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Cartoon by Vaughan Tomlinson - The Guardian

ANALYSIS: None of the three leading contenders to secure the affluent east Auckland seat of Tāmaki at November’s election are willing to claim a supposedly leaked “internal” poll that showed a shock result, with National behind in third place.

The poll, published by left-wing outlet The Daily Blog, had ACT’s James Christmas a nose ahead on 26%, with Labour’s Max Harris in second on 24% and National’s Mahesh Muralidhar third on 23%.

All three are fresh faces, with none having been in Parliament before - though both Christmas and Muralidhar have been candidates before.

The Post has been unable to independently verify this poll.

Read more:

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The battle for Tāmaki: how a ‘safe’ seat became a live contest

Can Max Harris break Labour's 69-year Tāmaki drought? He doesn’t seem sure

The result would be a massive shock for National in particular, given it held the seat for six decades dating back to the Muldoon era - though electorate seats are notoriously hard to poll accurately because of the smaller population sample size.

Tāmaki has been an ACT seat since 2023, but the current MP, Brooke van Velden, is leaving politics at the election.

The result at the last election was itself a bit of a surprise, and came following increased scrutiny on National’s then-MP Simon O’Connor who had alienated some in the area and his own party due to publicising his hardline conservative views including around abortion.

Christmas, a former National candidate, has been campaigning hard to retain the seat for his party.

Both ACT and National feel they deserve to keep the seat - the former because it managed to unseat a sitting MP and secure its second electorate, and the latter because Tāmaki is, as Muralidhar has previously put it, “National Party heartland”. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon also made an appearance at Muralidhar’s campaign launch in June in a clear tick of approval, having name-dropped the candidate in several public speeches.

That’s despite speculation that National is prepared to lose some electorates in order to retain its senior list-only MPs, among them Nicola Willis and Chris Bishop, at threat of being booted out of Parliament in November.

Labour’s Harris is a dark horse - a well-respected barrister in his own right, but seen as a very unlikely winner given Tāmaki’s history. He is likely to make it into Parliament regardless through his ranking on Labour’s list.

While The Daily Blog’s publisher Martyn Bradbury is claiming the poll was “internal” - as in, commissioned by a political party - and leaked to him, nobody from the Christmas, Harris or Muralidhar camps would verify it.

In fact, perhaps owing to just how surprising it is, National has distanced itself from the poll completely and disputes the result.

It’s understood that National is conducting its own polling in Tāmaki. It has been suggested this shows a very different result, though Muralidhar would not comment on these numbers other than to confirm that “this poll was not commissioned by National or my team”.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon launches the campaign for National's Tāmaki candidate Mahesh Muralidhar at an invite-only lunch at the Orakei Yacht Club.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon launches the campaign for National's Tāmaki candidate Mahesh Muralidhar at an invite-only lunch at the Orakei Yacht Club.

Photo: BRUCE MACKAY / The Post

Meanwhile, ACT’s James Christmas said he was aware of “rumours of polls floating around” but that it was “all a bit of a parlour game this far from the election”. The party had previously polled in the seat while van Velden was still the candidate and before Muralidhar had been confirmed as National’s contender. That poll, obtained by the Sunday Star-Times in March, showed van Velden remained the most popular candidate.

The poll of 750 Tāmaki locals had van Velden on 50%, Labour’s 2023 candidate Fesaitu Solomone on 15% and Muralidhar on 13%.

“The people of Tāmaki will decide who is best equipped to represent our community in November,” Christmas told The Post, saying he takes nothing for granted.

Labour’s Tāmaki team have also been trying to verify the poll, it’s understood, but are understandably invigorated by the result. Labour being that close to winning a seat it hasn’t secured since the 1950s would be a remarkable outcome. The party denies responsibility for the poll, despite the numbers appearing first on an openly left-wing website.

Harris said that, if true, the poll was a “recognition of the hard work” of his team and may also suggest that boundary changes in Point England - a Labour-favouring part of Auckland that was previously part of the neighbouring electorate - might be working.

He said it signalled that voters were weighing up their options “in what seems to be a knife-edge three-horse race”.

