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Tony Brunt

New Zealand politician

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 4, 2026
Entity authorityQ27942262
Source-derived summary

Anthony John Brunt (born 1947) is a New Zealand journalist, activist and politician. He was the founder and leader of the environmentalist Values Party in the 1970s.

Biography

Early life

Brunt was born in Auckland in 1947 and later became a journalist. He has Samoan ancestry. He briefly changed profession and became a trade union organiser before returning to his career in journalism. He then moved to Wellington to study political science at Victoria University of Wellington.

Political career

Brunt became politically active and formed the environmentalist Values Party in the early 1970s and served as its inaugural leader. He founded the party to serve as a response to the "barren and miniaturist" political culture that existed in New Zealand at the time. Then aged 25, Brunt was the youngest leader of a political party in New Zealand history. He went on to contest the Wellington electorate of Island Bay at the 1972 election, where he placed third out of six candidates, gaining 7.6% of the vote.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Tony Brunt” as new Zealand politician. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Tony, Brunt and Zealand.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1947, 1972—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1947. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Tony, Brunt and Zealand providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Tony Brunt”, the useful work is to connect “new Zealand politician” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q27942262. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1947 and 1972.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
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Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Tony Brunt”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Tony Brunt primary sources, Tony Brunt archive and Tony research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Tony Brunt”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Tony Brunt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.