My Account of the Public Record

Why I am writing this

Search engines are very good at preserving controversy and very bad at preserving proportion. A headline written during a few chaotic weeks can sit above twenty or thirty years of somebody's life forever. That has happened to me.

I am not pretending I never made mistakes. I did. I am not pretending every criticism of me was dishonest. It was not. But I reject the idea that the most sensational headline, the shortest quote or somebody else's political interpretation should become my permanent biography.

This page exists because I have a right to speak for myself.

Before politics: the real origin of 0199

Long before the Pākehā Party, I had already developed a habit of walking directly into markets dominated by much larger incumbents. The roots of 0199 began before the Christchurch earthquake.

Hotel Dynamics Group taught me high-conversion direct and telephone sales. TelstraClear then brought me into its direct-sales environment to apply those lessons. The prevailing assumption was that important consumer telecommunications products needed to be sold face to face. I demonstrated that, with the right offer and process, they could be sold extremely effectively by phone. My conversion rate on suitable prospects became extraordinarily high, at times approaching 100 percent.

At the same time my mother, Pauline Ruck, was experimenting with affiliate marketing and had developed a directory concept combining telephone access with an online database. She presented that idea publicly on Dragons’ Den before I later knew the Christchurch directory operators with whom I became involved. A few months after first watching what she was doing, the commercial logic clicked for me.

Pauline Ruck presenting her directory concept on Dragons’ Den ↗

I began looking for backing and eventually became involved in a Christchurch online-directory venture associated with Andrew Beaven and Larry Springer and fronted publicly by Simon Barnett. I was contracted to handle marketing and sales. Andrew Beaven later accused me of taking their idea when I went on to build 0199. I reject that version of events. From my perspective the chronology could hardly be clearer: my mother had already presented her directory concept on national television before I knew them, and her work was what first made the model click for me.

Then the Christchurch earthquakes changed the commercial environment completely. In my account, the directory owners chose not to enforce invoicing against Christchurch businesses we had sold during that period. I understand why businesses were being treated sympathetically, but commercially it removed the revenue base I had expected from the sales operation. I was also pushed out of the central-city environment around which much of my Christchurch life had revolved.

I moved first to Wellington and built 0199 Directory Assistance around a four-digit number, a VOIP call centre, directory data, outbound sales and inbound customer contact. Each successful business sale was worth about $295 + GST. That is why my mother's old Dragons’ Den appearance remains so striking to me: a concept the Dragons declined to back became, in my hands, a product where individual telephone sales could generate hundreds of dollars and be repeated through a trained sales team.

At the time I believed the traditional Yellow-style directory and advertising model had become far too expensive and offered poor value to many small New Zealand businesses. My approach was to educate first: what did a listing actually do, where were enquiries coming from, what could a website do, what did a domain cost, what did hosting cost, and how could a business measure whether advertising was producing customers?

0199 did not have Yellow's history, capital or market position. That was exactly the point. I wanted to show that a much smaller operator could combine telecommunications, data, direct sales and the web to give businesses another route. Customers began asking us for websites, email and hosting. I expanded development capability and signed the first website customer myself. That changed my career again.

Read the full 0199 origin story →

2013: the Pākehā Party

In June 2013 I created a Facebook page called the Pākehā Party. It began partly as provocation and partly as a simple political point about what I saw as unequal treatment based on ethnicity. I was not an established politician and I did not have a party machine, donors, consultants or a press operation behind me.

Then it exploded organically.

The growth came before the news stories

This chronology matters because later reporting can create the impression that television discovered the page and caused it to take off. That is not how I experienced it.

By my recollection, the Pākehā Party page was already surging before the first mainstream news story appeared. Someone contacted me to tell me it was exploding on Twitter. I did not even use Twitter at the time. That is one reason I remember the moment so clearly: I was being told that something I had created was racing across a social network I was not participating in and barely followed.

My recollection is that this organic surge was already underway at least a day before mainstream media coverage began. People were sharing it, arguing about it and passing it from person to person. The media arrived after the phenomenon was already in motion.

Mainstream coverage undoubtedly amplified what was happening once journalists noticed it. That is different from creating it.

The comparison with the established parties is not a retrospective claim I invented. It was reported by TVNZ. The Te Karere clip is available here: TVNZ / Te Karere: Pākehā Party report ↗.

What remains especially important to me is the sequence: the page took off first; mainstream coverage followed. By the time television was explaining the phenomenon to a national audience, the organic phenomenon already existed.

What I believed people were reacting to

My argument was about equal treatment under one set of rules. Critics saw the page as racist, inflammatory or historically ignorant. Supporters saw it as permission to say things they felt could no longer be said in mainstream politics. Those disagreements were real, and I am not rewriting them away.

I also publicly rejected racist abuse appearing around the page and began moderating comments. A mass Facebook audience is not a disciplined political organisation. It attracts people for completely different reasons, including people whose views I did not share and did not want attached to me.

