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The Door Swings One Way: Elliot Ikilei, Free Speech Union and the Far Right

 


The Door Swings One Way


The candidate for Takanini

Elliot Ikilei is standing for New Zealand First in Takanini, one of the most ethnically mixed electorates in the country. In June he told Newsroom that his party offers voters a chance to curtail the influence of academics and return to the fundamentals of Western civilisation. He placed New Zealand First in a line with Reform in the United Kingdom, One Nation in Australia and Donald Trump in the United States, and said nobody can call them racist because the party has authentic, organic diversity. The photograph above the story shows him handing Shane Jones a Hobson's Pledge petition to make English an official language. He is the second Hobson's Pledge spokesperson on the party's 2026 list.

Eight years ago, in July 2018, Ikilei was the deputy leader of a minor party speaking at an Auckland rally for Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux after the council pulled their venue. That same month, in the Taxpayers' Union office in Wellington, Jordan Williams and three colleagues founded the Free Speech Coalition to sue Auckland Council over the same booking, and raised fifty thousand dollars for it. The Coalition renamed itself the Free Speech Union in May 2021. Ikilei and the Union were born in the same month, out of the same cause, defending the same two touring white nationalists.

The road from that rally to a parliamentary candidacy in South Auckland ran through a Steve Bannon broadcast platform, a Freeview channel programme produced by a Hindutva media operator, a select committee hearing on the Treaty Principles Bill, and an hour of courteous disagreement on the Free Speech Union's podcast. Each stop made the one before it unmentionable. By 2026 the party press release describes a youth worker, a health and safety trainer, a man of Niuean, Tongan, Māori and English heritage.

That biography is true. It is also the point of him.

The record he is running on

A Pākehā talkback caller saying there is no such thing as systemic racism gets nowhere in Takanini. A Niuean, Tongan and Māori youth worker saying it gets a television show, a petition handover with the Deputy Prime Minister's colleague, and a candidacy. The heritage listed in the press release is doing political work, and the people deploying it know exactly what work it is doing.

The record runs like this. Deputy leader of the New Conservative Party from January 2017, leader for six weeks at the end of 2020. In August 2018 he seconded Don Brash in a free speech debate at the University of Auckland. In April 2019 he was suspended from Twitter for describing trans women as men with a disorder. In August 2020 he joined the anti-lockdown liberty march down Queen Street, the one that also drew Jami-Lee Ross.

In 2021 he fronted Talanoa Sa'o on Apna Television, Freeview channel 36, with Leao Tildsley and Fuiavai Ala'ilima, all three of them New Conservative candidates from the 2020 election. In the trailer he told Pasifika viewers the media had groomed them into believing white people are bad and brown people are oppressed. On the campaign trail he had told audiences the greatest culture in the world is Western culture. He accused the government of putting anti-white race theory into schools. On the same programme, Tildsley gave an admiring interview to Edwin Tamasese, the man arrested in Samoa during the measles epidemic that killed around seventy children, for telling people the vaccination campaign was the problem.

Colin Tukuitonga, Associate Dean Pacific at the University of Auckland and a Niuean like Ikilei, told Byron Clark that Ikilei does not speak for Pacific communities and that most Niueans have never heard of him. Efeso Collins, more generous, named the theology underneath it: a deference that teaches our people to accept that we are the naughty ones, and to read our own overrepresentation in the prison muster as a moral failure rather than a structure.

In January 2025 Ikilei appeared for Hobson's Pledge at the Treaty Principles Bill hearings, arguing that references to iwi and hapū should be stripped out of the bill. Seventeen months later he was a New Zealand First candidate. The party that once ran on the grievances of provincial New Zealand now runs brown spokesmen against Māori constitutional claims, and calls the arrangement diversity.

The room Bannon built

In 2021 Ikilei sat on a panel for the second episode of Counterspin Media, promoted under the question of whether racism is real or manufactured. Two thirds of the panel came from Talanoa Sa'o. Asked whether the overrepresentation of Māori and Pasifika across every deprivation measure shows a racist system, Ikilei answered that it has nothing to do with racism, quoted Thomas Sowell on the American welfare state, and put the whole thing down to fatherless homes. The host, Kelvyn Alp, spoke about his own run in Te Tai Tokerau: he had wanted to see how many intelligent Māori there were, and unfortunately there were not many. The panel sat through it.

Know whose room that was. Counterspin streamed twice weekly on GTV, the platform Steve Bannon founded with the exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, the outlet that pushed fabricated Hunter Biden stories through the 2020 United States election. Graphika's researchers placed Guo at the centre of a network of media entities running disinformation and organised harassment. In the first episode Alp sat between the New Zealand flag and the flag of the New Federal State of China, the Bannon–Guo project. Its local arm, Himalaya New Zealand, states its purpose as countering false narratives pushed by left-leaning media and compromised NGOs here, and its representative was Counterspin's first guest. The same two flags stood behind Jami-Lee Ross when Bannon interviewed him on War Room.

Alp himself founded an armed anti-government outfit in the 1990s, the New Zealand Armed Intervention Force, whose members turned up in military dress at the home of the managing director of the Bank of New Zealand in 2002. He later led the Direct Democracy Party, which ran candidates in 2005 including members of the white nationalist National Front.

So a man who would be introduced five years later as a youth worker with frontline experience went on an American insurrectionist's media platform, hosted by a militia founder who had run candidates alongside the National Front, to tell the country that the disparities carried by Māori and Pasifika people have nothing to do with racism. I have yet to see one journalist put that episode to him since he became a candidate for a party in government.

