Tamaki trials Trump talk in Waitangi party crash

Photo: Getty Images.

Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki crashed the Waitangi party, bringing a message of discrimination and exclusion to what had been a celebration of tolerance and inclusiveness.

At the dawn service in the Whare Rūnanga, Anglican Bishop Kitohi Pikaahu encouraged participants to say their prayers and blessings in whichever language they wished.

But at the mid-morning service outside the whare was joined by the self-styled bishop and more than 500 of his followers, who were wearing t-shirts promoting the church’s Man Up parenting kaupapa and Vision NZ, the new political party fronted by Hannah Tamaki.

After New Zealand’s Catholic Metropolitan Archbishop Cardinal John Dew reminded the crowd that New Zealand’s tradition of religious freedom was first affirmed at the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, Bishop Tamaki launched a diatribe against immigrants, calling them parasites.

He accused the Labour Government of selling off land and allowing China to control water.

As well as matching impeached United States President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric, bishop Tamaki borrowed another Trump campaign crowd-pleaser by calling for the draining of the Wellington bureaucratic swamp.

His intervention was in contrast to the celebratory nature of the occasion which has drawn tends of thousands of people to Waitangi.

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