If there was a change of Government the next Government could potentially be full of fundamentalist Christians, anti vaxers and all sorts of people whose view of Aotearoa is not conventional or reality based.
Act has a number of candidates who, how to put this politely, struggle with reality.
From Russell Palmer at Radio New Zealand:
ACT is in damage control after candidates were revealed to have made inflammatory posts on social media.
One candidate who likened vaccine mandates to concentration camps has resigned, while another who linked the Covid-19 vaccines to drownings has renounced the comments and apologised.
A third candidate, Anto Coates, who referred to Covid-19 as “mass hysteria” and in a parody song said former prime minister Dame Jacinda Ardern had thought about thowing people in a gulag – and stepped down more than a month ago.
ACT leader David Seymour said Coates had resigned “for personal reasons”.
It now appears that “personal reasons” includes holding bat shit crazy views that will bring the Act Party into disrepute.
NZ First has its own issues.
As I reported before it also has some really weird potential MPs.
Like Kirsten Murfitt, who was identified by Stuff reporter Charlie Mitchell as Polly, who has some very unusual beliefs, like Donald Trump is secretly a zionist and 911 may not have actually happened.
And she is not the only one. From the article:
Stuff has identified several other announced NZ First candidates who have shared false or extreme views about the pandemic and other topics.
They include Auckland consultant Janina Massee, who formed her own political party last year called NZ STRONG but folded it last month to join New Zealand First. She has since been confirmed as the party’s Whangaparāoa candidate.
On social media last year, Massee shared a post that asked: “Why are we still being led to the slaughter like so many to the gas chambers[?]”, in a seeming reference Covid-19 vaccines. It is unclear if she wrote the post or simply shared it.
There is also Coromandel candidate Caleb Ansell who has posted QAnon catchphrases and who also called for the defrocking of the Archbishop of Canterbury for opposing a Ugandan Church’s extreme anti gay law stance.
And the Hamilton West candidate Kevin Stone who said that Covid was a “plandemic” orchestrated by multiple governments at the behest of a global financial cartel seeking a “great reduction in the population of the developed world and the virtual enslavement of the remainder”.
NZ First’s candidate vetting is not very good. Either that or it has calculated that there is a sufficiently large coalition with anti vaxers to get it over the line.
But National and Christopher Luxon present the biggest risk of the next Government being pretty strange and out there.
From Andrea Vance at the Sunday Star Times:
On current polling, [National’s] caucus is about to swell by at least a third. In government or not, the more people you have, the more you have to manage. And they come with politician-sized egos.
Based on an analysis of the party’s list, released last weekend, this incoming crop brings an added risk: a large, socially conservative faction of a size not seen in the National party since the mid-1980s.
The ‘Taliban’ – as the existing group is known to centrist MPs – is set to grow to as many as 18 or 19 MPs, based on list placings and likely electorate wins. (There are also a handful in unwinnable seats.)
They are either evangelical Christians – like Luxon himself – or with morally traditional views.
It follows a trend in Western democracies, where conventional conservativism is foundering, and there is a rightwards drift, with centre-right parties becoming more hard-line and leaving behind past, more moderate politics.
Although many of the predominant social debates (gay rights, abortion, euthanasia) are settled in New Zealand, these are combustible times.
When one issue fades, as with same-sex marriage, the religious right will find something else. In both the US and Australia, they have been galvanised by a battle over transgender rights, and in particular young trans people.
Recently, across the Tasman, it was revealed the ‘no campaign’ to sink the indigenous voice to parliament referendum had deep links to conservative Christian lobbyists.
The prophetic voice tends to be the loudest – and it will be emboldened by a leader who shares these moral views. But it is not the prevailing one in New Zealand – and it is off-putting to the majority of centrist voters.
Luxon himself has been at pains to distance himself from the anti-trans extremists, and has lambasted NZ First leader Winston Peters’ views on that topic as “off the planet”.
But if National wins in October, an unruly rump of zealots championing Christian identity politics is a significant risk to National’s cohesiveness, and its ability to hold that power.
We have seen in the United States what happens when the Evangelicals join with the right. Their support comes at a cost and the cost is not pretty.
So whichever way you cut it if there is a change of Government the next Government could be full of cranks, people who question science and fundamentalist Christians some of who probably think that the end of days could be a good and rapturous thing.
New Zealand should be afraid, it should be very very afraid.
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