Paul Henry will stand for the ACT Party in this year's election, ACT leader David Seymour announced on Tuesday morning in Auckland.

Henry addressed reporters from the QT hotel rooftop after the announcement. He said he resigned from TVNZ's board that same morning, telling reporters the role had become "untenable" for him once his candidacy became public. He had been appointed to the TVNZ board the previous year.

ACT had promoted the event to media as a "major election-related announcement" without confirming Henry's name beforehand.

Henry said he had been weighing a return to politics since speaking at ACT's "Change Makers" rally in Auckland in June 2024, where he appeared as a guest speaker on the party's official social media. That rally came as Seymour set a public target of 15 percent for ACT at the 2026 election.

Henry said his decision was driven by hopes for his grandchildren and concern about a Labour-led government, which he described as "a complete disaster."

Henry stood for the National Party in Wairarapa in 1999 and lost to Labour's Georgina Beyer, whose win made political history as a significant moment in New Zealand politics. More than 25 years separate that campaign from this one. Since then, Henry has worked as a broadcaster on TVNZ's Breakfast and Close Up, then in Australian and British television, and more recently as a TVNZ board member — giving him a public profile that few list candidates typically bring to a campaign launch.

ACT has not yet confirmed which electorate seat or list position Henry will occupy. This matters for assessing what his candidacy actually changes about ACT's election chances, as opposed to what it changes about media attention to ACT's campaign.

Henry's departure from the TVNZ board removes an obvious problem: a state broadcaster board member standing as a parliamentary candidate creates a conflict of interest. But it also meant ACT picked up a candidate with minimal time for the usual vetting process that accompanies most candidate selections. Whether this reflects confidence that Henry's profile will do the work normally done by weeks of local campaigning, or simply the reality that a rooftop press conference generates momentum regardless of preparation, matters less than the electoral arithmetic.

Seymour's 2024 rally target of 15 percent was itself notable for a party that was polling well below that mark when the target was set. It remains unclear whether a high-profile broadcaster moving into electoral politics will shift that number. Celebrity candidacies in New Zealand's MMP system — where voters elect both local representatives and party lists — have produced mixed results. They don't always translate public recognition into party votes, and Henry's own record is instructive: his electorate loss in 1999 against a candidate who became a historic first shows that profile alone hasn't been enough for him before.

What Tuesday's announcement does confirm is how Seymour chose to handle the news. Rather than fold Henry into a routine candidate list announcement, he made this Henry's story, delivered by Henry himself from a rooftop stage. That choice signals how ACT wants the candidacy read — as a standalone event rather than one name among many on a list. What it doesn't yet tell anyone is where Henry sits on that list, what local electorate work he might do, or how the party intends to use him between now and polling day.