacco in New Zealand, and is the founder of Resistance Kiwi, a now defunct conspiracy website which promoted conspiracy theories about globalisation. Inwood met with David Seymour as an intermediary for protest organisers during the 2022 lockdown protests. 

According to The Spinoff, Resistance Kiwi’s X account was the original source of a false rumour that a video of Mayor Tory Whanau was doing the rounds. Digital researcher Keith Ng discovered that Resistance Kiwi and Independent Togethers’ websites were being hosted on the same private web server. 

In an interview with Salient in May, Ray Chung said he was “very concerned” to hear about Inwood’s prior involvement with the tobacco and whaling industries. He said that despite knowing them for 6 years, “no one has mentioned this before”. Inwood’s controversial links to whaling and big tobacco have been publicly available on his Wikipedia page since at least 2015.