Electorate polling can be unreliable. In July, a leaked poll from Curia showed two-term Auckland Central MP Chlöe Swarbrick behind National’s first-time candidate Candace Kinser. But in 2020, when Swarbrick secured the seat for the first time, two polls had showed her in third place behind both National and Labour.

Earlier this month, The Post obtained a poll by Community Engagement showing Labour’s Sophie Handford ahead of incumbent National MP Tim Costley in the Kāpiti seat.

Inside the Alice in Wonderland world of NZ sovereign citizens

Mock courts, homemade kingdoms and handwritten decrees might seem harmless enough. But behind New Zealand’s sovereign citizen movement lies a trail of bankruptcies, foreclosures and lives upended by pseudolaw. Federico Magrin investigates.

Federico Magrin

August 22, 2026 • 4:00am

From local council disputes to multi-million dollar tax frauds, sovereign citizen tactics are spreading nationwide.

From local council disputes to multi-million dollar tax frauds, sovereign citizen tactics are spreading nationwide.Photo: Nina Weil

A footpath in front of a Golden Bay cafe was painted in a chequered fashion earlier this year.

Black and white tiles adorned with psychedelic details covered the pavement. However, the Tasman District Council claimed what the business owner did could represent a risk for people with low vision.

So Nganga, the owner of the MAD Safe Heavenly Haven in Collingwood, convened a mock court with hand-drawn seals, where people heard claims made against the council.

In May, he had painted the footpath in front of his shop in a style resembling Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. But he had never asked for consent. And while the artistic merit of the painting wasn’t debated, council staff said it represented a hazard.

The chequered tiles outside a Golden Bay cafe led to a dispute with the local council and a mock court hearing that ordered the council to pay for the artwork.

The unofficial court declared Nganga, also known as Kelvin McKenney, had “full jurisdiction” over the footpath and ordered the council to pay the business owner for the artistic work.

The council’s transportation manager and roading engineers were invited to attend the hearing, but they declined. “There is no legally-binding element to the proceedings and any subsequent opinion of the hearings, and therefore no obligation to attend,” council communications officer Tim O’Connell said.

And while the council is not pursuing enforcement at the moment, Nganga was still reminded that the tiles needed to be rectified.

While some residents might be aware of the high number of incidents involving sovereign citizens or people making pseudolegal claims, a review of hundreds of court documents, social media accounts, websites, correspondence from councils and cases of people resisting police arrests shows that a majority of reported incidents have occurred there.

Nelson-Tasman courts and councils were more likely to hear pseudolegal claims, or receive fictitious correspondence, when compared with other regions. Auckland was the region with the second highest number of serious incidents and Waikato third.

Since 2019, 25 serious cases were identified in Nelson-Tasman: one involved a man punching a police officer, another a man kidnapping a meter reader.

Pseudolaw and strawmen

The systems that hold civil society together work largely because almost everyone, however reluctantly, shows up to court, to hearings, to the processes that bind communities to shared rules. Sovereign citizens don’t. They contest jurisdiction, refuse the stand and treat the whole apparatus as a fiction they have personally seen through.

Outlawed by Harry Hobbs and Stephen Young (pictured) is published this week by Penguin.

“It’s incredibly difficult today to even understand who’s out there that’s carrying the torch of pseudolaw, and that’s because they don’t identify as such,” said University of Otago professor of law Stephen Young.

Young has co-authored a book on the sovereign citizen and pseudolaw movement, Outlawed, which was published on Tuesday by Penguin.

The movement originated in the United States in the late 1970s, and spread through a “pseudolaw memeplex” to different countries, he said. Since 1977, 300,000 followers of the sovereign citizen ideology and about 600 cases of violent behaviour have been identified in the US.

“It’s a myth narrative that they have. This type of belief was identified in the United States but it spread into Canada and New Zealand.”

Sovereign citizen is an umbrella term that covers the core beliefs shared and circulated by pseudolaw adherents who use certain tropes and memes, such as: “everything is a contract” and “government authority is limited”.

The memeplex, which was first conceptualised by Canadian researcher Donald Netolitzky in 2018, promises immunity, free money and includes anti-authority narratives.

