Julian Batchelor and the apocalypse

Sunday, 10 September 2023

Julian Batchelor is roaming the country warning of “spiritual darkness” in the form of co-governance. His tour has helped thrust the issue into public focus, but critics say Batchelor’s rhetoric draws on myths of the past to justify apocalyptic views of the future.

Julian Batchelor stands in a cavernous building, shoulders hunched and arms crossed, refusing to speak to the small crowd before him.

“It’s a bit awkward,” one man in the crowd muttered. A woman offered a suggestion: “Should we sing a waiata while we wait?”

Around 75 people had ventured into the cold, mid-winter night to hear Batchelor speak.

Like previous events on his “Stop Co-Governance” tour, the lead-up had been shambolic. The original venue had cancelled under pressure from his critics, and a new location was secured at late notice: A desolate building in central Hastings that used to be a Dollarama.

Some attendees were not there to listen politely. As soon as Batchelor started speaking, he was heckled. The police were called. Batchelor, unable to talk, waited in solemn silence, standing beside a projected New Zealand flag, blowing in a digital wind.

Since his tour began in February, Batchelor has romped over New Zealand with the spirit of a doomsday preacher warning about the coming apocalypse.

Across more than 60 events, he has described co-governance as a “war”, a “coup”, “apartheid”, and like a “pre-1840 tribal raid”. He says it will usher the “destruction of New Zealand”, and is a stop on the road to Māori dictatorship and tribal rule. When reaching for historical parallels, he often lands on 1930s Germany, when unthinkable horrors were about to be unleashed across Europe.

This message has, understandably, been contentious.

Batchelor is regularly followed by protesters who try to infiltrate and disrupt his meetings. He left one venue behind a phalanx of police officers, slowly moving through a jeering crowd, to find his car had been vandalised with graffiti and two of its tyres deflated. In Tasman, there was a scuffle between protesters and the far-right activist Lee Williams; in Palmerston North, a protester was forcibly dragged out of a meeting by other attendees.

Batchelor has revelled in the notoriety. The protests, he believes, prove his thesis: That Māori and the “woke white people” supporting them are intolerant and disorderly.

“Neither I nor any of my supporters have been hostile to Māori,” Batchelor told The Press.

“Quite the opposite, in fact. We have been peaceful but Māori protesters have been hostile.“

He cited the Hastings event as evidence. After the police arrived, and removed hecklers at Batchelor’s request, he began his seminar.

The structure of the seminars is always the same. Batchelor outlines his definition of co-governance — “the elite Māori takeover of New Zealand” — before railing against the news media and the activists who oppose him.

It then transitions into dry history lecture, which Batchelor delivers with the energy of a surly school teacher, quizzing the audience as he goes. In it, he argues the commonly understood meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi is false, and the truth has been covered up through a conspiracy between politicians, public servants, iwi and the media.

In Hastings, it was much the same, except he struggled to make progress. A large crowd had gathered outside, singing waiata and performing haka. The old Dollarama shook. Batchelor was barely audible.

It was getting late, and he was about to reach the most controversial part of his presentation. In lurid detail, Batchelor chronicles an ahistorical view of Māori life before colonisation.

He describes slaves kept in pens to be fattened up like sheep, then cooked on hot rocks for dinner; Slaves having their genitals cut off and thrown at the women to be eaten raw like oysters. Māori, he said, would bury their enemies alive and build a pā on top of them; they would delight in consuming an enemy chief and defecating him out the other end as the ultimate humiliation.

Like much of his historical material, the source is unusual: Jean Jackson, who he describes as a “Ngāi Tāhu historian” but was in fact a self-described freelance journalist and fantasist. Her many books, which are kept in a file at the National Library, are littered with stream-of-consciousness conspiracies about the Illuminati, the Rothschilds, and politicans being mind-controlled; Her writings on pre-colonisation Māori are unsourced, and there appears to be no historical evidence for these specific claims.

In any case, Batchelor didn’t make it to this point, thwarted by a wāhine who strolled to his laptop and slammed it on the concrete floor. As police dragged her out, she swiped at a projector and yelled “Don’t come at my iwi and put hate speech on my people”. The meeting ended soon after and protesters poured into the building, continuing their waita, their thunderous haka, denunciations that floated through a dismal Hastings night.

