Most people consider the mental health system to be part of the wider health system. This isn’t true at all. In reality, the mental health system is part of the criminal justice system. In the same way the political Establishment uses the Police, it also uses psychiatrists to destroy their enemies. Psychiatry in the West today is a weapon used to stifle dissent.
In the Soviet Union, dissidents were destroyed for being mentally ill. Dissidence itself was a crime; anyone who did not slavishly obey the authorities risked being diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia“. Anyone who pointed out that the Holodomor was a genocide risked getting locked up in a psychiatric institute, never to be seen again.
Like most crimes committed by authoritarians last century, the same thing is happening in Anglo countries today. As with all other crimes committed by Anglo governments, the mainstream media strenuously denies that it’s happening.
A New Zealand woman named Pamela Taylor is now copping the same treatment from the New Zealand mental health system that freethinkers copped in the Soviet Union. Taylor, like those destroyed by Soviet psychiatry, is a dissenter. She attended the Parliament Lawn protests last year, and is well aware of the criminal nature of our current ruling class.
Earlier this week the Police dragged Taylor away to a psychiatric facility in Dunedin where a Dr Nigel Fanshaw “deemed her to have mental dysfunction”. Apparently the psychiatric assessment was ordered by a Family Court Judge in connection with an ongoing dispute with the father of her children, and was prompted by Taylor’s view on the Coronavirus vaccine and the fact that she attended the Wellington protests last year.
Taylor is no longer being held in psychatric “care”, but the damage has been done. As honest legal scholars have pointed out for decades now, the process is the punishment. Simply being forced through the mental health system will serve as a lesson not to question the Government again.
Normies don’t realise it, but the mental health system is tougher than the criminal justice system.
If you chop someone’s head off and rape the corpse, and then get arrested, you will have a lawyer with you at every step of the process to make sure your rights aren’t violated. If you can’t afford a lawyer you’re given one for free by the state. This lawyer will ensure that, if your rights are violated, you will get away with whatever you did (or at least get massive compensation).
No such respect is granted to you if you’re under suspicion of having a mental illness.
If you’re under suspicion of having a mental illness, you can be hauled in front of a psychiatrist for a mental health assessment, without any right to protest. You can be put under the Mental Health Act and have your freedom taken off you, without any recourse to a lawyer, without any recourse to appeal, without any rights at all.
The decision whether to put you under the Mental Health Act will usually be made by one psychiatrist only. You will not have a lawyer present to ensure your rights are not violated. If a bad decision is made, you will not be informed of your rights to overturn that decision (you have no such rights anyway). You can then be hauled off and force medicated.
Psychiatric medication is capable of producing many and varied changes in human behaviour, but one of the most predictable is sedation. These “chemical lobotomies” are ideal ways to smash dissenters. In principle, it doesn’t matter if those so lobotomised are really dissenters or not, as being unable to work is also considered a form of dissent.
All of this horror is justified by the delusion that, because psychiatrists have done nine years of tertiary study, they must be smarter and morally superior to everyone else. In reality, psychiatrists are some of the most depraved and despicable members of our society. Almost all of them are hard-core materialists who believe that spirituality is a mental illness. Having no spiritual sense, they follow the societal herd on all moral questions.
And so, if a psychiatrist puts a patient under the Mental Health Act, that psychiatrist is not obliged to explain their reasoning. It’s assumed that any attempt to explain would be futile owing to the inherent subhumanity of the patient. No such assumptions of subhumanity are made about rapists and murderers, who are given full rights to appeal.
People under suspicion of mental illness are lower than rapists and murderers in New Zealand: that’s weaponised psychiatry.
The grim, brutal truth is that the mental health system is twins with the criminal justice system. Its purpose is primarily to destroy the enemies of the Establishment. The mental health system isn’t there to help, it’s there to punish. Dissenters like Pamela Taylor and VJM Publishing are the prime targets of it.
Weaponised psychiatry is used all over the world today to keep the herds of human livestock under control. This is not only true of the Soviet Union and its descendants but also of America and New Zealand, where psychiatrists routinely violate the Human Rights Act with no consequences. All it takes is a person or group arrogant enough to believe that they can decide what other people’s best interests are.
The choice between love and fear is the most vital choice available to us as human beings, although it is typically misunderstood or misconstrued. Fear and love don’t always look like you would expect them to.
