A white nationalist convicted of what a judge called “in effect a hate crime” towards Muslims is standing for a seat on the board of a multicultural New Zealand school, sparking alarm over the adequacy of laws governing the influential bodies and a debate about whether people with extremist views should be barred from standing.
Philip Arps, one of nine candidates for five positions on the board of Te Aratai College in Christchurch, was jailed for 21 months in 2019 for sharing footage of a white supremacist terror attack on two mosques in the South Island city. He asked a friend to modify the footage by adding cross-hairs and a “kill count”.