Batchelor, as ever, was undeterred by the chaos. Summarising the event later on his blog, he noted the laptop was fine: A fact not owed to the structural soundness of Apple products, but to a “supernatural intervention”.

“Miracles happen in our meetings”, he said.

The activist

God called Julian Batchelor to campaign against the “spiritual darkness” of co-governance.

The evangelical Christian who once wrote a 700-page tome about “the war for souls” has been drafted into another battle. He is New Zealand’s Cassandra for co-governance; a martyr for Māorification.

It’s not the first time Batchelor has turned to activism. In the 1990s, he campaigned against a gay pride parade in Auckland, serving as spokesman for the New Zealand chapter of “Stop Promoting Homosexuality International“. He instigated a letter-writing campaign, and held a placard at a council meeting that read “Homosexuality is a thing God hates”.

(Batchelor told The Press his views on gay people have not changed).

Although trained as a school teacher, he was moved to serve God, and started a business helping churches convert to evangelism.

He briefly paused his career for politics. In 2005, he stood for NZ First in Mt Albert, held by then Prime Minister Helen Clark (Batchelor came fourth-equal, receiving the same number of votes - 746 - as ACT’s then 22-year-old candidate, David Seymour).

In the late 2000s, Batchelor sought out land on Cape Brett peninsula in the Far North, intending to convert a historic lodge into an international evangelism centre. That fateful decision, he says, is how he came to experience “tribal rule”.

Batchelor had unknowingly stepped into a long-running land dispute. For generations, local Māori had trailed a tribal walkway to the cliffs where their tīpuna were buried. To do so, they had to cross a small piece of land now owned by Batchelor.

Local Māori believed the land had been alienated from them in the 1930s. Batchelor said his ownership of the land resulted in a campaign of harassment.

In 2016, he took time off work to write a book. Spanning more than 200 pages, it alleges his neighbours — which he labels the “Criminal Group of Maori” (CGOM) ― subjected him to property damage, defamation, and slander. One person, he said, defecated on his driveway.

“Without exaggeration, I’d felt like I’d had an encounter with a wild tribe of primitive savages,” he wrote.

The final straw came in 2020, when Heritage New Zealand received an application to note the tribal pathway as wāhi tapu. Documents obtained by The Press show Batchelor was not directly informed and the decision was confirmed before he knew about it.

As Batchelor tells it, he was holding a pencil when he received the news. He snapped it in half, and in that moment, decided to tell the country about his experience with co-governance.

“Maori in Rawhiti tried to break me down, make me submit, make me a slave, and I said no,” he said recently.

“Tribal rule is coming to New Zealand through co-governance and it is hell.”

His tour hasn’t quite gone as intended. What were once public meetings became private events due to the regular disruption by protesters.

Hastings showed even that wasn’t enough: Since then, the roadshow has gone underground, operating in the shadows like a resistance movement.

Most of the meetings on a recent South Island tour were held privately in homes and streamed live on Facebook, where Batchelor’s slideshow was projected onto bare walls or hanging bedsheets, attendees vetted beforehand over the phone.

While there has been considerable media coverage of Batchelor’s tour — and the general air of unpleasantness following it like a storm cloud — there has been little reckoning with its content.

Despite being the public face of opposition to co-governance, Batchelor’s blog posts and seminars contain little discussion of the issue as it is traditionally understood. Instead, they are a stinging attack on Māori culture in general and its visibility in public life, filled with apocalyptic visions of the future and revisionist views of the past.

In his widely circulated pamphlet, for example, Batchelor claims it is “highly likely” that New Zealanders will be required to pay tribal tolls to drive between areas, fish, go to the beach, or visit Conservation land.

One recent blog post likened New Zealanders to passengers on the hijacked planes that struck the World Trade Centre in 2001: “A growing number of New Zealanders sense that if Co-Governance and the Maorification of New Zealand is not stopped, our nation will have a twin tower experience,” it says. “Not literally, but metaphorically.”

