 RCR with Paul Brennan, Reality Check Radio. So here is the statement released by DemocracyNZ last night, Sunday evening. On behalf of the Board of DemocracyNZ, we make the following statement. DemocracyNZ was formed in March, 2022 on the fundamental principles of democracy, unity, and equality. We stand for freedom, for family, and for farming. During the course of the past 10 months, we have announced a number of candidates. These candidates have come from a wide range of backgrounds and skills. Yesterday, referring to Saturday, the Board of DemocracyNZ addressed an ongoing issue with a candidate who was unhappy with board decisions and governance of the party in general. This is not something we take lightly, but the decision as a board was unanimous. As a consequence, four other candidates have chosen to resign. We thank Steve Cranston, Kirsten Murphy, Lee Smith, Matt Shelton, and Bill Dyatt for their contributions and wish them the very best for the future. They go on to say, we understand this might be an unsettling and confusing time for some, but it's not uncommon to have candidates decide to depart from a party before an election. We remain strong, united, committed, and focused on the mission we embarked on when we started this party, which is to fight for our country and restore democracy in a fair and reasonable manner. We will contest the 2023 general election in October of this year. We have talented and dedicated candidates running in seats around the country who have continued to pledge their support for democracy in Zed and will continue to work hard for the very reasons our party's mission states. We thank you for your support regards Matt King, Party Leader and Danny Sims, Party President. So that's what we know at this time, Monday morning. Of course, Matt King has been a guest on this program not too long ago, and many of you fed back to us what you thought about that. So we thought we'd try and delve into with what we know so far what is going on here. With Cameron Slater, Cameron, welcome back to RCR. Good morning, Paul. Okay, you just heard that statement. What sort of statement is that? Well, it's a nothing statement other than to say that they've got ructions in there amongst their membership so much so that five candidates had ones been sacked and four have bailed out in support. And this is just a classic Monty Python-esque type situation, where you've got the people's front of Judea and then you've got the splitters that have gone in another direction. And this is what you're seeing here. But I mean, just reading into this, you know, he's saying, you know, it's a common thing for candidates to depart before an election. No, it's not, Matt. It's just not. There's not one candidate either. It's five. It's five candidates that have disappeared. So what we're reading here is, and we haven't seen what any of these people have said out there. There's rumors and innuendo and all of those things. But let's just deal with reality here. Five people aren't happy with how one person perhaps has been treated. And they're clearly not happy with what's been going on with decisions and governance of the party in general. This is all classic small party stuff that happens all the time. I think it was the impression among many that this was a viable option and, you know, it had a growing energy behind it. And it was a party that people were considering. But it turns out on the basis of this, behind the scenes, very fragile, just about to fall apart even. The people who think that Democracy New Zealand is a viable option for the election are addicted to Hopium, right? They are hoping that things will come right. They're hoping that the media will give them a fair chance. They're hoping that Matt King can win in Northland. They're hoping that they can get 5%. And there's no plans to do any of that. I've spoken to Matt King about this. I said, you know, what are your plans to do two things? First thing is, what's your plan to win in Northland? And his answer to me was, well, I just know I will because I was the candidate before. You know, when I was, you know, I won it before. And he utterly believes and is convinced that his boyish good looks is wit and charm that got him across the line in Northland when in actual fact it was because he was a member of the National Party. No other reason. You know, and you've got a four-way competition up there. Willow Jean Prime is quite popular apparently from what I can gather on the ground. You've got Shane Jones who's looking to, you know, carve off some of those disillusioned National Party people and people who've voted for Labour in the past that can't bring themselves to vote National. You've got the ACT candidates having a good old scrap up there as well. And then you've got Matt King. Now, what we need someone to do is to actually do a poll up there, a lot like the poll that was done in Auckland Council elections for the mayor. We had all these centre-right candidates. Somebody did a poll, showed that Wayne Brown was gonna win and made the others all pull out and quit. That's what needs to happen in order for somebody to get across the line that's not the National Party or the Labour Party in Northland. But no one seems to be willing to cough up the five grand or whatever it costs for a poll to do that. Okay, let's say that happened. Who is the likely recipient of those who would be prepared to move in the face of that information knowing that it's just not gonna happen if you're a Democracy NZ supporter or a Matt King supporter? Well, I mean, theoretically, people who believe in democracy and freedom and all of those things that they talk about, freedom, family and farming. Theoretically, it should be the ACT Party. But David Seymour destroyed his freedom credentials with his behaviour over the Wellington protests. The only person who can really benefit from this would be New Zealand First and Winston Peters. He's saying the right things. He's doing the right things at the moment. And the reality is he is the only small party that has a chance of getting over 5% in the next election. And that's not pushing Winston's Barrow or anything. I'm just dealing with reality. Everything else is hope. And I love that term because people who support all these minor... I mean, you saw yesterday on the nation or on TVNZ, whichever it was, the guy from Top going on about how grand they are. And you've had a couple of media people pushing Top's agenda in with their columns, et cetera. But Top is only scoring a half of 1%. They're not even realistic as a party that's gonna get across the line. So there's still a lot of people out there who are still believing that hope is gonna get them there. And it isn't gonna get you there. Hard work is gonna get you there. A plan is gonna get you there. And I'm yet to see a plan from Democracy New Zealand or from Mat King or anybody associated with them on how they're gonna, first of all, win a seat and secondly, get 5%. That's 150,000 votes. They're just, you know, you've got a whole lot of small parties that are all competing for that 150,000 votes to get to 5%. They're never gonna work together. As I said, this is a Monty Python-esque situation. We've got splitters and splitters of splitters. And, you know, the problem with these small parties is