Even his electoral office was eccentric, a house painted in a great shock of loud, screeching blue set out the back of a petrol station among empty houses owned by a building removals company. Chris Penk, No 18 on the National Party list, seven years in Parliament,MP for Kaipara, minister of three relatively obscure portfolios, is in possession of something volatile, something appealing, something generally absent in New Zealand politics and just about entirely missing in National: character.
He goes about his political business quietly, reliably, and, as you would expect from a former servant of the Royal New Zealand Navy, loyally. But he goes about his other consuming interest — social media, namely X — with good great humour, and essentially positions himself as a troll. He is the right-wing provocateur the left loves to hate. He rarks them up. He goes too far. His behaviour is a great shock of loud, screeching blue.
I wanted to meet him not merely out of an admiration for his brand of comedy and satire. Penk is true-blue National, a believer of all that personal responsibility shtick, and right now is on the right side of history: National’s resounding victory at the polls last year is a very clear sign of the way New Zealand is thinking. There has been much hand-wringing and denial in the media about the philosophical direction of the new government, but voters got what they wanted. They wanted this Age of Luxon, his business acumen, his promise of success — they wanted the way he thought. I wanted to see the way Penk thought. Or, rather, some of the multitude and plurality of ways: his tweets on X are a very clear sign he has a lively and wandering intelligence.
Penk is 44. He grew up in Kelston. His travels have taken him approximately 1.5km to where he lives now, in Glen Eden, with his wife and their two sons aged 6 and 2. He joined the navy after university, and served on warships. He later enlisted as a submarine navigator with the Australian naval forces. He took on the comedy role of aide-de-camp for the Governor-General — his responsibilities included holding a cushion — and re-joined civilian life as a lawyer. He entered Parliament in 2017.
Chris Penk is true-blue National. Photo / Alex Burton
We met at his offices across the road from Mate’s Bar in Huapai northwest of Auckland. Poor old Huapai suffers one of New Zealand’s ugliest town centres, created and designed as a truck stop, although the surrounding countryside is pretty and horsey with lots of vineyards and fruit trees. Penk is tall, slim, pale, and his crooked smile signals that he’s good fun, a maverick. We spoke for over an hour. He said some things he probably ought not to have said, and he spoke beautifully about what water sounds like from a submarine. The way he talked of “submariners” was with honour, and nostalgia, too: many politicians yearn for a sense of purpose after they leave politics, but Penk achieved that sense before he entered politics. You could say he’s at home in deep water.
The first thing I asked him about was based on misinformation from Simon Bridges. I’d recently had lunch with the former National leader, and he seemed to recall that Penk’s maiden speech was an acrostic — the first word of every paragraph spelling out a secret message. He was half-right. Penk’s debut in the House was quite dull, but concluded with the revelation that it was an exercise in “maiden speech bingo”: he’d planted three songs from the Beatles, three chapters from the Bible, and three names of New Zealand warships. Another, later speech did indeed play with an acrostic.
I said, “Why, though? Why the maiden speech bingo, why an acrostic?”
He said, “Just to amuse myself. As an Opposition backbencher in one’s first term, one speaks a lot in Parliament and no one listens. So one amuses oneself. I won’t tell you what it [the acrostic] spelled out. It spelled out a phrase which I didn’t feel bold enough even under the cloak of parliamentary privilege to say. It might have been to do with political party donations, but I couldn’t possibly remember.”
“Did it take you a while to figure out how to do it?”
“Oh, not really. Because I mean the name of the party was easy enough. And then all you do is say what you want to say and then you sort of fill in the gaps.”
I said, “So for example the first word was Labour.”
“It wasn’t actually. My first word was New Zealand. And then, of course, once I got into my speech, I started with ‘first’ as one often does.”
Judith Collins once reprimanded Chris Penk for comments he made about Winston Peters. Photo / RNZ
Right. He meant the Serious Fraud Office accusation that the New Zealand First Foundation had obtained nearly $750,000 by deception between 2015 and 2020. The High Court dismissed the case. Penk’s concealed teasing of the political party now in a coalition government with National was somewhat more explicit in 2021: in response to Winston Peters describing National MPs as “sex maniacs”, Penk took to the Twitter machine, and wrote, “Peters is the real s*x maniac because he can f*** a whole country at once.”
