Hannah and Brian Tamaki at their home in Papakura. Photo / David Fisher
Brian Tamaki radiates a certain charm. Across the lunch table today, wearing his trademark black polo-neck top with his wraparound sunglasses on the table, he makes it clear that the idea of talking to the Herald is not his own.
“I first of all said no, but my wife is very ... ”
As Hannah sits alongside him, I’m expecting him to say something along the lines of “persuasive”, but he switches tack.
“... but immediately, I can see that you’re different.”
A charm offensive.
Over the course of the next hour-and-a-half, we have a perfectly amicable conversation. He lightly prods me a couple of times to emphasise a joke or a point, he laughs reasonably frequently, and both he and Hannah open up on a number of personal details about themselves and their political campaign.
Then, just a few hours later, Brian Tamaki is at his regular Monday night ‘Apostles Academy’ pulpit, speaking to a different audience, having a crack at media, promising to disrupt the general election, and praising the Vision NZ candidate, Karl Mokaraka, who that very afternoon clambered on to a fence to interrupt a Christopher Luxon press conference, in what turned out to be one of the memes of the campaign.
As we’ve seen in the past weeks, Mokaraka and members of Freedoms NZ - Tamaki is the leader of the umbrella party which encompasses Hannah’s Vision NZ party - have continued to cause trouble on the campaign trail, disrupting and gatecrashing party launches.
A charmer then? Or a chameleon?
Tamaki, 65, has a history of controversies, littered with comments he’s made about politicians, the gay community, Muslims and, of course, media.
Over more than four decades, and through various iterations, he has fashioned a polarising and intriguing persona – loved and adored by a band of followers and supporters; treated with suspicion and scorn by others.
He has a black-and-white view of journalists. It’s not positive.
“I understand what the media do and what they want to do. When there’s blatant overstepping and inaccurate reporting, that annoys me. I’ve learned over the years, we have an abusive relationship – you use me, I use you.
“You don’t want me to get into Government,” says Tamaki, which – even by his own admission – is as likely as him having Christmas with Dame Jacinda Ardern.
Nevertheless, I take the bait and ask why.
“I’d stop the funding,” he says, referring to the erroneous belief that NZ on Air money for journalism projects somehow influences newsroom editorial decision-making, in favour of the Labour Government.
He then makes what I take to be a joke, but later realising he might be serious.
“And then if I was prime minister, I’d get you all in the room and I’d put all your photos in the paper and tell my own story about you. What I think of you; go right through. Where are you from? Stuff? Good. You? The New Zealand Herald. Good.”
A lot of people in the “freedom movement”, he says, “have no trust at all in the media”.
Hannah Tamaki adds: “To be honest, we’ve always met with media, but the stories always regurgitated old stuff.
“What journalists should do is write from their own perspective, not regurgitate stuff that other people have written, and get to know Brian and Hannah for who they are, not what others say they are.”
Over lunch at HQ on Auckland’s Viaduct, the couple freely raise many of the historic controversies themselves.
They talk about their views on homosexuality, and same-sex marriage; their reported views of the links of gay sex and pornography to natural disasters like earthquakes and cyclones; claims that their Destiny roles have set them up financially for life; and the Wellington Parliament protest and how they say violence could have been prevented.
The issue for media, of course, is the balance of giving the Tamakis a fair hearing and reporting political policies, while highlighting any misinformation and blatantly controversial and inciteful statements. And not playing into his supporters’ claims that the media is ignoring them.
Journalist Virginia Fallon, in a recent article on The Post website, wrote: “The problem with interviewing Tamaki is whether it’s right to interview him in the first place, to give him both another platform and another opportunity to upset.”
Fallon also quoted The Disinformation Project’s Kate Hannah. “They’re here now, they’re part of our political landscape, and they’re influencing things,” Hannah said.
“It’s probably important for the media to not perpetrate a lie they promote. You know: ‘Look at the mainstream media – they’re ignoring us’.”
Brian Tamaki says he’s feeling “brilliant” about life.
