Megan Lovelady converted to Islam after the Christchurch Mosque attack on March 15, 2019. Photo / Janneth Gil
Megan Lovelady converted to Islam after the Christchurch Mosque attack on March 15, 2019. Photo / Janneth Gil
March 15 will be a day of remembering and reflecting on one of the most horrific events in our history - the Christchurch mosque attacks. An edited extract of a landmark work, Histories of Hate, explores intolerance and extremism in Aotearoa New Zealand.
On March 15, 2019, a terrorist motivated by extreme right-wing views carried out mass shootings at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand. Fifty-one people were killed, a further 40 received life-changing injuries and countless other lives were forever affected.
Many thought the violent conspiratorial thinking behind this atrocity was a one-off, an outlier in our history. But as 2020 progressed, and a lockdown to limit the spread of Covid-19 was instituted in March, some New Zealanders began to take more interest in some of the arguments that emerged from the US, including those made by QAnon and other members of the alt-right. Four of the fringe conservative political groups – New Zealand Public Party (NZPP) or Advance New Zealand (who formed an alliance of convenience for the purposes of the election), Vision New Zealand, the New Conservatives and the ONE Party – were explicitly “Christian” and expressed, to varying levels and with different levels of enthusiasm, a degree of interest and advocacy for conspiratorial arguments, sometimes with a clear identitarian component. Additionally, there are elements of conspiracy in the policies and positions of the New Zealand Outdoors Party, focused on “community wellbeing”, the replacement of agribusiness with personal fishing and hunting, and strong opposition to the use of 1080 poison, mandatory vaccinations, Covid-19 restrictions and 5G technology.
A lone police officer patrols outside the Al Noor Mosque a few days after the March 15 terror attack. Photo / NZH
The 2020 General Election was dominated by the uncertainties of the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown, exacerbated by the fact the election was delayed. As well as casting their constituency and party votes the public were able to respond to two “progressive” referendum questions on euthanasia and cannabis. These served to highlight concerns with public morality, and mobilised the minor Christian and conservative parties (and parachurch groups such as Family First with its seemingly effective “Say No to Dope” campaign) as they proffered alternative futures for New Zealand society to those offered by the major “secular” political parties. The main opposition National Party leader, Judith Collins, went as far as being filmed by the press praying in church in an attempt to capture some of this “Christian” vote.
A key activist, Seventh Day Adventist preacher and a prominent public voice for conspiracy theories, was Billy Te Kahika. He began broadcasting on his Facebook page and, by March 2020, was becoming more political in his commentary. His claims that the pandemic had been planned and was being used as a justification for the enslavement of populations began to draw more attention. By April, he had an audience of 30,000 online. He then launched the explicitly Christian NZPP in Auckland in June 2020, and a month later joined with Jami-Lee Ross and the Advance New Zealand Party to contest the 2020 General Election (Ross was previously a National Party MP and activist, with links to the party leadership). Te Kahika called on “God to bless and make New Zealand great again”; his pivotal messages included the claim that the Covid-19 pandemic was a fraud, and that “billionaires have developed viruses to enslave humanity … that the Government was authorising [the] military to enter people’s homes and [was] planning to implement forced vaccinations”. He also peddled “misinformation about the facts of fluoridation and 5G”. Radio NZ summed up the rationale for his key beliefs:
… 1080 poison is not about competing ideas of pest control, but a plot to poison the rural landscape to concentrate people in cities … Vaccines and water fluoridation are not about public health, but about numbing the population, increasing their compliance, and reducing intelligence … 5G is not an iterative evolution of existing technology, but a dangerous weapon … being used on unsuspecting populations.
In June 2020, there was evidence Te Kahika was deploying some of the more bizarre and racist elements of the conspiracy theories of the alt-right in an online video. He outlined his views about Israel and the role of Jews in creating disarray and new international systems that meet Jewish, and other ‘internationalist’, agendas. Te Kahika’s views were clearly and crudely antisemitic, and involved the repetition of tropes of classical far-right antisemitism. What was concerning were the number of views of this video, the numbers turning up to Te Kahika’s public meetings, and the thousands who attended his mid-September anti-lockdown rally in Auckland.
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The reaction to NZPP was varied. Te Kahika was a compelling and charismatic speaker, and in meetings in Tauranga, Whangārei and Auckland he gathered large and enthusiastic audiences. But political pundits and the media were largely critical and often scathing. In one instance, a newspaper editor took it on himself to challenge local NZPP supporters and candidates. The editor of the Gisborne Herald published an extremely critical op-ed of NZPP and then, in an editorial, defended its publication. He then followed this up with a dismissal of the key conspiratorial claims made at a meeting of local supporters and more generally by the party.
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In February 2021, the NZPP (renamed the Freedom Party) was wound up, although Te Kahika promised to continue his work via social media and still solicits cash donations.
