DAVID MOFFETT

Playing on the Right wing

Almost two decades ago, David Moffett radically restructured Welsh regional rugby, kindling a bitterness that still lingers in the valleys north of Cardiff. Now he’s bringing the same oppugnant approach to New Zealand politics. On Thursday, he formally announced his appointment to the board of the New Conservatives.

The party is trying to rebuild out of the ashes of Colin Craig’s political career. Moffett, now a management consultant, is devising a new strategy, to distance the party from Craig’s Pharisaic fall from grace. He is also considering running for Parliament next year.

Moffett, 71, burst on to the political scene late last year, raging on Twitter at ‘‘traitorous’’ Jacinda Ardern, and calling German Chancellor Angela Merkel ‘‘a thoroughly detestable excuse for a human being’’. He’s been trolling both sides of the discourse – baiting ACT leader David Seymour and Leftwing blogger Martyn Bradbury. His profile – he is a former Sport England, NZ Rugby, NRL and Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) boss – saw his insults generate headlines here and in Britain.

He is primarily concerned with migration, climate change and gender politics. They are all touchstones of the populist Right-wing movement sweeping the Western world, a backlash to political establishment thinking.

That discontent and fears about a dilution of national identity and globalisation have propelled Donald Trump into power, and seen far-Right parties make significant electoral gains across Europe.

Can the movement catch fire in New Zealand, traditionally a good five years behind political trends in the northern hemisphere? And is David Moffett, once a referee, the man to kick it off? His conversion to politics was motivated by the UN Migration Compact, an issue that was hijacked last year by an online network of nationalist and far-Right activists.

‘‘This gives the United Nations the right to set our policy on immigration and that is not a good thing. We should decide who comes here,’’ Moffett says.

The global agreement on a common approach to migration, which New Zealand signed, sets out non-binding guidelines for member nations. It explicitly ‘‘reaffirms the sovereign right of states to determine their national migration policy’’. But suspicion took root and the United States, Australia, Poland, Hungary, Austria, and Brazil all pulled out.

Moffett is troubled by the idea that New Zealand will be targeted by people smugglers and become a destination for ‘‘planeloads’’ of violent rapists from East Africa.

‘‘I read today there is a boatload of 200 Indians coming to New Zealand, who when they arrive they will be illegal immigrants,’’ Moffett says. ‘‘I don’t think they are refugees

. . . I do believe that they are – what’s the term – I’ll have to think about that for a moment – they are welfare, um, immigrants is not the right word.

‘‘I don’t want to use the word invaders because I don’t want this to be right in everybody’s faces. But they are seeking to land in a welfare country such as New Zealand and they are doing it illegally . . . what the people smugglers tell them [is] if you get to Australia or New Zealand they’ll give you a house, they’ll give you medical, free schooling, free everything else.

‘‘You just have to tell them you are a refugee and under this compact they are not going to be able to turn you away.’’

There has never been a mass arrival in New Zealand, but should that happen, they can be detained for up to six months.

Moffett is critical both of the definition of refugee and the ‘‘corrupt’’ United Nations system for dealing with those who claim refuge. He has no truck with the idea that desperate people are forced to go to desperate lengths to find safety.

‘‘We have got embassies all over the world. Let them go there and claim asylum and we can vet them and we can decide whether they are the sort of people we want in our country.’’

To back up his opinions, Moffett reaches for conspiracy theories he’s read on the internet. He struggles to articulate them, or convincingly defend them.

‘‘Recently, Australia had an agreement with the United States to take some of the people on Manus Island – unfortunately, when they got to America they found out that there weren’t all these free handouts and they wanted to go back,’’ he says. ‘‘They’ve got their foot into America and they don’t want to be there because it is too tough. These people – in a lot of the cases – are not genuine refugees.’’

Moffett is unsure where he sourced this example. In fact, it has been reported that almost three-quarters of the refugees were rejected by the US, apparently because they were born in Muslim countries.

‘‘Well, it’s been in the news,’’ he says. ‘‘Perhaps, if the mainstream media was to report some of this stuff, they would see . . . you’ll find it in an Australian newspaper somewhere.’’