Fear we equate with horror movies, or material fears pertaining to the physical world. You may be surprised just how many of these inner machinations of fear are purely ethereal or intellectual- the mind simply being afraid of ideas that it has construed as threatening.
Love, too, is greatly misunderstood. We often characterise it as arriving in the form of affection, but this is just our human patina colouring our world. If we are lacking an existential sense of connection, then we feel we need to be affirmed to be worthy or loved, so we continue to seek this outwardly in manifold ways, most of which are merely fantasies. We find ways to move in the world that encourage other people to tell us we are special, we seek out soulmates and endlessly outsource our need for specialness to others, when really all that is needed is a supremely deep dive inward.
The game of fear cannot be won. To engage it at all represents an inherent loss, hence the state of the world. There is no hierarchy within fear – the bully or tyrant is just as much a victim as those he abuses. To step into the game of fear is therefore to choose to court misery. It cannot be foisted upon you; it can only be chosen. This is because we are ultimately responsible for our own states of relative wisdom or ignorance.
Fear is regularly chosen out of conditioned habit and miseducation. Recognize every small decision of fear, and choose to disengage from that illusion into the truth of love where you already are, the truth of I AM. Awareness is the golden key to this. The truth of who you are cannot be trapped in darkness against your will.
The game of love, by stark contrast, cannot be lost. To choose it represents an inherent victory. There is no hierarchy in the participation of the love of the divine. To enter it, in other words, to choose to engage it, is to experience immediate success. You are not granted external reward – it constitutes its own reward. It must be chosen eventually, because the only other choice begets sorrow, loneliness and misery. Real love is never separate, real love is shared amongst all or it is nothing.
Look at all the tiny ways fear continues to dominate our thoughts, and therefore our lives. The great teachers consistently taught that the kingdom of heaven, whether they called it ‘moksha’, ‘liberation’ or ‘nirvana’, was always all around us, but they were also careful to add that no one is typically willing to look at it, because the price would be giving up all that you think you know. What we are afraid to give up in this equation is the paltry kingdom of our own making, the constellation of our egoic arguments, arrogant conclusions and our blithe confidence about the way the world appears to us at this level.
That is because those who do not understand their true nature are loath to look through the eyes of anything but fear. The opposite of this eternal teaching is simultaneously true – hell is all around us, but none can understand that it is both temporary and illusory. In this self-imposed blindness, people resort to the only solutions they have learned in their life-long ignorance, all of which serve to dig them into an ever-deeper hole. For one who chooses fear, suffering is their constant companion. Is there any among us who has ears to hear this timeless message? This is what the teachers of the past across the globe have implored us in unison.
There is no moral ‘ought’ in choosing love over fear, or unity over separation. This is simply the choice that is always freely available to you. If you know your true nature, the light that you are doesn’t really have much of a choice anymore, because what is good chooses the good, and what is light moves toward the light. Do you choose your thoughts, actions, and attitudes to confirm the deeper nature of love and unity? Or, do you choose that which separates us indefinitely from that simple realization? With what ongoing result? No one will judge you for what you have chosen – they don’t need to, because it would be of no use. Pointing out how you were wrong cannot make love feel better about itself, because love is not an insecure ego.
Are you choosing the love that is the source of all, or are you choosing the denial of love which is fragmentation and disunity? Are you choosing the same thing over and over and somehow expecting miraculously different results? You are free to sow your fields with any seeds you wish, but don’t sow them with nettles and expect a bumper crop of apples.
Fear is above all a prodigious liar. It shows you not only glimpses by way of mental images, but also glimpses of projected feelings pertaining to what your choices and actions might lead to, such as the projected feeling of ultimate contentment, peace, or sweet success. Furthermore, because it was born inside your mind, it knows your weaknesses. It promises you results entirely different than it is capable of producing. Most people are unaware that it was fear that glued together their entire worldview.
The ongoing purpose of fear is to create more fear. Like love, it is self-propagating. Do not believe this, because that would be of no help to you – observe it in your thoughts and actions and experiment with it. Have you ever seen an evangelist spread a message of fear? Why are those who promote fear so loud and obnoxious? Why are the peaceful, tolerant, compassionate and inclusive so quiet? Because they don’t stand on soap boxes exhorting change from everyone around them on pain of exclusion. The message that ‘all is well’ is an exceptionally quiet but powerful message. It is extremely difficult to make that out amongst the clamour of the deluded masses shouting themselves hoarse.