“I’m 65 and I’ve never felt so alive. I’m doing this and my mind is sharp. I’m still an action man.
“We thrive on challenge. We get energy out of contact, and I think we love leading people to their better selves.”
Hannah, in her early 60s, says she’s feeling “amazing”.
“I think anything that you do to help people is like a drug to me. I am a bit of a socialite, the more people I meet in the different places, the happier I am.”
It’s been 43 years “since we were struck down by the light”, says Brian Tamaki.
Over more than four decades, he has moved through various roles and lifestyles – the former hard-living forestry worker who turned fully to religion and God, setting up his own fundamentalist church, Destiny. A man who has led social programmes, including the Man Up programme to move wayward men away from lives of criminality and chaos.
More recently, with Hannah, he’s been a protest organiser and self-proclaimed freedom fighter, willing to go to prison to fight the cause.
The public’s consciousness and perception of Tamaki ramped up in 2004, after Destiny’s ‘Enough is Enough’ march in Wellington, opposing civil unions.
Up until then, Tamaki says he was considered mainstream. Perhaps even on track for a knighthood, he jokes.
“In 2004, the Enough is Enough marchers had a specific, albeit regressive, cause – opposing the then civil unions bill. Tamaki could credibly call on at least 5000 church members and point to social programmes contributing to a genuine community good,” wrote columnist Morgan Godfery in The Guardian in August 2022.
Godfery, now a senior lecturer in the law faculty at Victoria University, said that the 2004 protest “left a scar on Wellington’s collective consciousness. LGBTQI+ people were abused on the street”.
“Georgina Beyer, an MP in the governing Labour Party and the world’s first transgender MP, made her way to Parliament’s forecourt to confront the protesters and ‘stare them in the eye’.
“Kiri Allan … at the time a law student at the neighbouring Victoria University, went out to confront the protesters too (with a righteous assist in the form of a haka from the now Green Party MP Teanau Tuiono).”
Beyer told marchers: “Your hatred is intolerable.”
Tamaki says over lunch, nearly 20 years later, that as soon as the march had finished, he started hearing references to him as a “Nazi” and a “hater”.
He says he was genuinely shocked about the reaction and that he’d met such a backlash.
Broadcaster Paul Holmes asked him to appear on his primetime television show after the protest. Tamaki says he was cautious because Holmes had been critical of him and the march.
“I said ‘no because you’ve told lies’. He said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, I want to interview you about the thousands of these Māori men here’.
“I said they’re down here because they’ve changed their lives and they want to be good husbands and fathers. He said that’s what I want to talk about today.
“I had a bit of a hesitation but I said, ‘you promise?’ He said ‘I promise …’
“I got into the studio and the cameras are all there. He says, ‘So Brian Tamaki, why do you hate homosexuals?’”
Tamaki says he should have responded, “you lying s***head!”.
“That would have been good.
“I was like a possum. I said I don’t [hate homosexuals]. I looked stupid. And then I was branded. Even my grandmother phoned me up that night and said, what the hell are you doing?
“I said, ‘No, it’s not right, Nan’. And she says, ‘Yes, it is. Why did you do that?’”
I listened to a recording of the Holmes interview recently. Beyer was on the show with Tamaki and Holmes – the host was persistent but professional throughout the segment.
It wasn’t until mid-way through the interview that Holmes makes the observation to Beyer that Tamaki doesn’t like the gay community. Judging by the audio recording, Tamaki more than holds his own position during the exchange.
Tamaki says over lunch today at HQ: “I don’t hate anybody.”
He opposes same-sex marriage, he says, based on his Christian values and the belief that a child should be raised in a family with a mother and father.
But he says that does not mean he hates gay men or women, despite a string of controversial reported comments in the past, including references to queer people as perverts. On Holmes’ show that night, he talked about “unnatural” and “abnormal” behaviour.
Herald columnist Shaneel Lal has said recently that Tamaki’s concerns “about what consenting adults are doing in bed is perverted” in itself.