I have never claimed every person who clicked “like” was voting for me, or that Facebook likes automatically translated into an electable party. What interested and, in my view, alarmed established political actors was the speed. An outsider with no normal political machinery had put an idea into the public square and tens of thousands of New Zealanders had attached themselves to the conversation in days.

The “Auckland businessman” framing

Another detail that still matters to me is the way some coverage repeatedly described me simply as an “Auckland businessman”. That description was technically convenient at one point in my life, but as a summary of who I was it removed the context I thought mattered most.

I grew up in Christchurch. My early working life, hospitality years, rave and music history and a large part of my identity were rooted in Christchurch and Canterbury. The Canterbury earthquakes then disrupted my life and access to the central city badly enough that I was pushed out of the environment I had built my life around. I went first to Wellington and later to Auckland.

In my account, the journalists writing about me knew that Christchurch and earthquake history. I therefore regard the decision to present me simply as an “Auckland businessman”, while leaving out the Christchurch and earthquake context, as deliberate editorial framing rather than an innocent lack of information.

Why does that matter? Because the two descriptions create very different pictures. “Auckland businessman launches provocative political page” makes me sound like a detached operator who appeared from nowhere. “Christchurch-raised businessman displaced after the Canterbury earthquakes, later living in Wellington and Auckland” places the same person inside an actual life story.

I cannot prove what sympathy any individual editor wanted or did not want readers to feel. I can say that, from my perspective, stripping away the Christchurch and earthquake context had the effect of making me easier to caricature and harder to understand.

I later returned home. Christchurch has again been my base for at least a decade and is where I am building my current work today.

What I mean by an establishment machine

I do not mean that a secret committee met in a room and decided what everybody should do to David Ruck.

I mean something more ordinary and, in some ways, more powerful. Political incentives, media incentives, party interests, activist networks, social pressure and reputational fear can all push in the same direction without central coordination. A person can become a symbol. Once that happens, every old mistake becomes newly relevant, every clumsy sentence becomes evidence of character, and every hostile interpretation can be repeated until it feels like settled biography.

That was my experience of 2013.

I drew hostility from multiple and often mutually opposed political camps. I also experienced hostility from people I understood to have gang affiliations or street-level connections to political causes. I am not claiming that every critic coordinated with every other critic, nor that I can prove who was acting at anyone else's direction. I am describing the environment as I experienced and understood it.

What the backlash became in my life

The public story did not end when the Pākehā Party stopped being a daily headline. In my account, the reputational environment created around me in 2013 followed me for years. By 2016, when I publicly supported Donald Trump, I felt that I was already carrying a target on my back built from old headlines, political hostility and stories about me that other people repeated far more readily than they ever asked me to explain.

I say that during that later period gangs came to my home and business premises and tried to force me to sign over my company. I say I was threatened with guns. I also witnessed the consequences of serious sexual violence against a young woman who was present. I am stating that here as my account of events I experienced, not as a claim that every element has been tested in court or independently established by a third party.

What compounds that period for me is what happened afterwards. I felt abandoned not only by institutions I expected to protect me, but by my own family. I felt that the police left me with no meaningful protection and that members of my family found it easier to believe stories that made me responsible for what happened than to sit down with me and confront the reality I was describing.

One example now has its own section on this site. I later learned that my sister, Denise Ruck, had been told by a friend that the gang violence was supposedly because I owed money for drugs. I reject that explanation completely. At the time I was still earning substantial income from hosting, SEO and Google Ads management, and I was deliberate about paying what I owed. In my view, that story turned violence against me into another accusation against me, and it was accepted because it fitted an already-established caricature.

That is one of the deepest consequences I attribute to the media frenzy around my name: once a person has been publicly reduced to a villain, almost any later story can be made to fit the character already created for him. People stop asking what happened and start asking which version of the existing caricature best explains it.

I lived inside that for years. I felt left to rot among stories I believed were false while people who had judged me avoided speaking to me directly. I am no longer prepared to leave those accounts unanswered.

Read Story One: Denise Ruck →

About the “criminal background” headline

One of the search results that has followed my name for years is an NZ Herald headline from the Pākehā Party controversy saying that I “admit[ted] criminal background”. The words are connected to something real. The impression they leave without chronology is, in my view, deeply misleading.

The offending was from the 1990s. Contemporary reporting in 2013 itself described it as about sixteen years old. It is now nearly three decades in the past.

I do not deny the theft. I pleaded guilty. I served the sentence. I regret it.

What I dispute is the way an old offence was revived during a political controversy and compressed into a permanent search-engine identity, including a reported valuation of $40,000 that I do not accept reflects what I actually took.

The context behind the offence

There was a reason I committed that offence. That is not the same thing as an excuse.

I was young and heavily involved in Christchurch's rave and events scene. I had organised a large rave that, by my recollection, attracted roughly 3,000 people. It was a major undertaking involving a venue, production, security, ticket sales and a lot of people relying on the event going ahead.

The venue and security arrangements became problematic. By the time I understood how serious the situation was, the event was already being set up and tickets had been sold. Things happened around and after that event that I am not presently prepared to turn into public accusations against other people. What I can say is that property went missing and I felt responsible for trying to fix the losses.

