Has the National Party steadily lost its extremist religious social conservative elements since the mid-eighties? Where have they all gone? The seventies were arguably the nadir of civil liberties, democratic accountability and human rights in New Zealand, under the despotic populist reign of Rob Muldoon as Prime Minister for nine indescribable authoritarian years. Fortunately, he lost his fragile parliamentary majority as a result of National's Waipa MP, feminist and lesbian Marilyn Waring, who refused to back the government over retention of New Zealand's military linkages to nuclear-equipped and armed foreign allies. Out went Muldoon's mediocre contingent of Cabinet cronies and sycophants and in came the reformist Lange administration. As has been noted in the past columns this year, Fran Wilde mooted a homosexual law reform bill which passed Parliament and finally decriminalised male homosexuality after almost fifteen years of organised effort. Within Parliament, there was a diehard core of truculent social conservative homophobes, most of whom resided within the National Party, apart from Napier Labour MP Geoff Braybrooke. However, National led the core group of hardline opponents - Graeme Lee (Coromandel), John Banks (Whangarei) and Norm Jones (Invercargill). Over time, the hardline eroded. National lost the New Zealand General Election in 1987 due to urban liberal revulsion at the extremism of religious social conservatism, and the party gradually sidelined its more truculent social conservatives. Matters were assisted by the sheer mediocrity and unreliable nature of Lee and Banks. Lee left National in 1995 to establish the fundamentalist Christian Democrats, while Banks drifted away after demotion out of the Second Bolger Cabinet and became a Radio Pacific talkback host. Moderating his once-strident social conservative, he became Auckland Mayor for two non-consecutive terms, before Len Brown defeated him. As for Jones, he died of Legionnaire's Disease in 1986. After the mid-nineties, no National MP has been quite so stridently supportive of religious social conservatism, apart from current Police Minister Judith Collins, whose social conservatism is focused on law and order policies and opposition to abortion rights. Granted, National's caucus still contains fundamentalist Christians like National's New Plymouth MP Jonathon Young, but he is in a marginal electorate and has kept a low profile since he won the seat narrowly from Labour's Harry Duynhoven in 2008. As noted beforehand, there's also Jonathan Fletcher, National's Rimutaka candidate. Don Brash lost the 2005 election due to his party's suspicious ties to the Exclusive Brethren cult and its opportunist opposition to LGBT relationship equality, after which National seemed to learn its lesson. Or have religious social conservatives simply gone elsewhere? It isn't hard to work out where. New Zealand First and United Future were more welcoming environments for religious social conservatives, and Muriel Newman and Stephen Franks did their level best to alienate more moderate liberal elements from the ACT caucus. Prebble and Hide's populist and erratic leadership did the rest, leading to factionalism, civil war and the demise of the party organisation (and parliamentary representation?) As for their current whereabouts, I suspect they may be swelling the numbers of Colin Craigs' Conservative Party. Does this mean that National can relegate potentially embarrassing and truculent social conservatives to satellite religious social conservative parties, as seems to be the case here? Or does it mean that National's religious social conservatives are simply keeping under 'stealth' settings, ready to re-emerge if their party wins an absolute majority at the elections? It's difficult to tell. One suspects that National remembers the outbursts of UK Tory religious social conservative parliamentary candidates in 2010, which may have cost the British Conservatives an outright parliamentary majority, and is wary about letting any of its own religious social conservative activists off the leash. One can only wait and watch National's candidate websites and the fundamentalist media carefully. Craig Young - 3rd November 2011