The Dog House is only a memory now, but for many years it was tucked into the northeast corner of Cathedral Square in Christchurch. When I was a teenager, it offered the latest arcade games and thickshakes that came with optional raw egg and whipped cream. It was open 24 hours a day, which made it notorious for a range of reasons.
On one of those days, I was waiting for a thickshake and picked up a book that had been left on one of the tables. Its title, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, seemed exciting. I didn’t know at the time that it was an anti-Semitic conspiracy tract from the far-right John Birch Society – or that its presence at the burger bar was no accident.
The Dog House was owned at the time by members of Zenith Applied Philosophy (ZAP), a capitalism cult founded in 1974 by John Dalhoff (aka John Ultimate), who was expelled from the Church of Scientology but had taken the methods of its “training courses” with him. Dalhoff loathed trade unions and taxes (apart from those he imposed on his adherents) and boasted of godlike magical powers.
The god died like any other human in 2001, but I was put in mind of him by recent reports of people with apparent fringe beliefs on the Act Party list. More specifically, I was put in mind of Trevor Loudon, who was elected as Act’s vice-president in 2006, shortly after he wrote on his blog to confirm that he was a longtime ZAP “student” and that “I am enjoying my studies immensely at the moment and plan to continue indefinitely”.
Loudon’s blog post was a response to Russel Norman, who was soon to become the Green Party’s male co-leader. Loudon had written darkly of “evidence” that Norman had been a member of the Democratic Socialist Party in Australia. Norman readily confirmed he had joined the party as a teenager and in turn asked Loudon if he was “aware of the association between ZAP and the fascist Nationalist Workers’ Party”.
Loudon retorted that “there never have been any such links” and offered to stake his Act membership on it. A 1983 New Zealand Herald report does, in fact, indicate that many adherents of ZAP and its sister organisation Trim were members of New Force, a party founded by, in Wikipedia’s description, “white supremacist and Holocaust denier” Kerry Bolton. The party, which contested the 1981 general election on a platform of support for apartheid and repatriation of Pacific Islanders, later renamed itself the Nationalist Workers’ Party, but by that time, the ZAP and Trim contingent had been thrown out.
It might be unkind to trawl over this, but for the fact that Loudon, who now lives in the US, has become a celebrity in international right-wing circles for his tireless pursuit of people he perceives as secret communists in public and commercial life (his website offers an entire section devoted to former US president Barack Obama). He has also branched out into exposing the “climate change scam”, “gay communism” and the threat posed by Islam.
Loudon isn’t the only ZAP student to find a home with Act – his colleague Geoff Russell has been both a candidate and officeholder. Meanwhile, readers bold enough to visit the website of the New Zealand Centre for Political Research, run by former Act MP Muriel Newman, will find many conspiracy theories, most regarding climate change or an impending Māori takeover. Former leader Rodney Hide is a vocal member of Voices for Freedom, a relentless source of misinformation.
Act may have been founded by Labour Party heretics, but in this sense it has inherited the historical mantle of Social Credit. The fringe will always be with us, and it will always need a home.