I made a stupid and unlawful decision about how to do that.

I took DJ equipment belonging to somebody I knew. I also took his car, a second-hand Subaru. At the time I rationalised taking the equipment by telling myself that it was insured, that the owner would get replacements, and that I could use what I took to replace some of what had gone missing after the rave.

That reasoning was self-serving and wrong. Insurance does not make taking somebody else's property acceptable, and taking the car was wrong too. The owner should never have been made responsible for a problem that was mine.

The $40,000 figure

My recollection is that the property consisted of two second-hand turntables, three boxes of second-hand vinyl records, and the second-hand Subaru. I estimate the Subaru was worth about $5,000 at the time. Even including the car, I do not believe the total value of what I took was anything approaching $40,000.

Why the particulars matter

The particulars are important because a bare $40,000 valuation attached to this theft can create a very different mental picture from what I remember actually happened. A reader can easily imagine a large haul of professional musical equipment, perhaps enough to fill a van, taken from an established musician, studio or retailer. That is not my account of what I took.

My account is specific: two second-hand turntables, three boxes of second-hand vinyl records and a second-hand Subaru that I estimate was worth about $5,000. I am not listing those items to minimise what I did. I stole them. It was wrong. I am listing them because accepting responsibility does not require me to accept an inflated or misleading impression of the scale of the property.

In the context of the 2013 political controversy, I regard the combination of the $40,000 figure, the revival of an old conviction, the repeated “Auckland businessman” shorthand and the omission of my Christchurch and earthquake history as deliberate framing intended to maximise public backlash against me. That is my conclusion from the pattern of coverage and from what I experienced at the time.

The article remains online and searchable today. I experience that as continuing reputational harm, particularly when search engines surface the headline without the fuller particulars, chronology or subsequent decades of my life. I cannot establish the publisher's present-day motive merely from the fact that the article remains available, but I regard the continued absence of this context as deeply objectionable.

I have wondered how that valuation arose, including whether insurance considerations played a part, but I cannot prove another person's motive and I am not going to turn speculation into an accusation.

I also did not appreciate, when I entered the guilty plea, that the valuation was embedded in what I was admitting. By the time I realised the significance of it I was standing before the judge. I felt guilty about the theft itself, wanted to take responsibility and wanted the matter over. I pleaded guilty.

I accept that I stole the equipment and the car, and I accept responsibility for that. I do not accept that my guilty plea should be treated as proof that I personally agreed the property was worth $40,000.

If I could go back, I would not take the equipment or the car. I would deal with the losses differently, involve the appropriate people and accept whatever financial damage landed on me. I was young, I panicked, I rationalised a bad decision and somebody else paid the price for it. I cannot undo that. I can only tell the truth about it, including the parts that make me look bad.

I made mistakes too

A first-person account should not become a self-exoneration exercise. I was provocative. The original concept was deliberately provocative. I underestimated how quickly the page could grow and how much responsibility came with suddenly having that audience. I did not have the political organisation, discipline or communications infrastructure required for what the page was becoming.

I also discovered that when tens of thousands of people attach themselves to an idea, you cannot control every reason they are there or every statement they make. Moderation, wording and discipline matter enormously. I learned that in public and at speed.

Why I still think the episode had value

The positive legacy, for me, is not a demand that everyone agree with the Pākehā Party's wording or politics. It is that the episode exposed how quickly an idea outside the approved political channels could break through and how rapidly established institutions could react when it did.

It made people argue about equal treatment, ethnicity, public policy, identity and who gets to define the acceptable boundaries of debate. Some of those arguments were ugly. Others were useful. But they were real arguments, and they were happening because a message had escaped the usual gatekeepers.

It also taught me how fragile personal reputation can be when a complex person becomes a headline category. Search engines preserve controversy far longer than they preserve the years spent building businesses, employing people, training teams, creating systems or helping customers. That is one reason this website exists.

From 0199 to 2013 to GRID EATER

There is a line through these events that makes sense to me even though the subjects look unrelated.

With 0199, I challenged an established commercial intermediary and tried to give businesses a better-informed alternative. In 2013, I created a political communications phenomenon that bypassed established channels and drew a level of attention I was completely unprepared for. Today, with GRID EATER, I am again building infrastructure intended to reduce dependence on expensive or opaque intermediaries.

The technology has changed. My instinct has not: understand the system, question the margin, educate the customer or audience, own as much of the infrastructure as practical, and build an alternative.

The point of this page

You do not have to agree with my politics, my interpretation of 2013 or every decision I have made. I am not asking for that.

I am asking for proportion and chronology. I am asking that somebody searching my name can find the entrepreneur who built 0199, the salesman who learned to build systems, the person who worked in restaurants, created Surreal Entertainment and promoted large rave events while young, worked in radio and television, rebuilt around hosting and AI, made an old criminal mistake and accepts it, and experienced a political firestorm from the inside.

A headline can be part of a life. It should not be allowed to become the whole life.