Third Canterbury council has candidates with conspiracy links
Wednesday, 17 August 2022
A third Canterbury council has at least one candidate who has links to conspiracy and anti-vaccination organisations and another who threatened media with “a day of reckoning”.
Vicki Payne is standing for the Waimakariri District Council in North Canterbury as a councillor in the Kaiapoi-Woodend ward and as a Community Board member in Woodend and Sefton, while vocal anti-mandate protestor Colin Wightman will stand in the Oxford-Ohoka ward.
A woman with the same name as Payne has a private Telegram account that follows conspiracy groups including The White Rose. Telegram allows users to discuss topics they do not want made public.
According to Newsroom The White Rose is an anti-vax, anti-mask organisation that encourages people to violate public health rules and compares vaccines to human experimentation during World War II.
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The group provided stickers promoting a range of conspiracy theories, including that the pandemic was a lie.
The woman also engages with Counterspin’s Telegram account – a far-right conspiracy media platform, and commented on a video about satanic rituals from the group, saying she “didn’t doubt satanic rituals were real”.
Conspiracy theories around ‘Satanic Panic’ have long been around with over 12,000 unsubstantiated cases reported in the United States in the 1980s at the height of the hysteria.
Payne confirmed she does have a Telegram account but refused to answer if she was the same person who wrote the post about satanic rituals.
Instead, she said she had been following government and council “overreach” for “many years” including Three Waters Reform, Local Government NZ and “CEOs unelected roles”.
On a Facebook community page, Payne shared her support for a Freedom and Rights Coalition protest in Rangiora, North Canterbury, and promoted a 5G conspiracy document to her business clients.
Conspiracy theorists believe the 5G roll-out is causing widespread deaths globally because of electromagnetic fields and some believe it is causing Covid-19, despite science showing it is a hoax.
She also liked Sue Grey, the well-known Covid-19 conspiracy lawyer’s page and two other Freedom groups.
In response to questions on her affiliations, Payne said she was an independent standing to unite council with the community.
When asked about social media links to freedom and conspiracy groups she said she “was not really interested” in what Stuff was “talking about” and said she had to pick up a sick family member, before hanging up.
Colin Wightman helped organise the Christchurch “Black Friday protest” in February where he spoke to a small crowd outside Stuff’s Christchurch office.
The protest upset many after a poster depicted a disturbing image of a public hanging in 1946 after WWII, which they incorrectly described as showing a dozen Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg in Germany, accompanied by a caption saying: “War and crimes against humanity victims.”
The photo actually shows executions in Kyiv, which was at the time part of the Soviet Union and is now the capital of Ukraine.
According to RNZ, the image is a popular meme online among far-right groups, and is often accompanied by a caption: “Photograph of Hangings at Nuremberg, Germany. Members of the Media, who lied and misled the German People were executed, right along with Medical Doctors and Nurses who participated in medical experiments using living people as guinea pigs.”
At the time Wightman dismissed concerns the poster was insensitive to Holocaust survivors or that it intimated a direct threat to media.
However, he did compare current conditions under the New Zealand Government to Nazi Germany.
He said the gruesome photo depicted “a day of reckoning” for media bosses.
When asked what that reckoning would be, he suggested imprisonment.
His message, along with signs that included slogans linking the New Zealand media to genocide, caused anger among some passersby, including one young man who was visibly upset.
The man shouted: “They killed six million of my people, you have no idea.”
Wightman said on Wednesday he was not aligned to any far-right or conspiracy groups but thought the Freedom and Rights Coalition was an “outstanding group” and Destiny Church pastor Derek Tait was a bold character who stood firm in his beliefs.
One of the protestors in the “freedom camp” outside Parliament, Wightman also organised a pre-fab shower block later taken away by police.
He said he believed police started the riot outside Parliament and they caused the “ratbags” to get out of control, despite footage showing protestors lighting fires and throwing projectiles at police.
Wightman said he believed Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was carrying out a United Nations agenda of communism and depopulation. Claims that Covid was developed as a form of population control is part of a raft of outlandish conspiracy theories based on the United Nations Agenda 21, a global sustainable development plan.
Five Christchurch City Council candidates are receiving help from anti-vaccination, anti-mandate group Voices For Freedom (VFF) as is one woman, who is standing for the Selwyn District Council.