People nevertheless continue to feed fear. This is because in some way, those empty promises about the survival of the frightened fragment you had assumed yourself to be have been believed and invested in. You repeated the choices again and again, which bought you more of the same. There is no use in claiming you were swathed in darkness of ignorance because what is past is past – what counts is what you are choosing now in the light of awareness. Perhaps you were ignorant and in darkness, but you are not now. This is what is meant by putting one’s hand to the plough and not looking back.
This is also why the great teachers and mystics placed such an emphasis on the dictum ‘know thyself’. The contents of your soul need to be made clear to you, no matter what. It is the number one primary good to be self-knowing, in other words to be ‘awake’. Being awake has nothing to do with being a walking encyclopaedia of conspiracy theories. It has to do solely with your access to the depth of your own truth in the flow of this eternal now, moment to moment.
Thankfully, for many of you reading this, the time for choosing fear has actually ended. Further investment in fear is no longer tenable in your life, and the deeper part of you knows this to be so.
Examples of fearful thoughts:
Get them to like you, then you will feel conditionally worthy.
Put yourself first, and you will be safe.
Use reverse-psychology, then you can manipulate your partner into giving you more of what you want.
Tell your partner you can change or become a different person, then they will not leave you.
Treat them respectfully now so that they will look after you when you are in trouble.
Do what they say you ought to, and then you will fit in and not be excluded.
Make them think your role is more important than it is, then they will respect you.
Bury the problem and ignore it for long enough, and it will leave you alone.
Notice how many of these are consequentialist in nature. Fear projects horror into the future and asks you to fritter away the only thing that is real, the ‘now’, in cascading delusions. It casually disrespects the well-being of others in favour of short-sighted self-preservation and self-promotion. Anything that depends upon a projected result in this way does not touch the realm of love, which is about service and the inherent value of doing, not consequence. I would rather refrain from giving too many examples of love, because I don’t wish to imply that you are being given a moral prescription, however, take the following example. A mother bird pushes her fledgling out of the nest because she trusts her offspring is mature enough to spread its wings and attempt flight. Is it bad to push, or is it loving to respect what another is capable of?
The same kind of love may be available to you when for example your friend or spouse refuses to agree with your claim of being a victim to a particular situation. Maybe that doesn’t feel immediately nice, as how we often portray love, because you aren’t being shown affection. Despite this, maybe you really are being supported and given exactly what you need for your continued growth and liberation. Such is love; it doesn’t always look the way we think it will, and sometimes it can appear less like being wrapped and swaddled and more like being dunked into cold water.
If you knew you were eternally loved, worthy, valid, and included, and you were never once considered by the divine source to be a candidate for exclusion, what would you do in light of that unconditional love and acceptance?
The traditional argument is that if there were no tough rules, people would just do whatever they want. Don’t forget that the only reason tough rules are even introduced in the first place is in response to an already dysfunctional society poisoned by the very institutions placed to protect it. Throwing more dysfunction into play will do nothing to heal the core failure.
A society can function perfectly without harsh rules if it is founded upon love. This has nothing to do with dancing around in circles wearing daisy chains saying ‘anything goes, man’. Love is not laissez-faire; it is intelligent, cohesive and wise. It attends to specific situations with a high respect for context, because love means that aware attention is given, unlike the vacuous bureaucratic processes we are all-too familiar with. If society is founded upon separation and inequality, then those harsh rules will convey the optical illusion of their necessity.
Disengage fear and you are in your authentic, natural state, the great ‘I am’. Unbeknownst to almost everyone, this is the core message that the world’s highest teachers have brought to us. They all had to skirt around this core message, because it was so simple that people wouldn’t accept it. The human mind craves narrative and substance around messages, hence all of the mystical parables and stories we have inherited. The kingdom of heaven is at hand, not reserved for those who are morally good and conform to authority, but for those who remember their heritage in spirit and choose to leave fear behind along with all the other things of the past that did more harm than good, such as bloodletting and prefrontal lobotomy.