Roy Kaunds, and the Union's choice

The man who connects Ikilei's television show to Bannon's platform is Roy Kaunds. He was executive producer of Talanoa Sa'o and chief operating officer of the Apna Media Network that carried it, and he turned up as Alp's guest on Counterspin episode seven.

Listen to what he said there. Alp opened by remarking that if you believe the mainstream media he is a white supremacist with white privilege, then asked why people move from East to West. Kaunds blamed socialism in India and praised Modi's government for dismantling it. He called the He Puapua recommendations apartheid, the same word Ikilei used on Talanoa Sa'o. He compared measures to close Māori–Pākehā inequities with caste reservations in India and named the result reverse privilege: the scheduled castes now get the privilege, he said, and blaming the Brahmins is just like blaming the whites. There is no systemic racism, only a narrative built for political mileage. Alp thanked him by observing that he was quite intelligent for an Indian.

Kaunds carries the respectable furniture of Indian Aotearoa with him. General secretary of the Indian Association of New Zealand. Board member of the New Zealand Bharat Chamber of Commerce. Co-producer, in 2026, of Lotus in the Long White Cloud, a documentary for the New Zealand Indian Central Association about a century of racism against Indians in this country. Independent candidate for the Henderson-Massey Local Board in 2025. The man who produced that documentary went on a white nationalist broadcast to deny that racism is structural and to recycle an anti-Dalit line as the lesson of caste. The Aotearoa Alliance of Progressive Indians named his method years ago: fold Hindutva into Hinduism, into Hindus, into Indian New Zealanders, so that any critique of a far-right political project reads as an attack on a whole people.

In 2022 the Free Speech Union rang me. They wanted me for an interview on The Kashmir Files, the film Hindutva networks were then using to circulate calls for the genocide of Muslims and the rape of Muslim women. I had spent the previous six or seven months under organised attack from Hindutva supporters here, reported in the Herald and in Newsroom. The Union had said nothing about any of it. The caller described me as an academic with a different viewpoint. I declined, and the Union gave the microphone to Kaunds, who had been part of the machinery coming after me.

On 21 July 2026 the Union's podcast gave Ikilei an hour. Dane Giraud, a council member, introduced him as New Zealand First's candidate for Takanini and a key figure in Hobson's Pledge. They compared childhoods in the same part of Auckland. They disagreed warmly. The blurb promised a conversation moving from common ground to open clash, which is the house style: the clash is the product and the civility is the packaging. Counterspin did not come up.

What the word is doing

Free speech, in this circuit, is a permission slip issued selectively, and the pattern of issue is the politics.

When two academics disputed the standing of mātauranga Māori, the Union had a fund running for them inside a month. When a Hindutva broadcaster wanted a hearing on an anti-Muslim propaganda film, the Union supplied the room. When Hindutva networks spent most of a year trying to drive a brown professor out of his job, the Union had nothing to say, then phoned to ask whether he would like to help with their film segment. Its commissioned survey asked academics whether they felt free to debate treaty issues and sex and gender issues, as though those were the two frontiers of inquiry in this country. The selection is the argument. Everything else is procedure.

The word has a job to do. It converts political positions into procedural rights, so the question stops being what Kaunds said about Dalits, or what Alp said about Māori intelligence, or what Ikilei said about fatherless homes on a platform built to overthrow two governments, and becomes whether you are the sort of person who believes in open debate. Whoever names the content becomes the censor. Ikilei can tell Newsroom he wants to curtail the influence of academics and in the same season appear as a champion of free expression, and no one in the chain finds that funny.

This is no longer a podcast problem. It is a ballot paper.

So: ask him. Any journalist covering Takanini can put the Counterspin episode to Elliot Ikilei, and ask what he made of his host's remarks about intelligent Māori, and whether he still holds that Māori and Pasifika deprivation has nothing to do with racism, and what he thinks now about a programme he fronted that gave airtime to vaccine denial while South Auckland was burying its own. He has had an easy run of profiles. He has not had an interview.

Stop treating the Free Speech Union as a neutral party. It is a political actor with a founding purpose, a licensed brand from Britain, a funding base, and a demonstrated record of whose speech it rescues and whose it leaves in the water. Newsrooms that quote it as a civil liberties referee are doing unpaid work for one side.

Decline the invitation. The hour of civil disagreement is the fuel the pipeline runs on, and the guest list is the message. Saying no costs you an hour and costs them the legitimacy they came for.

Say the chain out loud, with the dates attached. Southern and Molyneux, July 2018. Talanoa Sa'o and Counterspin on Bannon's GTV, 2021. Hobson's Pledge at the Treaty Principles Bill, January 2025. New Zealand First, June 2026. The Free Speech Union's microphone, July 2026. These links are documented. The people who build this infrastructure count on each one being discussed separately, as a show, a personality, a candidacy.

And for those of us who came here as migrants, the brown face on the platform is not representation. It is the oldest instrument in the colonial toolkit, picked up and passed around a new set of rooms. Indians in this country spent a century on the receiving end of the politics Kaunds now circulates against Māori and Muslims. Pasifika families in Takanini are being asked to vote for a man who went on an American insurrectionist's channel to explain that their hardship is their own doing. Our grandparents were the ones kept outside. We do not get to pull the door shut behind us and call it freedom.

Sources

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