Young said the origin of the term “sovereign citizen” was unclear, but a number of gurus and activists helped shape the international phenomenon, such as American political activist William Potter Gale who formed the anti-government group Posse Comitatus, which refused to pay taxes. US Republican politician Richard ‘Dick’ Marple tried to introduce sovereign citizen-style legislation in New Hampshire, and farmer-turned-pseudolegal activist Roger Elvick, was the founder of the strawman theory which claims a person may be entitled to money deposited into a trust at birth.

Information disorders and social media propaganda researcher Sanjana Hattotuwa said pseudolaw claims and the sovereign citizen ideology promised a complete answer to people who might feel a sense of powerlessness.

The challenges posed by these individuals and their ideologies were not “about strange words, bizarre world views or failed legal theories but in a political imagination that wants the protection of rights without reciprocal obligation, authority without the consent of others, and punishment without an independent court”.

The sovereign citizen movement is fluid and defies the traditional left-right political divide; it’s leaderless and its boundaries are blurred. People enter and leave it rapidly. However, sovcits, strawmen, freemen and living men share the same vocabulary, viral materials, digital channels, old-fashioned sources and dissident claims, creating a library of documents that is repeatedly posted online to attract followers and subscribers.

Janine of the House of Arabella and Walters said ‘being sound of mind’ she wanted to take control of all councils and government departments across the country.

They instruct individuals on how to claim to be a “living man/woman existing in the private” and how to argue that using capital letters for a person’s name changes their legal status to a corporate entity.

Since Mark Quinn, the founder of Challenging Councils, was interviewed for this article, Zoom meetings hosted by the group now open with a disclaimer: “Information shared within this group is for general discussion purposes only, does not constitute legal, financial, tax, accounting, or other professional advice. Members should seek independent professional advice appropriate to their circumstances”.

Co-opting rangatiratanga

Young said the sovereign citizen movement was often associated with white supremacy and conservative libertarian approaches, but it had also infiltrated Māori communities. “It has latched on to indigenous sovereignty arguments in ways that are, I think, quite concerning,” the researcher said.

A national study of 277 court cases (of which 94% were self-represented) spanning 26 years has found over 50% of the cases attached pseudolaw arguments to bogus Māori sovereignty claims, including New Zealand’s biggest tax fraudster John Bracken. And these claims were heard by councils too.

Ingarani Maori Inc sent a joint letter to the Ōtorohanga District Council and the Waikato Regional Council, telling them the “New Zealand Company” had been declared bankrupt and called the notification of an overdue rates payment a fraud.

In October 2022, the Porirua City Council received a letter from a ratepayer claiming they were entitled not to pay to park “on our own whenua”. Attached to the letter were also an “order of incorporation” and a series of trespass orders against all government departments.

In 30 years, pseudolaw claims have taken hold. All of the 78 New Zealand local authorities have been contacted for this article and thousands of letters and emails were released under successive Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act requests.

Similar letters have been received by councils around the country, including one sent to the Ōtorohanga District Council which was dated “25th day of Whiringa-a-rangi in the year of He Whakaputanga 191”.

In the North Island, there were many associations that exploited indigenous claims of rangatiratanga to advance sovereign citizen claims. In October last year, Ingarani Maori Inc sent a joint letter to the Ōtorohanga District Council and the Waikato Regional Council, telling them the “New Zealand Company” had been declared bankrupt and called the notification of an overdue rates payment a fraud. “Leave our beneficiaries alone,” it said.

Sovereign citizens often return rates correspondence to councils with writings on it.

Further north, Whangārei-born Jenny Sullivan, also known as Lady Crown Turikatuku III, or the “Sovereign Crown of the Mauri Nation”, ordained Bay of Plenty woman Janine Walters on video sharing platform Rumble.

She then became Janine of the House of Arabella and Walters. While Lady Crown Turikatuku III lives in Australia, Walters petitioned for her own kingdom . In a letter sent to several councils across the country, she said “being sound of mind” she wanted to take control of and gain ownership of courts, ministries and local government by “royal decree”.

Turikatuku was one of the wives of Hongi Hika (Ngāpuhi), a 19th-century tohunga (person of prestige) whose leadership and encounters with English-born priest Samuel Marsden are told in the book Tears of Rangi by Anne Salmond. Lady Crown Turikatuku III claims she is a descendant of Turikatuku.