The very remembrance of this heritage is sufficient to elicit in us all of the virtues that the world traditions have valued and promoted – not acting so as to become good, but because this is how goodness itself naturally acts when given the appropriate encouragement. This represents the final layer of self-inquiry and self-discovery – that we in our natural state are divinely free and unblemished. The ego fearfully misinterprets such a statement as mere arrogance, but what it really represents is the final challenge of love to confront and therefore understand who you truly are – this is the timeless meaning of the dictum ‘know thyself’. This vital ‘I AM’ marks the eternally available choice to participate in Love, which is by the same turn to permanently deny the movement of fear.
*
Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
Observant Anzacs have noticed something very suspicious in recent years. Both the Australian and the New Zealand Governments have embarked on a push towards “co-governance”. This is a poorly-defined concept that manifests in boondoggles like the Aboriginal Voice to Parliament in Australia and Three Waters in New Zealand. This article explains what’s going on.
Like most inexplicably popular political narratives, the narrative that we need co-governance is pushed by globalist forces. Their ownership of the apparatus of propaganda enables them to get everyone talking about whatever issues those globalist forces desire. What they want is people talking about identity politics, and what they don’t want is people talking about class.
So the narrative doing the rounds in Anzac political circles at the moment is that there is an urgent need for some kind of “reconciliation” between the filthy, thieving white invaders and the peaceful, innocent brown and black natives. Without this reconciliation, we can only expect more violence and social discord.
This narrative is also being pushed in North America, proving its globalist origins. In Japan and Korea also, the globalist forces that try to make white Westerners ashamed of their ancestors are pushing the same narratives. Making people hate their ancestors, and by extension their families and nations, is a core strategy of subversion. People who hate their ancestors won’t fight to defend their families and nations.
Predictably, the globalist class pushes two truly shitty subnarratives and demands that we plebs choose between them when, in reality, for us to make any choice is to lose. This is their modus operandi, as seen previously in the “Christianity vs. Atheism” false dilemma (previously described as The Clown World Fork), the “men vs. women” false dilemma and the “Communism vs. Capitalism” false dilemma.
The two subnarratives we get are “Anti-white vs. racist”. Either you hate white people, or you’re a racist. In practice, this means that if you’re white and you don’t agree with your own disenfranchisement, you’re a racist. Moreover, if you’re brown and don’t agree with the disenfranchisement of whites, you’re a race traitor.
Pushing these subnarratives all but guarantees that the population fights with itself and ignores their globalist oppressors. Every parent knows that if you unfairly favour one child they will inevitably end up fighting with the others who resent them. The same logic applies to nations. Help one subgroup at the expense of others, and those others will attack the subgroup that was helped, while the nation-wreckers sit back and laugh.
The purpose of the push to co-governance is not only to weaken white people (although this is a goal that is thereby achieved) but also to pit them against Maori and Aboriginal people. As with children, all it takes is for Anzac governments to give money and privilege to Maoris and Aborigines that they don’t give to equally poor white people, and the end result will be the people fighting themselves.
Job done.
Revealing the fact that co-governance is not intended to help white people, they are browbeaten into accepting it by having ‘racist!’ screamed at them. If co-governance was beneficial to the nation, it wouldn’t need abuse to sell it – it would sell itself through simple logic. The fact that people get called racist for not agreeing to it is proof that it’s not in their interests.
The subdivision of whites into middle-class oppressors, who are thrust into the spotlight, and a working class, who are forgotten, is a bonus for the globalists. The white middle class understand the privilege of their position, and so fight for the status quo. The working class, the only one capable of producing men of true revolutionary sentiment, are completely disenfranchised and marginalised.
What the globalists are ultimately trying to engineer is a situation where the average working-class white Anzac and the average working-class Maori or Aborigine can look at each other in the street and see an enemy. The more animosity that exists between the constituent elements of the Anzac working class, the less animosity goes upwards to the rulers of that working class.
Divide and conquer – it’s a strategy as old as time.
The absolute last thing they want is a situation where working-class Maoris stand up and say that Maoris and whites need to team up against a corrupt government, as an 83-year old one recently did at Waitangi (before getting dragged away). Anyone who claims that the government is the mutual enemy of the working class is decried as a conspiracy theorist or stochastic terrorist.
Paying reparations on a racial basis will inevitably privilege middle-class Maoris and Aborigines above working-class whites, leading to discord and internal strife. True justice would involve, as VJM Publishing has argued before, that reparations be paid to the working class on the basis that they were the working class. The globalists don’t want that, though – they want us at each other’s throats, which is why they’re pushing the co-governance narrative.