Tamaki says people can be in a relationship with whomever they like.
He says he was simply trying to protect and promote, based on his faith, traditional marriage between a man and woman.
Hannah Tamaki adds: “When they say that we hate gay people, we’ve both got gay nieces and nephews … who have helped us with our campaign.”
Brian: “I’ve never hated anybody.
“What I was opposed to is Helen Clark saying that she was going to legalise gay marriage and be the first country in the world to do it. So, it was a bit of a gloat thing for her.
“But for me, we had so many Māori families who have been wrecked and we brought men back to being husbands and fathers again to their kids. And then I see that they want to equalise two men and two women together.
“This is my personal opinion. I don’t hate anybody and just because I disagree doesn’t mean to say I hate you.
“I actually love everybody.”
The headlines haven’t stopped there.
Tamaki says he was made out to be a “crackpot” when media outlets reported him linking pornography to cyclones and homosexuality to natural disasters. He says he’s been taken out of context, as media have pored over his Destiny sermons. Christian scriptures, he says, talk of the link of human behaviour and the environment. He says he was quoting those from the pulpit.
“They took it into the public domain and gave little wee snippets that they made it look like I was a crackpot.
“Whereas these scriptures are clear that when human behaviour and the deprivation of man went down, it has a direct effect on the environment.”
The Tamakis have been frequently in the spotlight over their lifestyle, and a belief that they’re living off the fruits of tithing within Destiny. Many of the parishioners are tithed 10 per cent of their incomes.
But the couple say they live a modest lifestyle; there is no pot of gold.
One house, in Papakura, with a mortgage. Records show it’s worth $2 million. A car each. Tamaki has a motorcycle. He says he loves writing, which I mistakenly mishear over lunch as “riding”.
I love riding too, he says.
“Rich people don’t have mortgages,” says Hannah. “They say Brian is worth $7 million or something. I go ‘Where the heck is that flipping money, I’ll pay the mortgage with it’.”
Three great-grandchildren live at home with them, along with their parents.
“They’re fun; they’re like our little drug,” says Hannah.
Brian is often pig hunting.
He has a “big rig”, and ventures to the South Island, often with young men on the verge of criminality. He says he is helping them turn their lives around, on two-week away trips at a time.
He’ll “catch up” with 40-50 pigs. The meat is processed into sausages and patties for roasts or hangi for churches. Other meat is frozen, and distributed to families.
Hannah says she’ll sometimes accompany the pig-hunters.
“I’ll go with him for a couple of days and then it’s like, oh, I’ve had enough of the men’, but I do like going out on the bush. I’m usually driving around waiting with a cup of tea and helping do something else.”
It’s that kind of back-to-basics, traditional Kiwi lifestyle that the Tamakis are promoting on the campaign trail.
Their values, they claim, are firmly based around family.
“We’re a party for everyday, working-hard Kiwis,” says Brian of Freedoms NZ. “That’s my life. That’s her life.
“We grew up on a farm, our family is still farming.
“And then I went into forestry through hard work in my younger years in the 70s. We’ve been hard-working all our lives.
“I’m a musician, Hannah and I were fully into that Kiwi life. They were great years to be alive.
“You know, we had a Mark II Zephyr, you could play rugby on Saturday and league on Sunday. So, no rules.
“Everything was basically … free to go where you want, say what you want, drink what you want, do what you want. That’s all changed now.
“That’s what we grew up with; that New Zealand is not this one.”
Tamaki lost his own personal freedom early last year, spending time in Mt Eden Prison.
As New Zealand’s response to Covid became more polarised, and protests more frequent, Tamaki moved from fronting his church to leading various anti-lockdown, anti-mandate gatherings in Auckland.
He has been charged with breaching lockdown rules but a date for his court hearing is yet to be determined.
He went to prison for 10 days in early 2022 for allegedly breaching bail, before a judge ruled he should be released, partly because the ultimate penalty is unlikely to be jail.