From her house, Walters runs a Rumble channel where she plans to establish a “decentralised governance model”. She started a faith-based movement, Now Freedom for All, and charges people $20 to provide access to “education sessions” and become members.

It is one of the many attempts to monetise on what sovereign citizens want – another pseudolaw “mentor” in the Bay of Plenty charges $1000 for three-hour session on ”spiritual reclamation of land“.

In a letter sent to several councils last year, Walters claims the Crown owes her $9,990,305,284,406,650,000.

Waihi ecofarmer Ewan Campbell is bankrupt but is still operating a farming company.

In June last year, a protest in front of the Tauranga office of the Bay of Plenty Regional Council saw a pole and a flag erected. A group hoisted a yellow and purple flag with a lion’s mane in the middle, the emblem of the self-proclaimed kingdom of Janine of the House of Arabella and Walters.

Then there was Ewan Campbell, the Waihi ecofarmer who decided tax laws did not apply to him.

Campbell ran a Tauranga organic butchery which employed seven people. He did not file GST, PAYE or income tax returns for his companies. In 2016, he was jailed after evading close to $1.5 million in tax. He declined to accept letters delivered to him in person and claimed he was a beneficiary of a Māori incorporation, hence Inland Revenue did not have authority over him.

He was adjudicated bankrupt while at Waikeria Prison, in October that same year. Campbell did not budge. As he got out of jail, he established EcoFarm Aotearoa, a farming consultancy company.

Sovereign citizens consult social media groups asking for suggestions on how to avoid paying fines, rates, or mortgage repayments.

He is not the official director of the business (the company’s registered director and figurehead is a Tauranga man who was struck off the New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants register because of “conduct unbecoming” of an accountant in 2013), but Campbell operates the business as if it is his.

Campbell was still bankrupt as of July. “He has not filed a statement of affairs and will remain bankrupt until three years after one has been provided,” MBIE insolvency and trustee service regional manager Anthony Pullan said in an emailed statement. “Ewan Campbell has not been granted consent to enter into, carry on, or take part in the management or control of a business.”

Campbell has been contacted via phone and email, but declined to comment for this article.

‘Fanciful legal universe’

The pseudolaw movement was a fragmented phenomenon, said Adelaide University associate professor of law Joe McIntyre.

Councils across the country have received thousands of letters making bogus claims about rates.

“It is very much a choose your own adventure approach to law, so picking and using the pieces you want and rejecting the pieces you don’t.”

McIntyre, who co-authored a research paper on the internationalisation of pseudolaw in 2024, wrote that adherents used archaic and obscure terminology to depict themselves as authoritative figures, while they lived in a “fanciful legal universe”. Their counter-narrative provided phrases that were used as a “talisman of legal immunity”.

At times, hard-done-by individuals adhered to the movement seeking a solution to their problems, or legitimisation for non-compliance, living on the illusion that an alternative system could solve their problems, even if only for a short but merry moment.

“We saw a lot of very disaffected people during the Covid era who had always seen themselves as good citizens, and now the government was telling them to do something they didn’t want to do.

“They didn’t want to become criminals and pseudolaw seemed to offer them a way to avoid the public health measures they didn’t want while remaining within the law. So that dynamic, I think, is core to understanding what pseudolaw is: it’s not about rejecting law, it’s about articulating a law that is functional for that individual. So in a way, it represents a commitment to law. It’s just a commitment to their version of law,” McIntyre said.

While pseudolaw arguments were first heard in North America in the 1970s, it didn’t take long before they made their way to New Zealand courts.

Back in Collingwood, Nganga is still making art and holding sham hearings at the former café. He said he did not own a business anymore, because he did not need to. His doors were still open to visitors and he would happily prepare you a cuppa, if you cared for one.

He has not renewed his food business registration since it expired in January 2022. However, the chairs and tables on the footpath are a sign of his commitment to maintaining his beliefs. The artist, who is originally from Australia, has established a hapū, Ngā Wai ē Rua, and called the colourful shop on Tasman St a marae.

In a handwritten letter to the Tasman District Council, he trespassed council and SPCA staff, police and army officers and many others, and threatened them with a minimum penalty of $10m.

-Nelson Mail

https://www.thepress.co.nz/nz-news/361063600/inside-alice-wonderland-world-nz-sovereign-citizens