Some of Batchelor’s views are better seen in the realm of conspiracy theory. He has speculated about links between Māori and the Chinese Communist Party, and in his most recent seminar, suggested the upcoming election results might be altered (“It’s not outside the realms of possibility,” he told The Press). In interviews, he has promoted the debunked theory that a race of white, ginger-haired people settled New Zealand before Māori.

Much of his scorn is reserved for the presence of Māori culture in society, including the use of te reo Māori.

Batchelor says he refuses to use te reo words to protect his mind from brainwashing. He has encouraged parents to home-school their children so they are not exposed to Māori culture at school, which he has described as “grooming” and “child abuse”. On his blog, he once likened the words “Kia ora” to “heil Hitler” — “Clicking our heels and raising one arm in the air when we say it will come next,” he wrote.

Today, these views appear under the banner of opposing co-governance, using his sweeping definition of the concept, but that wasn’t always the case. In 2018, Batchelor started writing a book titled “The Maori Agenda For New Zealand”, the first chapter of which was posted online.

It makes no reference to co-governance, but contains the same generalised attack on Māori, described as “a very troubled race of people” who fundamentally lack good character.

“All things considered, do we really want our children and grandchildren ‘Maorified’ so that they can learn all these negative behaviours?” Batchelor wrote, referring to statistics around crime, suicide, and obesity.

“Not on my watch.”

Anti-Treatyism

After one of his meetings, Batchelor picked up a sign left behind by a protester that said “honour Te Tiriti”.

He wasn’t offended. He agrees with the message, and believes that’s what he’s doing: Urging New Zealand to return to the original meaning of Te Tiriti in te reo Māori, which he believes has been lost due to a corrupted view of history.

A large portion of Batchelor’s seminars explore this history; the Treaty’s intended meaning, and how it has been interpreted (or, in his words, “twisted”) over time.

Mainstream historians say Batchelor’s arguments are nonsensical, and draw upon largely debunked theories that have been advanced by a small group of pseudo-historians for decades.

Specifically, Batchelor draws heavily on the views of authors who publish books under the controversial banner Tross Publishing. Several of those authors have attended his seminars, and Batchelor says they endorse his work.

“You don’t have to be a ‘historian’ to present historical facts accurately,” Batchelor told The Press, before alleging that some historians had been “leaned on” to change their views on Treaty issues.

These arguments portray pre-colonisation Māori as backwards and barbaric, obsessed with war and desperate for protection from the Crown. Māori, in this account, enthusiastically gave up sovereignty in exchange for safety from each other.

“Māori were self-annihilating,” Batchelor said in one seminar. “Cannibalism, slavery, and infanticide were rife.

“This wasn’t Europeans killing Māori, it was Māori killing Māori… Māori tribes could not stop warring. They were out of control.”

Dr Vincent O’Malley, a historian who has published extensively on the Treaty-era of New Zealand history, said this view of the past “has no merit at all”.

“Māori were turning to trade and commerce in a major way and dominated the local economy before land losses and Crown invasions brought much of this to an end in the 1860s,” he says.

Dr Peter Meihana, a senior lecturer of Māori History at Massey University, describes these views as “anti-Treatyist”.

“Māori were not self-annihilating,” he says.

“British intervention did not save Māori. The so-called musket wars impacted on Māori — however, by 1840 the conflicts had largely subsided and traditional peace-making processes enacted.”

A central theory in Batchelor’s views is the so-called “Littlewood Treaty”, which he believes could be “the key” to stopping co-governance. It is an elaborate theory involving an English version of Te Tiriti found found in a Pukekohe house in the late 1980s.

Batchelor and his allies believe it is a lost final draft of the Treaty in English. Unlike the accepted English translation of Te Tiriti, the Littlewood text makes no reference to fisheries and forests remaining with Māori. If this was true, it would bolster the argument that Māori intended to give up sovereignty, and would seemingly rule out any claim to co-governance.

The view has been rejected by mainstream historians, including Donald Loveridge, who investigated the Littlewood text’s origins in 2006 (It is generally believed to be a poor back translation of te Tiriti).

Batchelor has nevertheless accused the Government of covering up the Littlewood text; he recently claimed it had been lost by Archives NZ (the agency confirmed to The Press it still holds the document and public viewings can be booked).

