Wellington’s deputy mayor has been censured and forced to apologise over his behaviour online after calling a member of the public a “nonce”.
Ben McNulty, an active social media user, took to X (formerly Twitter) last month over what he described as an “absolutely wild privacy breach” after details of travel arrangements he had made appeared to have fallen into the hands of scammers.
Another user suggested the issue may have originated with his own email or booking process.
“Why throw [the travel site] under the bus before you know what’s happened? With your lack of critical thinking you have no place in politics,” a user named Mike B commented.
McNulty responded calling Mike B a nonce, in a comment that has since been deleted.
Nonce is British slang commonly used to refer to a person who has committed a sexual offence against a child.
That exchange has led to a Code of Conduct complaint against the deputy mayor, which Mayor Andrew Little has upheld against him.
The Code of Conduct decision document, seen by the Herald, showed Mike B complained to the council, saying the city’s deputy mayor had essentially called him a paedophile.
Mayor Andrew Little agreed that paedophile is an accepted meaning of the word nonce, and found McNulty’s behaviour “constitutes a failure to remember the respect and dignity of the elected member’s office when dealing with the public”, therefore breaching the council’s Code of Conduct.
“It is also a failure to accord respect to an individual citizen, even if the identity of the citizen is unknown at the time the comment is made,” Little said.
McNulty said he did not know the full meaning of the term.
The complainant asked for a public apology, damages, a formal censure from the council, and removal of McNulty from his role of deputy mayor.
Little ordered McNulty to both publicly and privately apologise for the exchange.
Yesterday, the deputy mayor apologised on X.
“In January, I responded to an anonymous user’s post by saying they were a nonce. I now know that term has a meaning I did not intend, and using it was offensive. I regret using the term and apologise for doing so,” he said.
The mayor found no grounds for damages, arguing the complainant’s reputation could not be harmed because his full name was not linked to his X account.
Stripping McNulty of his position as deputy mayor would be “disproportionate to the wrong that was done”, Little said, and the finding of a breach of the Code of Conduct was formal censure enough.
Speaking to the Herald this morning, McNulty said it was a “learning lesson” and “certainly won’t happen again”.
“It was a hostile interaction on Twitter from an anonymous account, I responded with a term that I subsequently learnt has much worse connotations than what I understood it to mean, I’ve emailed the complainant to apologise and put out the statement on Twitter saying that the language was inappropriate and I fully accept that,” he said.
Asked what he thought the word meant, McNulty said he understood it to be the “equivalent to someone that’s being a bit of a dick”.
When asked whether it was appropriate for the deputy mayor to call a member of the public a dick, McNulty declined to comment further, reiterating his apology.
McNulty, a second-term Labour Party councillor, was named as Little’s deputy for the first half of the term after he was re-elected to council in October last year with a record number of votes in his Takapū Northern ward.
Little said at the time he was “impressed with Ben’s grasp of the important issues facing Wellington”.
“I’ll be throwing absolutely everything I’ve got into this role to ensure we build a cohesive team and positive council culture where all voices are heard,” McNulty said at the time.
Ethan Manera is a Wellington-based journalist covering Wellington issues, local politics and business in the capital. He can be emailed at ethan.manera@nzme.co.nz.