The New Zealand First Party were polling poorly in the lead-up to the 2020 General Election, and they did not recover on the night. Their 75,020 votes comprised 2.6% of the party vote, not enough to win representation in Parliament. With that, Winston Peters disappeared, perhaps for the last time.
Variable
Voting New Zealand First in 2020
European
0.27
Maori
0.32
Pacific Islander
-0.18
Asian
-0.55
The most important thing to note about New Zealand First is that it is (or, at least, pretends to be) a nationalist party. As such, it appeals to demographic groups in proportion to how Kiwi those groups are. So the more loyalty a person has to overseas interests, the less likely they are to vote New Zealand First.
Almost all Maori voters were born in New Zealand, which is why the correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and belonging to a particular race was the most strongly positive in the case of Maoris (0.32). The next most positive correlation was with Europeans (0.27), and the strongest negative correlation was with Asians (-0.55).
This closely mirrors the depth of the roots that each of those groups has in New Zealand. It’s fair to say that, the deeper one’s roots, the deeper the nationalist sentiments, and so the more likely one is to vote New Zealand First.
Variable
% of electors NZ-born
Voting New Zealand First in 2020
0.55
Voting ALCP in 2020
0.69
Voting Advance NZ in 2020
0.72
Voting Labour in 2020
-0.05
Voting National in 2020
-0.24
Voting Greens in 2020
-0.24
Voting ACT in 2020
-0.01
Voting TEA Party in 2020
-0.75
Underlying New Zealand First’s nationalist credentials are a high proportion of NZ-born voters. No party got both more votes than New Zealand First and a higher proportion of New Zealand-born voters in 2020.
The only parties to get a higher proportion of New Zealand-born voters were the ALCP and the Advance NZ parties, who, like New Zealand First, are heavily supported by disenfranchised people. The globalist parties, like National, Greens and the TEA Party, were the opposite to New Zealand First by this measure.
Some might be surprised that the correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and being born in New Zealand was not higher. After all, very few foreigners vote for nationalist parties anywhere. The explanation is that New Zealand First voters tend to be disadvantaged, which means they are often forced to live alongside cheap labour imports and refugees, who almost never vote for nationalists.
Variable
Voting New Zealand First in 2020
No qualifications
0.51
Level 1 certificate
0.59
Level 2 certificate
0.49
Level 3 certificate
-0.13
Level 4 certificate
0.62
Level 5 diploma
0.37
Level 6 diploma
-0.00
Bachelor’s degree
-0.55
Honours degree
-0.46
Master’s degree
-0.50
Doctorate
-0.34
New Zealand First voters in 2020 tended to be poorly educated. There was a significant negative correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and having any of the university degrees. These correlations were much weaker than in 2017, when all four correlations (between voting New Zealand First and having a degree) were around -0.70.
The strongest support for New Zealand First came from older people with School Certificate (Level 1 certificate) and younger people who have completed a polytechnic course (Level 4 certificate). This tells us that nationalist sentiments were more common among working class voters.
This set of correlations can best be explained by the fact that a large proportion of New Zealand First voters are rural and Maori, two groups that tend to be less educated than others.
Variable
Voting New Zealand First in 2020
Working as a manager
0.10
Working as a professional
-0.41
Working as a technician or trades worker
0.28
Working as a community or personal services worker
0.31
Working as a clerical or administrative worker
-0.27
Working as a sales worker
-0.32
Working as a machinery operator or driver
0.17
Working as a labourer
0.36
Variable
Voting New Zealand First 2020
Working in agriculture, forestry or fishing
0.44
Working in mining
0.18
Working in manufacturing
0.09
Working in electricity, gas, water and waste services
0.33
Working in construction
0.29
Working in wholesale trade
-0.39
Working in retail trade
0.07
Working in accommodation and food services
-0.16
Working in transport, postal and warehousing
-0.03
Working in information media and telecommunications
-0.45
Working in financial and insurance services
-0.50
Working in rental, hiring and real estate services
-0.15
Working in professional, scientific and technical services
-0.50
Working in administrative and support services
-0.25
Working in public administration and safety
0.00
Working in education and training
0.02
Working in healthcare and social assistance
0.34
Working in arts and recreation services
-0.15
Working in other services
0.31
There was a significant positive correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and working as a technician or trades worker (0.28), as a labourer (0.36), or working in agriculture, forestry or fishing (0.44), electricity, gas, water and waste services (0.33) or construction (0.29). In other words, there was significant New Zealand First support among typical working-class people.