Journalism is another of Moffett’s bugbears. He says the ‘‘mainstream’’ media aren’t reporting on the migration pact, or any of the other issues he’s worried about. ‘‘You have to understand that there is something called the global mass media. It is basically run by nine companies around the world and they have made decisions about what they want the world to look like.’’

Who are these nine companies? ‘‘I don’t know what their names are, but you know who they are – the Murdoch empire.’’

Earlier, Moffett had told me he first learned of the migration pact on Sky News Australia.

‘‘You need to understand Sky, Murdoch, have moved Left in the last six months. They used to have this programme called The

Outsiders and they used to have some really good presenters on there. They sacked one of them – he made a little error but it wasn’t a sackable offence. And then they continued to move to the Left.’’

He is referring to Ross Cameron, a former Liberal MP, dumped by Sky in November after he said: ‘‘If you go to the Disneyland in Shanghai on any typical morning of the week you’ll see 20,000 black-haired, slanty-eyed, yellow-skinned Chinese desperate to get into Disneyland.’’ Moffett’s thoughts on migration are curious. He was born in Doncaster, Yorkshire, but his father, an air traffic controller, moved the family to Kenya when Moffett was three. At age 16, when his parents split, he moved with his father to Australia. His sporting career has taken him to Wales, England and South Africa. He now lives in rural north Canterbury.

Economic migration is to be welcomed, he says. ‘‘You can get some really fantastic farm workers prepared to come to this country through legal channels.’’

Moffett’s opinions on environmental policy are contradictory and seem to be at odds with the New Conservatives’ official position on climate change, which includes policy on reducing emissions.

‘‘It is the biggest scam ever visited on the human population,’’ he says. ‘‘Give one single example of a prediction of all the scientists that has come true on climate change. By 2014, there should have been no ice left on the planet and we would never see snow again . . .’’

Who claimed this? ‘‘I haven’t come here with all that sort of stuff prepared. What was the name of that ex-politician?’’

Al Gore? ‘‘Al Gore, yeah. 2002 he was predicting all this stuff . . . I’m not going to take what they say to me as gospel. I’m going to do my own investigations and make my own mind up. I do not believe the narrative. CO2 in the atmosphere doesn’t increase global warming.’’

Gore once erroneously attributed predictions about Arctic summer sea ice to scientists, and for the last four years his comments have been recited by human-caused climate change deniers as evidence of a conspiracy.

‘‘I don’t believe what half of science is telling me . . . they have actually cottoned on to the fact that they can get themselves a very well-paid job for life,’’ Moffett says.

He then goes on: ‘‘The one thing I believe is that we should look after our climate. We do it here [at home], we recycle – buy local wherever possible . . . we do our bit as much as we possibly can to reduce a negative footprint on the planet.’’ For all his sound and fury on social media, Moffett has just 1800 followers on Twitter. He says he’s new to the micro-blogging site, but appears to have been active on it in 2009, commenting about his woes with the WRU, flight delays and his horses.

Currently, he’s using his account to share Right-wing memes and promote a rally in Auckland’s Aotea Square to protest against the UN agreement. Organisers want to emulate the French ‘‘yellow vest’’ movement and are asking demonstrators to wear black singlets. Only 32 members have indicated they will attend on the party’s Facebook page.

The New Conservatives gained just a 0.2 per cent share of the vote at the last election. Like every political wannabe plotting their rise to power in the last decade, Moffett has identified a wellspring of frustrations and legitimate grievances among NZ First and National Party voters as his constituency.

It can’t be ignored. Mainstream parties, deaf to the resentments of voters who feel left behind, have paid the price in Europe. Under Craig, the party almost scraped 4 per cent at the 2014 election and those voters are still looking for a home.

Moffett is using his platform as a lightning rod for those frustrations. He might appear to be a torchbearer for Right-wing populism in New Zealand, but ask him to flesh out his ideas and he is ill-prepared, his ideology both thin and confused: at one point he claims to be ‘‘a centrist’’.

He finishes up our interview with a senseless rant about paedophiles infiltrating the gay and lesbian community and schools, which seems to be his own riff on a conspiracy theory circulating on the white-supremacist fringes of the internet. Later, he sends me a YouTube video to explain the theory.

‘‘I don’t believe what half of science is telling me . . . they have actually cottoned on to the fact that they can get themselves a very well-paid job for life.’’