What seemly asterisks. As for his maiden speech, the Beatles songs and Bible chapters were nods to his parents. They raised five children, all boys; their mother sent them to Methodist church and Sunday school during the school term, and in the holidays their father sent them to Catholic mass. Penk voted against the End of Life Choice Act 2019 and the Abortion Legislation Act 2020.
He said, “Stable, almost to the point of being sheltered.”
“My understanding is that one of your brothers has created a firework with the spectacular name of The Penkonator.”
He said, “Ah. That will be the work of Scott. He won’t want me talking about him. Private individual.”
“You’re kind of a Penkonator yourself, aren’t you?”
“Why would you say that?
“Well, you’re provocative. Explosive.”
Chris Penk joined the navy after university, and served on warships. Photo / Alex Burton
He said, with cheerful disingenuity, “Do you think so? Gosh. I’m more provoked than provocative. I think we all have our fireworks moments. For me, I tend to think it’s only when someone has lit my proverbial fuse in a way that I think requires or allows response in kind. But I’ve probably inflamed the situation.”
“Out of amusement?”
He said, “Yeah. Honestly, yeah. And if you were to include this in the piece, no one will believe it, but I never intended to be really caustic so much as amused or maybe amusing. And of course the more risk you take, the more you amuse people, but also the greater the risk of offending. It’s a fine line and I’ve gotten on the wrong side of the line a couple of times.”
When she led National, Judith Collins reprimanded Penk in public for his “s*x maniac” tweet about Peters. Luxon, too, scolded Penk (“insensitive”) for his tweet directed at Tova O’Brien after the closure of Today FM: “Your poor ratings crashed an entire radio station.” Entertainingly, and affectionately, one person on X has described Penk as National’s “social media bot generator”.
I wondered what kind of influence the defence force had on his character. Penk enlisted in the navy at 19. He’d applied for journalism school, but somehow managed to fail to get in. We talked about the good times he enjoyed in the navy, the jokes, the banter, how the funniest guy he’s ever met in his life was a submarine officer: “Clever. Witty. Also sometimes crude in a way that you could have got away with 15, 20 years ago and probably couldn’t now.”
Penk typically inspires over 100 replies, about half of them apoplectic, to his X thoughts. He recently went fairly Penkonator on former defence minister Peeni Henare for saying at Waitangi, “I lift my gun, I let the shots do the talking.” Penk, caustically, not even trying to amuse, on X: “Sorry but the guy who ran our Defence Force into the ground should be embarrassed to spout bravado nonsense.”
Sorry but the guy who ran our Defence Force into the ground should be embarrassed to spout bravado nonsense like, "I lift my gun and I let the shots do the talking"https://t.co/wjIJCkasFi
I asked him about that, and he said, “As it happens, I get on with the guy. Or I have until now.”
The tweet provoked numerous howls of outrage from the left. The same thing happened during the leaders debate in the 2023 election campaign, when Penk tweeted his huge indignation about Chris Hipkins bringing up the revelations that National MP Sam Uffindell was asked to leave King’s College after beating a younger student with a bed leg. Penk’s tweets took the higher ground. It exposed him to ridicule. I asked if Hipkins’ comments made him angry. He denied it. “But,” I said, “it drove you to the Twitter machine.”
“Oh that’s not hard,” he said. “Come on, man! That’s twice a day.”
Penk said, “If anyone thinks that my leader is weak, then they have no idea about the guy and haven’t seen him in the settings that I’ve seen him.”
I asked, “How would you describe him in those settings?”
He said, “Focused. Also strong, because I need that direct contradiction to your appallingly misguided characterisation. But I think focused, and determined, although that’s kind of an aspect of focused, isn’t it?”
Turning the conversation back to the actions of his parliamentary colleague Sam Uffindell, I asked, “Have you ever beaten anyone with a bed leg at King’s College?”