Four other fringe parties that contested the 2020 General Election shared some of the conspiratorial views of the NZPP: Vision New Zealand, the party associated with Destiny Church through its leader Hannah Tamaki; the ONE Party; the New Conservatives; and the New Zealand Outdoors Party (which was under pressure to join with the NZPP at one point, and had its advertising pulled from Facebook because it was deemed to have breached the misinformation guidelines). Vision New Zealand, the ONE Party and the New Conservatives are all explicitly Christian parties subscribing to Christian values, albeit with diverse evangelical and Pentecostal theologies. The degree to which each party articulated conspiratorial views, or ethno-national politics, varied considerably, and rather depended on the inclination and activities of the candidates and, sometimes, the comments of supporters. The New Conservatives, for example, echoed some of the broad themes of the identitarian movement. In a letter to the Northland Age, the party’s deputy leader, Elliot Ikilei, outlined the core concerns and politics of the New Conservatives. They included:
the supremacy and core values of “our Western civilisation”, which were seen as under threat;
the use of fear (at that point, often focused on Covid-19) of “progressivism” and Marxism that are said to erode “free speech, our democratic process and our equality”; and
an “alignment to other nations and ideologies, including an increasing adherence to the United Nations”, which is said to weaken “our sovereignty, our nationalism and our identity”.
Some of the views expressed by New Conservatives candidates in the 2020 election gave rise to claims in the media that the party had attracted ‘far-right’ activists. A Radio NZ piece to this effect was subsequently the subject of a complaint to the Media Council. This complaint was rejected, in part because the New Conservative candidate in question had agreed that “‘far right’ might not be a bad description of his views”.
The ONE Party, co-led by Stephanie Harawira (formerly Māori Party and Mana Party) and Edward Shanly, argued that elected MPs should be answerable to an Apostolic Council of Elders. Echoing Tahupōtiki Wiremu Rātana, founder of the Rātana faith, they visited marae around New Zealand with Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Bible held high as their dual-inspired guides. Their Pentecostal and evangelical theology is focused on wairua, and Harawira claimed that God has spoken directly to her. Their intention is to (re-)establish New Zealand as a moral Christian nation opposed to Covid-19 lockdowns and regulations, which they understand as undermining individual rights and freedoms. They also oppose water fluoridation, would introduce compulsory military service for all over 18, and believe it is a fundamental right to own firearms. Identifying the evangelical and Pentecostal Christian dimensions of these religiously inflected identitarian alt-right parties in New Zealand is vital for understanding their apocalyptic-driven policies, recruitment bases, and national and international sources and linkages.
In the end, voters did not support these fringe conservative political parties, with the NZPP/Advance NZ Party receiving a total of 28,429 votes (1 per cent of the total votes cast) and ONE Party 8121 votes (0.3 per cent); the New Conservatives did slightly better at 42,613 (1.5 per cent). Te Kahika’s response was to claim that the voting was rigged.
Several activists, bloggers and protesters have echoed alt-right and QAnon arguments during and since the election. This has been exacerbated by the anti-vaccination politics that have emerged during 2020–21 with clear references to QAnon and far-right arguments. In Christchurch, a group of speakers collected on a regular basis to yell conspiracy theories about a range of topics at a typically small audience and passers-by. Long-time far-right activist Kyle Chapman was one. Recently, he has become very involved in anti-government and anti-vaccination protests and campaigning. Lee Williams was another. Williams has argued that social media companies are “part of the globalist conspiracy to lie to Western nations, the people of Western nations, because they seem hell-bent on flooding Western nations with mass migration from the Third World”.
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Alternative media such as Counterspin Media – broadcast on American activist Steve Bannon’s platform GTV – echoes the QAnon line on the pandemic and the alleged rise of communism in New Zealand and elsewhere. The host of Counterspin Media, Kelvyn Alp, has been involved in peripheral politics for some time, and formed an anti-government militia in the 1990s. Social and other media posts and comments confirm that conspiratorial and anti-government views have drawn inspiration from global influences such as QAnon. The adoption of Islamophobic and antisemitic material, including drawing cynical parallels to the Holocaust, are particularly concerning. There are also specific New Zealand aspects. These include misogynistic attacks on a female prime minister, and the appearance of some identitarian and QAnon views in farmers’ protests in 2021. Inevitably, others in the Government and media are also subject to attack and threats – ironically likening them to Nazis and/or communists against whom all acts of resistance might be justified.
The constituency for these views appears to have grown given the anxieties and anti-government politics associated with the pandemic, although the size of the overall constituency remains limited compared to that in the US or the UK, at least in terms of translating into political support. Perhaps the horror of the March 15 terrorist attacks made New Zealanders more wary of such views and the potential and actual consequences.
Abridged extracts from Histories of Hate: The radical right in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Matthew Cunningham, Marinus La Rooij and Paul Spoonley (Otago University Press, $50)
