An Auckland psychic healer yesterday announced she would be running for parliament. Less than 24 hours later, she wasn’t. So what happened? And why is she accusing Jacinda Ardern of treason? Stewart Sowman-Lund investigates. 

It’s been a big year for Jeanette Wilson. 

In June, as the Covid-19 crisis was continuing to spiral around the world, the psychic healer and medium advocated the use of a dietary supplement she claimed would counter the risk of the virus.

A month later, she was selling a bluetooth device she proclaimed could dose vitamins “vibrationally”. 

And yesterday, Wilson was setting her heights on the halls of parliament.  

It all started with a Facebook post:

And important information there was.

At 10am, Wilson officially revealed she would be standing in the Mount Albert electorate for the Public Party – that’s the one that recently joined forces with Jami-Lee Ross’s Advance NZ Party, and has labelled Covid-19 a “plandemic” and questioned 5G.

“If I’m putting my hat in the ring and going into politics, I’m going to do it with absolute truth and absolute integrity,” Wilson said in a Facebook Live video that also featured her questioning the lawfulness of the government.

“I have found something that is absolutely mind-blowing. I have found something that is going to challenge our very constitution here, whether our government has the right to make the laws – such as the Covid [sic].”

“I’m not a lawyer,” Wilson said, before proceeding to talk about the law. “I’m worried that this government does not have the jurisdiction to call a general election,” she said, in the same video announcing her candidacy for the upcoming general election.

At this point, I was beyond intrigued. Wilson’s video suggested the media wouldn’t touch this information, but it felt like my duty to seek it out. She said that at 4pm, she would be revealing more information at an undisclosed location (and on Facebook Live).

Sadly, this is where the trail went a little cold – at least temporarily. 4pm came and went. People were getting worried. “Hope you are safe, Jeanette,” someone wrote on Wilson’s Facebook.

About 15 minutes later, a Facebook Live stream miraculously appeared. Except, Wilson’s microphone was very quiet and nobody could hear her. As soon as the video concluded, it was deleted from her Facebook stream. The people were confused. I was confused. How had I been so careless as to not listen with headphones? Had I missed the crucial evidence? I felt deflated.

At 8.08am this morning, Wilson made a dramatic return to social media, bringing with her some shocking news. Her campaign for parliament was over, 22 hours after it began.

“I am guided what to do, we all are, the question is whether we listen,” she wrote. “This morning I was guided to withdraw from being a candidate in the forthcoming election.

“I am here as a truth speaker and some of what I say will not be popular – it is onwards and upwards LIGHT into DARK x”

It was shocking news. Just a day earlier, Wilson had been hoping she could take down Jacinda Ardern in the Mount Albert electorate.

Questions were circling in my head. Had Jeanette Wilson been pushed from the Public Party? Was she too close to the truth? Why does any of this matter at all? 

Along with the announcement that her short-lived campaign for parliament had drawn to a close, Wilson revealed the evidence she said could bring the upcoming election to a halt. And it involved… the flag referendum?

“The true flag of New Zealand is the flag of Independence,” she wrote. “When the Flag Referendum happened two gentlemen made a presentation to the select committee that included our current prime minister Jacinda Ardern to put forward the true flag of New Zealand.”

Wilson had discovered the Declaration of Independence/He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni, which was signed by 52 rangatira around Northland between 1835 and 1839, before 1840’s Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi. This is not the world of the psychic, but real history, though Wilson was less interested in the Waitangi Tribunal’s report on the subject than why the flag of independence was not included in the 2016 flag referendum.

“If this government is not constitutional and hasn’t been since 1835, that would mean all laws that have been passed are not lawful,” Wilson said.

Also: treason. Anybody who knowingly stopped information about the Declaration of Independence from getting to the Queen, Wilson said, could be guilty of treason. And that includes Jacinda Ardern.

“As best I can find, my resources are googling it … treason and high treason are still capital punishment, it’s the only thing that can be punished by death in this country.”

I googled this, too. Capital punishment for treason was abolished in 1989.

Despite having (very easily) debunked one of Wilson’s claims, I still wanted to know whether there was some truth to what Wilson was alleging. I went to constitutional lawyer Andrew Geddis.

“This is meaningless word soup, which takes various events and documents and strings them together in a manner that bears some superficial resemblance to a legal claim but actually is total and utter nonsense,” he told me.

“I’m not going to go through it bit by bit, because it isn’t worth the resultant loss of time and braincells.

“I’ll also note that these kinds of frankly unhinged sorts of claims have been raised before – witness this claim that the effort to change the New Zealand flag was all a conspiracy to adopt the TPPA. Hint, we didn’t change our flag, and we did adopt the TPPA (under a slightly different name),” Geddis said.

And just like that, my investigation into Jeanette Wilson’s political career was over. And just like her political career, it took me less than a day.