Chris Penk entered Parliament in 2017. Photo / Alex Burton
He said, “I didn’t go to King’s College.”
“Do you think you have any skeletons in the closet?”
He said, “I’ve done plenty of stupid things of which I’m deeply ashamed and would be horrified for anyone to know them. But those are things that I’ve said and thought and done that I know to judge myself on, but wouldn’t be interesting in any kind of way, I think.”
“Criminal?”
“No.”
“Offensive?”
“Probably? Certainly. In fact, yeah, of course I’ve said offensive things, done offensive things.”
“What offensive opinions have you held?”
“Actually, I’ve changed my mind on a few issues over the years, which I think we probably all have. But I don’t think I’ve ever held an opinion that would be offensive in the sense that it was ever ... I don’t think I’ve had an opinion that was based on nothing more or less than being spiteful or divisive for its own sake.”
“What about offensive actions?”
“Probably. Genuinely harder to think about. If you ask if I’m more ashamed of a thing I’ve done or a thing I’ve said or a thing I’ve thought, it would be a thing I’ve thought every day of the week. I’ve had some terrible thoughts about things that I would consider doing.”
“What the blazes are you talking about? Like, killing people?”
He said, “Oh, not very often. You’re alone here in the compound! Please don’t put that in. I don’t even know how we got on to this sort of thing. But nothing appalling, you know, not serial-killer kind of actions. I don’t know. Can you just read The Seven Deadly Sins and use your imagination? Just ordinary things that people think about.”
Chris Penk is proud of his leader, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Lust, greed, wrath … Penk invited another journey inside his mind when he talked about his life aquatic, as a submarine navigator. The longest he’d spent under water was 53 days.
He said, “You’ve got a lot of time to think. Submarine watches for example are six hours, and a quite reasonable chunk of that is looking through a periscope at absolutely nothing other than one-third sea and two-thirds sky. You’re looking, but you’re not really seeing anything. So I thought quite a lot about politics and political philosophy.
“At university, I had a left-wing view of the world which was around collectivism, but my thoughts evolved into thinking that people working together was equally able to be applied to a right-wing view of the world. If we think about limited government — if we believe as I do, that by encouraging society through community groups, iwi organisations, sports clubs, churches, business, whatever — if we allow those entities that are not government to work together and to be encouraged, with some government funding, I felt as though that was a better way of realising my ideals of collectivism.”
I thought the key word in Penk’s theorem of collectivism was the blithe “whatever”. I was more interested in his experience of leagues beneath the sea. I asked, “What does the sea look like through a periscope?”
He said, “Well, there are different colours at different times. But one thing you don’t expect is that the sea sounds quite interesting. It’s quite noisy. There are millions of sea creatures that make a lot of noise, and at certain times of day they’re more noisy. And submariners know this because the time that you do the things within your boat that are noisy, you do those at the same time as the sea making noise, thereby making it less likely that you’ll be able to be detected. So you run diesel engines for instance at the morning chorus and evening chorus.”
I asked, “Is life on a submarine mesmerising?”
He said, “It’s quite addictive because it’s its own little world, and it’s strange to not be in a submarine when you’ve been in one for three months. Some people find it difficult to adjust. They can’t drive very easily because they’re just so used to everything being so close to them. And coming up to the surface — the first time that the hatch is opened to the conning tower and you scramble up on to the bridge, that first taste of the air, the fresh air that you didn’t realise you hadn’t been breathing, is just absolutely incredible.”
He’d said that everyone on a submarine has a strict role. I asked him how he saw his role in the submarine of government. He couldn’t figure that one out, but found it easier when I asked him how he saw his role on board the warship of government.
He said, “I reckon I’m the guy standing on the foc’s’le when we’re ready to tie up alongside. I’ve got to hiff the rope over so someone else can catch it and tie us up alongside, and if I stuff that up, everyone’s gonna know. But until that moment I might as well have not been on board.”
He was just being funny. He takes the work seriously, but is incapable of taking himself seriously. “He’s one to watch,” Simon Bridges said of Penk, admiringly; I think he meant it more ways than one.