that they're usually filled with single-issue people who are unwilling to compromise on anything and politics is built on compromise and an ability to compromise. And then they're just too pure and won't do anything. It rhymes me, you know, really clearly of the Libertarian Party, Libertarian's Party that ceased to exist when they could no longer muster a quorum in a phone box. So, you know, so it takes big balls to stand in a party. It takes big balls to leave the party you were in and to go to the electorate. And, you know, if we look at the MMP year, we've had 27 years or nearly 30 years of MMP and only two people have quit their parties held a by-election and won. And those are Tariana Turia and Winston Peters. Everybody else who was in another party and then quit and informed a new party or didn't, they're all written off, they're all gone. They didn't actually stand by their principles and take it to the voters as soon as they quit. The old party, those two did and they won. But there's only two. Everybody else has disappeared from New Zealand politics. What you've just said sounds kind of logical and common sense to someone like me. And given the times we're in and the urgency that many people feel, how do you explain that lack of common sense amongst the players at the moment? I mean, it's obviously has to be some kind of unity. That's a 101 for projecting a party image, particularly for an election. It's obvious. And still, obviously, some can't put away the ego or put away the purity for the bigger or the greater good or the bigger cause. But there never is a greater good or a cause, the cause. I'm involved in the firearms community. There's 250,000 firearms license holders. And everybody says, well, we've got a big voting block here and that we can all change the impact of the election. We can really affect some things. But they never do because they're not organized. They haven't got a plan. There's no single representative group for firearms owners. In the United States, they've got the NRA. And when they say they're gonna hurt somebody at the ballot box, they go sit about and do it. But nobody's said they're gonna do that here. And that's a huge block of voters. But that huge block of voters is filled with people who will support New Zealand First, who will support the ACT Party. There's a good chunk that support the ACT Party. But David Seymour arrogantly assumes that he's got those votes forever. So there'll be some of them like me that are saying, well, I don't want anything to do with David Seymour because when I talked to him about what he was gonna do for firearms owners, he said he's not gonna do anything for them. And then you have to take the manager's word. He's not gonna do anything for them. So we've got another situation. We've got the so-called freedom movement, which isn't actually a freedom movement. It's not a movement as such. There's no leaders of it. There's no, you know, there's no cohesion. There's no central organized sort of thing. There's a whole bunch of people who've got particular agendas. They might be anti-vaccines. They might be anti-mandates. They might be totally, you know, wanting an anarchy type situation where there's no politicians involved and we just get on with each other. And then you've got a whole bunch of other people who are on the periphery of all of that. But there's no cohesive argument. There's no cohesive group that's putting them all together. There's so many disparate groups. I mean, I know what went on behind the scenes that led to Matt King creating his party, you know, and rushing out with press releases beforehand when everyone else was trying to work together. You know, so you haven't got an environment where everyone's gonna work together. And again, you're dealing with hoping. Everyone hopes that they're gonna work together because if you put it all together, they might get 5%. But there isn't a plan for that. And it's only 16 weeks to the election. It's not gonna happen. It's just not gonna happen. I mean, the reality is, when it comes to third parties getting across the line at the next election, you know, it's a given that the AK party will get across the line. The greens, they're slipping and marginal. And, you know, frankly, they're not focused on the environment anymore and they're focused on their hard version of communism and, you know, increases taxes and expanding the size of the state and all of those sorts of things. So they're diluted. They're the small part. The Maori party will, should get a couple of seats. But the reality is that all these other parties that are out there, unless there's some sort of, you know, I hate to use the term groundswell, but unless there's some cohesive groundswell of organization that can bring all that together, it's just not gonna happen. Which means that New Zealand first is the one that's likely to get across the line. Winston actually went to the Wellington protest and spoke to protestors. He refused to speak to the media when he was there. He made it quite clear that he was there to talk to the protestors, to understand what they were on about. And he's also had an epiphany about some of the things that happened after 2017, especially around the vaccine mandates and those sorts of things. And he realizes that, you know, based on the information they had at the time, they did what was necessary, but they should have changed that when new information came to light. And now he's very definitely saying, no, we should have let people have choices and we should never have had mandates. I mean, you should never have done these, these have damaged society. And the other thing that he's also talking about is that we need to have one class of citizen, not this polarization that's happening, the segregation that's happening in society that Jacinda Ardern started and Christopher Hipkins is continuing. So I think he's got a lot of things that he can touch on that a lot of people have disquiet over. They're not confident that someone as wet and woke as Christopher Luxon is going to be able to act as a ball walk against, you know, these globalist type people. He's very definitely a globalist. He's very definitely wet. He's very definitely woke. Winston is the person who's saying, no, we're not having this wet and woke rubbish in our society. And, you know, he'll bring some sensibility to government, I think. If you were advising Matt King right now with all you know, and some of what you've said just here right now, what would that advice be in the aftermath of that? What my advice to Matt King would be to go and get a poll in Northland. Go and get a poll, invest in a poll that shows that you're gonna win and develop a plan around that because you're never gonna get 150,000 voters, especially when you've got ructions like this. So the only hope, and they really are living on Hopium, democracy, New Zealand supporters. The only hope is that Matt King could win in Northland and the only way he's gonna gauge that is to get one of his donors, whatever's left of them, to pay for a poll and actually deal with reality instead of Hopium. Cameron Slater, thank you. And we'll see you again, if not before, who knows for next political panel this coming Friday. Thank you. Thank you very much. RCR with Paul Brennan, Reality Check Radio.