Of Political Realities & Zealots

By Olivia Pierson


The Wellington protest was a magnificent, spontaneous, organic achievement that’s now baked into New Zealand’s cultural history. The film River of Freedom and other excellent documentaries show us this. It’s ours for keeps and I for one will always be proud to have been involved during the one week I spent at Freedom Village living out of my car. 

The sudden rise of so many minor parties in this election will go down in political history as something of a 2023 phenomenon born of the freedom movement, yet they failed to unite around a core set of common principles and one well chosen leader. 

Unlike the protest, which had a central organising principle: End the Mandates, the new minor parties fell into multiple factions and too many egocentric cooks spoiled the broth. 

Crusading in the name of a cause is one thing, becoming a competent political party to influence the direction of power in government is quite another. It requires a completely different skill set, above all a commitment to objectivity. Too much emotional hysteria in politics is never a great idea. Community organising or crusading can be a powerful force for changing a culture, but politics is quite a different beast. 

There is a reason why the leaders of Voices for Freedom did not use their large influence to launch a political party before the election. Getting a new party off the ground with all the infrastructure and name recognition that a new party requires takes many years of committed action before it can become successful. Success in this context means being able to win enough party votes to get across the 5% threshold (150 thousand votes), or win a specific electorate seat to propel a candidate into parliament. 

Instead, VFF focused on getting a media organisation up and running in order to facilitate the much needed debates and discussions that our country desperately needs to have around politics and cultural issues. Reality Check Radio is the result of that effort and has grown rapidly, even without any advertising revenue yet being generated. Many within the freedom movement felt a monumental sigh of relief in just having this internet channel on NZ airwaves. The interviews and discussions are highly intelligent, professionally conducted and entertaining. They’ve met a deep cultural/spiritual need in so many Kiwis who felt marginalised and disenfranchised, especially after the last six years of toxic Ardernism. (Ardern remains a good example of how ghastly too much emotionalism in politics can be.)

Throughout this election cycle, Reality Check Radio platformed many different candidates from all the competing parties so that voters could hear what these candidates had to offer without people being rudely shouted down or over-talked. It has become a blast of fresh air and I’m proud to have a small role in one show on Friday mornings: a Political Agenda with Paul Brennan. 

I see a fair bit of the feedback that comes through to RCR and we all love receiving it. One of the things I noticed was that people who were supporting Liz Gunn’s New Zealand Loyal Party often wrote in and asked why Gunn was not given more interviews on the channel. These questions were often prompted by her supporters because, as she was campaigning around the country, it appears that Gunn was telling her audiences that she was not given enough coverage compared to other parties, most especially NZFirst. She disparagingly called RCR “propaganda” and some of her loyalists circulated a shabby little social media video referring to the channel, and my colleague Cam Slater, as an election “psyop.”

This is simply bollox. Gunn was invited on for interviews many times that she chose to decline. Sometimes she didn’t even respond at all to interview requests. The other representatives of minor parties did not decline, they jumped at the opportunity to speak to potential supporters who may be listening - hence they got more coverage.

So, last Friday Paul Brennan put out a clip on Feedback Fridays explaining this and I thought he was most gentlemanly about it. 

Gunn took to social media in an absurdly long post decrying that Paul Brennan had put out a “hit piece” on her. On the thread, whenever somebody weighed in to point out to Gunn that Brennan had not done a hit piece but had answered a common question cropping up in our emails in order to address the truth of the situation, those people were bombarded with pretty hostile attacks, not only from Gunn’s loyalists, but also from Gunn herself. It stands as a most uninspiring spectacle.

All that aside, what is clear to me now is that the freedom movement harbours some real zealots who are impervious to reason and the political practicalities of how our system works.

The polling leading up to the election became very clear that none of the minor parties, outside of NZFirst, were going to make it anywhere near the 5% threshold. What also became clear was the fact that Winston Peters, unlike David Seymour, had welcomed into his party as candidates some seriously competent and liberty-minded people on the freedom page. Instead of looking at NZFirst with a fresh pair of eyes, as I suddenly found myself doing, the zealots seemed hell-bent on wasting their votes, knowing full well that those votes are proportionally reallocated to the successful parties over the threshold line, mostly Labour and National. 

People can vote for any party they like, that’s democracy and I’m all for it, but what I found astonishing in this cycle is that the goal was, or should have been, to get as many solid freedom candidates into parliament as we possibly could. Through NZFirst, there was a real option for us to do exactly this, but instead many freedom voters stubbornly refused and actually subverted that process by preferring to believe in unicorns and miracles over and above the unfolding facts of reality as they took place in real time. 

When it was evident that the polls consistently showed that none of the minor parties were higher than 1%, if just NZ Loyal, Freedoms NZ and Democracy NZ voters had have thrown their votes to NZFirst, we would be looking at 11 or 12 excellent freedom candidates in our parliament, and a much weaker ACT Party to boot.

NZ Loyal voters were not served well by a rookie, histrionic, wannabe political leader overpromising preposterous outcomes such as a miraculous “two million votes,” as Gunn told people she hoped to garner after being a political party for only ten weeks (which in my view was a foolish endeavour serving only to split the already split freedom vote even further).  Over optimism is as much of a sin as chronic pessimism since both mindsets fail to deal with reality accurately. A good leader ought not to be that prone to delusion, else how can they be trusted with other real world serious events?

Once all the special votes have been tallied on November 3rd, the landscape may change a little.

​It remains however, a grave error to suffer from the childish notion that a political leader will save us.  Although NZ now has a change of government, many of the dire problems will continue to dog us: the globalism, the push for apartheid co-governance, the chronic economic cost of living crisis and the mass Covid vaccine injuries etc… we must stay engaged in sensible ways and realise that we the people cannot afford to suffer the foolishness of political naiveté.