In a shock to a surprising amount of people, a senior NZFirst youth figure was revealed to have been connected to far-right messaging networks. Nicholas Newport/Wells, 26, a former Waikato University student, was linked to at least one social media account that repeatedly posted ‘Heil Hitler!’, and which expressed support to the Australian National Socialist Network between retweeting Shane Jones when he remembered the ‘NZ’ in NZFirst stood for New Zealand and not NaZi. Paparoa, an independent research collective dedicated to tracking fascist & racist activity in Aotearoa, stated in a Twitter post that Newport “[…]was on Telegram talking about killing all n-words well within the last two years.” Within that time, Newport was active as a member of Young NZFirst. The day before the initial The Press article, NZFirst party leader Winston Peters attempted to frame Charlie Mitchell’s as of then unreleased article as a ‘hit job,’ refusing any assertion that Newport might have had a sway on the party. Of course, it would be fair to say that a member of a party’s youth wing doesn’t hold much sway over actual MPs, but youth wings are the soil where future candidates grow, and so obviously there should be concern that a prevalent figure in NZFirst’s youth wing may hold sway or even be edging the door open for entryism by more sinister elements. Newport was involved with Action Zealandia, a national socialist Telegram network which collapsed and which members of White Waikato, the group that was posting stickers up around the Hamilton campus, were active in.
In an Email to Nexus, Professor Al Gillespie says, “the problem we have in NZ/Aotearoa is that the rhetoric is becoming increasingly dangerous.” NZFirst have demonstrated a rapid increase in nationalist posturing, including attacks on Immigrant MPs like Dr. Lawrence Xu-Nan, stating that the Green MP should “go back to [his] own country.” Gillespie says that when there are no consequences for this sort of bad behaviour, it “incentivizes those with less power to mimic what they see and hear.”