Prison was “shocking, horrible”, says Tamaki.
He says he was locked in solitary confinement in Mt Eden, with no sunlight, and no windows. Food was delivered to him through a slot, three times a day.
Through the walls, he could hear other prisoners, wailing. “They were mentally distressed.”
When he emerged from prison more than a week later, Tamaki was placed on house arrest for a further 68 days.
“Which turned me into a prison guard. They’ve never paid me for it either,” jokes Hannah. “It meant I had to look after him. I had to be the prison warden.”
The prison stint appears to have emboldened support among existing supporters and – according to the couple – attracted new ones.
“We’ve talked to people and they’re like, look, I’m not a person of faith, but you gave us the courage to stand,” says Hannah.
“We’ve had people come up and shake Brian’s hand, and just yell at him out of the car: ‘Thank you, ‘I’ll follow you effing anywhere’!”
Religious expert Peter Lineham told Newshub Nation recently that Tamaki is now less interested in religion and “much more interested in public profile”.
In his Guardian column last year, Morgan Godfery wrote that in the 18 years since the ‘Enough is Enough’ march, Destiny had lost at least 2000 members.
“That leaves the bishop desperately seeking a cause,” wrote Godfery.
The Tamakis say they have between 8000-10,000 church members and gained members when other churches turned away non-vaccinated parishioners during Covid.
They are not vaccinated themselves but say they are not anti-vaxxers and do not share conspiracy theories of other far-right parties. Tamaki then goes on to say he has concerns about the safety of the vaccine.
He also points out his family members, including their great-grandchildren, are vaccinated for other diseases such as measles.
The couple say they are pro-choice, and remain firmly on their anti-mandate, anti-lockdown stance. Many of the effects of the past three years, are just being felt now, in terms of mental health and youth crime, says Tamaki.
Tamaki says his party’s biggest election challenge is raising awareness. The party lost a legal case for more advertising funding, when the Electoral Commission ruled it was one party, rather than four.
Bringing together a group of four parties – Vision NZ, Outdoor and Freedom, Rock the Vote and Yes Aotearoa – under the umbrella brand of Freedoms NZ has had the potential to be very messy.
Social media sites such as Facebook have punished the prominence of their political posts, Tamaki claims, burying them in their algorithm.
Realistically, Freedoms NZ should be happy if they get anything over 1 per cent of the vote. This week’s 1 News-Verian poll had them at 1 per cent.
“It’s always a mountain,” says Tamaki of the 5 per cent party vote threshold.
He talks of building momentum over this election and the next but also adds: “By the time we get to the day of voting, I believe in a ballot box revolution.”
Hannah is standing again, this time in the Māori seat of Tāmaki Makaurau. In 2020, she stood in Waiariki, winning just over 1100 votes.
Labour’s Tamati Coffey lost the seat to Māori Party leader Rawiri Waititi by 836 votes. Hannah considers it a personal triumph that she stopped a Labour clean-sweep of the Māori seats.
The couple considered giving politics all up at one stage. A quieter life, of holidaying and travel.
“I said ‘no way’,” says Hannah. “An athlete doesn’t just run one race and not win. I said ‘No way, I’m going to keep going’.”
Brian: “So there were my hunting clothes, my fishing clothes and there was a pair of overalls which meant work. So, I put those on, because I’m not going to let you go by yourself. I wanted to look after her.”
Hannah: “Not that I need babysitting or anything.”
Brian Tamaki firmly believes New Zealand’s best days are still ahead.
“I see a prosperous New Zealand. New Zealand can capitalise on its isolation.
“That’s now going to be an advantage with the Northern Hemisphere, I think, going down a pathway of separation, war, you know, civil problems and upheaval.”
He recalls a billionaire, he thought it was Elon Musk but it was actually Peter Thiel, who named New Zealand as the place to be in the event of a major global disaster, such as nuclear war.
“We are so far down here in the South Pacific,” says Tamaki. “He’s right.”
Expectations tempered around return to surplus in 2027/28.