This can be easily explained with reference to the fact that working-class Kiwis are the big losers from mass immigration, which drives down their wages and drives up their rent. As such, working-class Kiwis are much more likely to support nationalist – and thereby anti-immigration – sentiments than middle-class ones.
There were significant negative correlations between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and working as a professional (-0.41) or working in professional, scientific and technical services (-0.50). This reflects the fact that nationalism often doesn’t appeal to the highly educated, who see it as potentially restricting their freedom to travel and to ply their trade in new places.
It’s necessary to note, however, that a high proportion of people working in professional industries are foreign-born. It might be that middle-class Kiwis are just as likely as working-class ones to be nationalists, but because the overwhelming majority of immigrants are middle-class and not nationalists (at least not Kiwi nationalists), middle-class people, taken as a whole, are not nationalists.
Contrary to the perception that New Zealand First voters are all selfish bigots, there were significant positive correlations between voting for them in 2020 and working as a community or personal services worker (0.31) or working in healthcare and social assistance (0.34). Selfish people don’t tend to choose occupations or industries where helping other people is the focus.
Variable
Voting New Zealand First in 2020
No children
-0.52
One child
-0.34
Two children
0.14
Three children
0.55
Four children
0.60
Five children
0.45
Six or more children
0.32
Being nationalists, it follows that New Zealand First supporters like to breed. The correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and family size was strongest with those who have four children (0.60). There were also significant positive correlations between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and having three children (0.55), five children (0.45) or six or more children (0.32).
On the other hand, there was a significant negative correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and having no children (-0.52) or only one child (-0.34).
These correlations can best be explained by reference to the fact that New Zealand First voters tend to be rural, Maori and poorly-educated, which are three factors suggesting a higher-than-usual birthrate. Moreover, the sort of person who moves to a big city and does not have children is almost invariably attracted by globalist ideals.
Variable
Voting New Zealand First in 2020
Is married
0.02
Is divorced/separated/widowed
0.64
Has never married
-0.23
One of the harder-to-explain correlations between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and another demographic variable is that with being divorced/separated/widowed, which was 0.64. It’s not immediately apparent why nationalists who have large families would so often be divorced or separated.
The most plausible reason is that New Zealand First has been highly demonised in the mainstream media and in popular consciousness, and therefore attracts an unusually high proportion of disagreeable people, the agreeable ones having fallen in behind the mainstream parties. As there is a correlation between being disagreeable and getting divorced, disagreeableness could explain the high divorce rates of New Zealand First voters in 2020.
Variable
Voting New Zealand First in 2020
Lives in an urban electorate
-0.43
Lives on North Island
0.10
Is male
-0.00
New Zealand First had strong rural support in 2020. A correlation of -0.43 between living in an urban electorate and voting New Zealand First in 2020 was as strong as the correlation between living in an urban electorate and voting NZ Outdoors Party in 2020, and was exceeded only by voting Advance NZ in 2020 (-0.56).
The slight North Island bias of New Zealand First voters was not significant, and probably reflected Winston Peters’ personal support in his home electorate, rather than an actual North Island bias. It is probably not the influence of a higher proportion of Maori voters on the North Island, because there is a higher proportion of Pacific Island and Asian voters on the North Island as well.
New Zealand First voters tend to be sterotyped as angry men, but the correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and being male was -0.00, i.e. non-existent. Popular consciousness refuses to accept the extent to which nationalism and anti-globalism are supported by women. The voters of actual far-right parties, such as ACT and New Conservative, had a pro-male bias in 2020, whereas New Zealand First voters did not.
Variable
Voting New Zealand First in 2020
Receiving NZ Super or Veteran’s pension
0.47
Receiving Jobseeker Support
0.34
Receiving Sole Parent Support
0.24
Receiving Supported Living Payment
0.25
Receiving Student Allowance
-0.31
New Zealand First voters are often characterised as angry pensioners who can’t handle change. This perception fits nicely with the stereotype of nationalists as elderly bigots. There might be some truth in this, but it’s misleading.