Dr Scott Hamilton, an independent historian, describes theories like the Littlewood Treaty and pre-Māori settlement as “bizarre”.

“It’s magical thinking that can’t really be understood in rational terms,” he says. “It’s mystical politics.”

He has tracked the rise of these views, and the small group of pseudo-historians who promote them, for decades. After peaking in the 1990s and 2000s, he says they have found new life in Batchelor’s roadshow, where they have been repackaged for a new audience.

“What [Batchelor’s] done is he’s plugged in to a pre-existing infrastructure that has been developed over decades,” Hamilton says.

“It’s an infrastructure that’s organisational, but also intellectual and ideological.”

Hamilton cites Allan Titford, a Northland farmer who in the early 1990s became a national figurehead for Pākehā grievance after the Waitangi Tribunal proposed his farm be returned to the local iwi.

When Titford’s house burned down soon afterwards, he blamed “Māori radicals”, and alleged a conspiracy to force him off his land. Titford became a full-time Treaty researcher, working with the One New Zealand Foundation and other researchers — including self-proclaimed “astro-archaeologist” Martin Doutre, who believes Celtic people settled New Zealand before Māori and is regularly cited as a source by Batchelor — to push conspiracy theories about the past.

(In 2013, Titford was sentenced to 24 years in prison for a range of crimes, including rape. His wife alleged he had kept her as a sex slave and assaulted their children with weapons. He had also committed the arson he had blamed on Māori).

It is this intellectual lineage that Batchelor draws from, Hamilton says; one that haunts our history, dating back to the 19th century but periodically reemerging in times of political division.

“There’s this very deep memory of violence and fear, and I feel it’s still there in the Pākehā subconscious,” Hamilton says.

“Sometimes it comes out, and it’s doing that now with Batchelor.”

Civil war

Julian Batchelor stands in a modest living room in Amberley.

Someone is doing the dishes. A phone rings; a sheep is bleating outside. He is visibly irritated by the interruptions, but at least there are no protesters.

He’s giving a truncated form of his seminar, his last until he holds a series of public rallies against co-governance, starting with an event on September 16 in Christchurch.

He hopes to swing the election — although he’s not sure for whom. He likes ACT, but Seymour worries him: He recently used the word “tikanga” in Parliament. “He’s being groomed and he doesn’t even realise it,” Batchelor says.

Batchelor reached the part of his seminar where he details Jean Jackson’s claims about pre-European Māori, which he does with his usual grim enthusiasm. Māori were obsessed with warring; they couldn’t stop. The life expectancy for Māori women in 1840, he says, was 20 years old. “They humiliated them so much, drove them into the ground, they died of a broken heart and a broken body.”

(When asked about Jackson’s reliability as a source, Batchelor said: “She did indeed say many bizarre things I would not agree with, but she had some interesting things to say about Māori life prior to the arrival of Europeans in New Zealand which match other records”.)

Historians say Batchelor’s inaccurate views of the past are crucial to understanding his visions of the future.

“I do think it is critically important to push back against and expose these views for what they are,” O’Malley says.

“A lot of New Zealanders aren’t necessarily equipped to do that because so many of us didn’t learn our own history at school. In the longer term the new histories curriculum will hopefully give people the ability to see through this stuff. But there is no doubt that we are seeing these views gain more traction at the moment and that is hugely concerning.”

“I think the anti-Treatyist movement is a broad church,” Meihana says.

“What they all have in common is a desire to undermine Māori indigeneity either by inventing a mythical pre-Māori race or by diminishing Māori treaty rights under the guise of ’treating people the same’.”

In some ways, the damage is done. Thousands of people have attended or seen one of Batchelor’s seminars; more than half a million copies of his pamphlet have been printed.

Nearly every week, Batchelor says, someone tells him they’re preparing for civil war. They fear Batchelor’s apocalyptic visions of the future, and the return of the world he describes as the past.

“If the public can’t talk about important public issues, tensions rise,” Batchelor told The Press.

“Civil war will be inevitable. It’s not what I want, or encourage, but it’s happening nonetheless.“