The Biggest Loser: Election Special

Mark Honeychurch - 16 October 2023

By now most of us will know that we’re facing a change in government in the near future, given that the National Party has likely secured enough seats with the help of ACT in order to form a majority. But, how close did we come to having our country run by conspiracy theorists who would have removed us from the UN and made other daft-sounding decisions that Al Blenney documented for us in the newsletter a few weeks ago?

Well, not all the votes have been counted yet, but most of them have - and it appears that we’re probably in the clear. The closest we came was probably New Zealand First, who have secured 8 list seats with ~145,000 party votes (~6.5%). Stuff recently documented conspiratorial thinking of several of NZ First’s list MPs, including QAnon belief, 9/11 nonsense, climate change denial and “plandemic” thinking, but thankfully all of these MPs are lower down the list than number 8.

None of the overtly conspiracy parties managed to reach the 5% needed to have any of their list candidates in parliament, or had any of their electoral candidates win a seat. The closest, which came as somewhat of a surprise to me, was NZ Loyal - the Liz Gunn led latecomer to the race. NZ Loyal managed a little over 1% of the vote (~26,000 party votes), and honestly it’s a little disconcerting, if this result is representative of the population as a whole, to think that around 1 in 100 New Zealanders are on board with Liz’s unhinged views of the world.

Liz has been loudly proclaiming about election fraud since before voting even began, after a SNAFU that meant she only managed to register two list candidates rather than the fifteen she was hoping for. She’s also been talking big, suggesting that her NZ Loyal party could sweep to victory in the general election - although her list MP stuff-up pretty much put paid to that idea. Given both of these delusions, I wonder how long it takes before Liz starts putting videos up on YouTube claiming that the election was rigged, and that she’s been cheated out of her rightful place as an MP alongside her list buddy and the 33 electoral candidates (all of which appear to have disappeared from the NZ Loyal website already).

Coming in below NZ Loyal, at ~0.5%, is Alfred Ngaro’s NewZeal party. Not so much conspiratorial as it is religious, I can’t help but imagine that any party run by Alfred Ngaro would want to force Christian beliefs and restrictions on the nation. It’s been interesting to see, Since Alfred lost his seat in parliament, how close he has remained to parliament, appearing at multiple Christian events such as “Jesus for NZ” that I’ve sneakily attended inside the Beehive.

Next up, at 0.3% of the vote, is the umbrella party Freedoms NZ - made up of Brian Tamaki’s Vision NZ, Sue Grey’s Outdoors Party and a couple of others. I wonder, if it wasn’t for Liz Gunn’s late entry into the race, whether this party might have done better than just ~7,000 votes. Interestingly, one of the constituent parties of this umbrella group when I went to see them in person, the New Nation Party, appears to have left the group before the election - and managed to come dead last in the election, amassing a paltry 1,288 votes (~0.05%).

Three more parties are of potential interest to skeptics. The New Conservatives - another group who seem very much aligned with Christian ideas of the world - managed ~0.15% of the vote, and their ex-leader, Leighton Baker, managed ~0.08% of the vote for his eponymously, and in my opinion arrogantly, named party, the Leighton Baker Party. Not even the fame of Leighton’s conspiracy-minded daughter Chantelle was enough to get him more than a handful of votes.

Finally the Women’s Rights Party, a political party that appears to have formed in the wake of Posie Parker’s visit to NZ earlier this year, and whose main pillars seem to revolve around promoting an anti-transgender sentiment that has been adopted by many of the conspiracy groups recently, managed about 0.08% of the vote, about the same number that Leighton Baker managed.

Adding these few groups’ votes in my head, they come to about 2.35% of the vote. So, even if the conspiracy vote hadn’t been split by the formation of so many different fringe parties, there’s not enough there to manage to secure any list seats. It’s hard to know how many of Winston Peters’ voters lean towards conspiracy thinking (although I have a suspicion the number would be quite low), so it’s impossible to know for sure if the conspiracy theorists could have made the 5% threshold if both NZ First didn’t exist and the other parties had formed a single, cohesive umbrella party that didn’t fall apart due to in-fighting and other problems caused by those who have larger-than-life personalities.