For one thing, the correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and being on a pension was 0.47, which is significant but not particularly strong. The correlations between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and being on other benefits were also significant: with being on Jobseeker Support it was 0.34, and with being on Sole Parent Support it was 0.24. Very few people on Sole Parent Support are elderly.
For another, the correlation between being on a pension and voting ACT in 2020 was 0.72, with voting New Conservative it was 0.65 and with voting National in 2020 it was 0.64. So the elderly bigot segment of the population would apparently much rather vote for right-wing parties led by whites than for a centrist party led by a Maori.
Variable
Voting New Zealand First in 2020
Aged 20-24
-0.44
Aged 25-29
-0.47
Aged 30-34
-0.50
Aged 35-39
-0.57
Aged 40-44
-0.40
Aged 45-49
-0.09
Aged 50-54
0.18
Aged 55-59
0.44
Aged 60-64
0.44
Aged 65-69
0.45
Aged 70-74
0.43
Aged 75-79
0.39
Aged 80-84
0.31
Aged 85+
0.19
New Zealand First voters are, true to stereotype, significantly older than average. There was a significant negative correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and belonging to any age group under 45 years of age, and there was a significant positive correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and belonging to any age group between 55 and 84.
These correlations are, however, not as strong as those between voting for other parties.
The strongest positive correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and belonging to any age group was with those aged 65-69. The correlation in this instance was 0.45. But the correlation between being in this age group and voting ACT in 2020 was much stronger, at 0.77. The correlations between being in this age group and voting National in 2020 (0.67) or voting New Conservative in 2020 (0.61) were also stronger.
In fact, the correlations between being in any age group above 45 years of age and voting National in 2020 were stronger than any of the correlations between being in those age groups and voting New Zealand First in 2020. So New Zealand First’s reputation as a pensioner’s party is mostly unfounded. The reality is that pensioners tend to be wealthy, on account of having much longer than average to accumulate wealth, and wealthy people prefer National to New Zealand First.
Variable
Voting New Zealand First 2020
No religion
0.18
Being a Buddhist
-0.55
Being a Christian
-0.09
Being a Hindu
-0.41
Being a Muslim
-0.43
Being a Jew
-0.37
Following Maori religions
0.36
Following Spiritualism or New Age religions
0.35
Further proof that New Zealand First voters are not from the political establishment comes from the correlations between voting for them in 2020 and religion.
Highly telling is the negative (if not significant) correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and being a Christian. This was -0.09. Given how many Christians are in positions of power in New Zealand, the fact that few of them vote New Zealand First reveals the extent to which New Zealand First is an anti-Establishment party.
The most strongly negative correlations between being religious and voting New Zealand First in 2020 were with being a Buddhist (-0.55), being a Muslim (-0.43), being a Hindu (-0.41) and being a Jew (-0.37). This can be easily explained by reference to the fact that people in these four groups tend to be immigrants, and therefore do not possess nationalist sentiments.
The most strongly positive correlations between being religious and voting New Zealand First in 2020 were with the Maori religions (0.36) and with Spiritualism and New Age beliefs (0.35). The former can be easily explained by the heavy Maori support for New Zealand First. The latter can be explained by the fact that many New Zealand First voters feel like outcasts in a globalist system, and people who follow Spiritualism and New Age beliefs are also usually outside the mainstream.
In summary, New Zealand First voters are a cross-section of salt-of-the-Earth working-class Kiwis. They like to have children, don’t like to live in big cities and don’t care much about higher education. Most of them belong to similar demographics as Labour voters, but are put off by Labour’s pandering to globalist interests.
The stereotypes about them carry a grain of truth, in that New Zealand First voters tend to be older than average, but are grossly misleading in the main. For one thing, Maoris vote New Zealand First more than white people do; for another, New Zealand First voters are much more likely to be family people than crotchety old bigots.
The best hope for New Zealand First in the 2023 General Election is possibly that disaffection with Labour’s Maori Caucus sees many Maori voters switch to New Zealand First. Labour gets far more Maori votes (by absolute measure) than either The Maori Party or New Zealand First, and if New Zealand First can pick up most of those Maori voters who have abandoned Labour since 2020 they could get over 5% in the 2023 General Election.
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This article is an excerpt from the upcoming 3rd Edition of Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan and published by VJM Publishing. Understanding New Zealand is the comprehensive guide to the demographics and voting patterns of the New Zealand people.
