Interestingly, Paul Goldsmith, who made the appointments, said that his appointees had been subjected to "appropriate background checks". It will be interesting to see if these checks included their repugnant views, and whether they were seen as a positive or a negative. But I expect National will try and hide that as "free and frank advice" from the inevitable flood of OIAs.
As for what to do about this: the immediate problem of bigots on the Human Rights Commission can be resolved by the next government simply sacking them. People with these views are unable to credibly perform the functions of the office, which is just cause for removal.
As for the long-term, there's a long-standing problem of political appointments to key constitutional offices, and this incident makes it clear that politicians can no longer be trusted with the job. So, we should take it off them, and give it to a permanent independent appointments panel, tasked with ensuring that appointments are based on merit rather than cronyism or political agendas. We know how to do this: we use an independent process for appointment of the Government Statistician (but not other public service CEOs), with criminal penalties for any Minister who attempts to interfere in it. And we know how to set up a permanent, non-partisan body because we do that for the Representation Commission, which ensures our electorates are not gerrymandered. We could, with the political will, establish such a process for the Human Rights Commission and other independent crown entities of an important or constitutional nature (such as the Privacy Commissioner, Children's Commissioner, Electoral Commission, IPCA, Waitangi Tribunal, and Climate Change Commission) to ensure merit-based appointments, insulated from cronyism and political sabotage. But I guess the problem is: why would any politician vote for that?