When Colin Craig launched the Conservative Party back in 2011, I was cautiously optimistic – maybe, finally, here was a party that could see that our societal fragmentation and lack of values was the cause of many (not all) of our problems. Boy was I wrong. Crazy Colin Craig turned out to be a monster, which was obvious even before it came out that he was a sex pest.

I never held any faith in the loonies associated with that party after that debacle. I felt it was a pity that the large minority of NZers with strong social values did not have a political home. But unfortunately, rather than winding up and letting something else take their place, people just kept trying to resurrect the very dead corpse of that party.

The first person to try to really flog the dead horse was Leighton Baker, a builder from Rangiora and apparently a decent enough person. They scored 0.24% and 1.5% in the 2017 and 2020 elections – clearly a loser party with no credibility or hope. They then gave the reins to Elliot Ikilei, trying to appeal to the socially conservative Pacific Island voters in NZ, with absolutely no results. They are now being led by two very ineffective weirdos called Ted Johnston (a barrister in South Auckland) and Helen Houghton, a law student.

Dieuwe De Boer of RightMinds.nz is a big influence in the party. That blog site is basically a gathering of Donald Trump fan boys and post-millenialists trying to usher in a golden age of Christianity in a decidedly non-Christian country.

The New Conservative party fielded a madman called Rudi du Plooy in the Hamilton West by election last year. He got 118 votes.

There never was any hope that this party of weirdos and malcontents were ever going to get 5% of the vote, much less win an electorate seat.

That hope is now even smaller, as Loopy Leighton Baker has now decided to launch his own political party and fragment the small pool of socially conservative voters willing to waste their votes even further. He has modestly called his party the ‘Leighton Baker Party‘. He was a popular man in the Parliament Protests, and is clearly interpreting the noise and enthusiasm from those people as a genuine prospect that he can finally be the man who cracks 5%.

In addition to him, there are other fully-fledged nutjobs like Sue Grey and Brian Tamaki also going after the parliament protestors’ votes, in addition to the sad case of Matt King and Democracy NZ.

So if you’re a socially conservative NZer, annoyed or revulsed by government over-reach during the great COVID overreaction, and probably a Christian who does not feel represented by Labour, National, NZ First or ACT and you feel like wasting your vote on a party which will never get in, you now have a choice of:

  • New Conservative nutjobs
  • Leighton Baker loopies
  • Democracy NZ led by the demented Matt King
  • Freedoms NZ party led by the very crazy Sue Grey and hell-bound Brian Tamaki

Crazy lefties have a huge range of parties to choose from which will represent them in Parliament – the Greens, Te Paati Maori, Labour and National all cater for them. ACT caters for the inner-city social liberal and farmers who have been abandoned by National, and NZ First caters for the deluded old fools who want to return NZ to a golden age that never existed.

There is nobody who caters for a classic conservative like me, and all attempts to do so have invariably been done by Quixotic narcissists and certifiable nutjobs. It is carrying on this election with the splintering of this block, you can lock it in that none of these people will get to Parliament.