The self-appointed apostle says he could be to Christopher Luxon what Elon Musk is to Donald Trump, and his track record speaks for itself.
Who is New Zealand’s answer to Elon Musk? The Herald’s tech insider, Chris Keall, put the question to his LinkedIn acolytes the other day. “If Luxon was to appoint a Doge-style taskforce in NZ, who should lead it?” Half the respondents told him it was a dumb idea. Among the remaining 50%, the frontrunner was Nick Mowbray, followed by Rob Fyfe and then Peter Beck.
Keall must be kicking himself today, however, for leaving out of his survey the only towering, true and most deserving would-be Elonesque consigliere to the court of the New Zealand prime minister. Having dispatched his “Man Up” troops to protest at a Pride parade and to “storm” a library where a drag artist was leading a presentation for children on the science of rainbows, Brian Tamaki told 1News he was volunteering to “be the Elon Musk to Luxon’s Donald Trump”.
The plucky bishop / reborn messiah called Brian / Very Naughty Boy elaborated on the idea on social media. “Well, guess what? If Luxon had the guts to give me a shot, I’d have National back on top faster than Musk launches rockets” – a reference, presumably, to the January SpaceX test flight of the Starship rocket, which exploded catastrophically within nine minutes of launch, showering debris across the Caribbean.
The parallels are uncanny. Elon Musk has been a founder across numerous startup enterprises; Brian Tamaki is the founder of a startup church. Elon Musk is the world’s richest man. Brian Tamaki is also a man. Elon Musk has countless weird obsessions. Brian Tamaki has a thing for horses.
Just as Musk surfs the internet looking for scores to settle and causes to champion, going so far as to purchase multibillion-dollar companies in an attempt to get people to like his jokes, Tamaki is on a crusade of his own, courageously shining a light into many of the most dangerous corners of New Zealand. Not just libraries, but also the scourge of pedestrian crossings. In Auckland and in Gisborne, Tamaki has encouraged his followers to paint over rainbow crossings. It takes a brave, disruptive and frankly very brainy social justice warrior to lead the charge against these frightening arrangements of paint. Independent research undertaken by the Spinoff suggests a significant number of people have successfully attended libraries for edification and fun, while pedestrian crossings are routinely used – sickeningly – to facilitate the safe passage of pedestrians from one side of a road to the other.
Elon Musk is at the vanguard of space technology, robotics, neurotechnology, AI and large batteries on wheels. Brian Tamaki is – well, let’s put this in a local context. In 1918, Ernest Rutherford bombarded nitrogen gas with alpha particles and split the atom. In 2023, Brian Tamaki searched the Pornhub website which he absolutely didn’t want to do but he did because he was looking for The Truth and duly arrived at a “revelation”: Cyclone Gabrielle had devastated the Tairawhiti region because a lot of people there had looked at porn.
That wasn’t Tamaki’s first scientific breakthrough. In 2016, he unshackled himself from the chains of entry-level intelligence and basic human decency to use deep thought and geophysics in deducing that the Canterbury earthquake was a consequence of homosexuality. A few years later he applied his disruptive, guru-level methodology (“revelation is more important than education”) once again, concluding that the Covid-19 outbreak had been caused by airborne Satanic demons and the drinking of bat’s blood.
But back to the business of politics. “The government,” Tamaki counselled on Sunday, “needs to have some balls”.
And Luxon, when you think about it, has much to learn from Tamaki’s extensive testicle-powered political back catalogue. In 2004, Tamaki confidently predicted that within five years Destiny Church would be “ruling the nation”. In 2005, the Destiny NZ political party scored 0.62% of the national vote. In 2020, Vision NZ, led by Brian’s wife, Hannah Tamaki, finished on 0.1%. In the 2023 general election, Freedoms NZ, of which Tamaki was co-leader alongside Sue Grey, received 0.33% – a whopping one third of one per cent.
Given that track record it is hard to understand why Christopher Luxon’s advisers have not been falling over themselves to court Tamaki and install him in Luxon’s Oval Office, as leader of New Zealand DOGE (Department of Grift Energy). Is it envy? Are they wokesters? Or are they slaves to very obvious evidence, rainbow defenders, library apologists and pedestrian crossing enablers?