Seymour can now define the terms of debate for every bill

Rather than an administrative power move, this could very much amount to a rhetorical coup d'état

A Cabinet Circular issued before the holiday break was recently covered by Henry Cooke, first on his Substack and then picked up by the Spinoff. The circular has to do with the transfer of processes regarding whom to contact during the policymaking process in regards to Regulatory Impact Statements.

Regulatory Impact Statements are formal paperwork requirements which have as their goal to increase transparency in the policymaking process. The former requirements had agencies “strongly recommended” to contact Treasury for any advice on the policymaking process. The new requirements stipulate that agencies have to contact the Ministry of Regulation “as soon as possible” after beginning work on a policy.

Cooke has already covered some of the potential impacts this seemingly-minor change could potentially have. It basically gives Seymour’s Ministry for Regulation a sneak peak at what legislation or policy could be coming down the pipeline. They may offer advice or attempt to tweak legislation, they may not.

But this move takes on far more political significance when we consider the importance of framing the terms of debate around a given political issue. What this change will do is to give Seymour a crucial headstart on framing the political discourse around any legislation.

This is more than just word games. The rhetorical framing around any specific political issue is crucial to the way the public understands the issues being debated. As I wrote here, “The key to any successful political campaign is to craft a message that is simple and resonates with your target audience. Once you hit on an effective message, you repeat it over and over again.”

Seymour has been able to use this strategy to great public effect during the entire process of his Treaty Principles Bill. He has been relentless in his framing of the bill as promoting equality, and not supporting different rights depending on race. In fact, at his introduction of the bill, he put the opposition on their back foot by claiming only to want to “to give equal enjoyment of the same fundamental human rights to every single New Zealander. The challenge for people who oppose this bill is to explain why they are so opposed to those basic principles.”

Thus, through a carefully-crafted rhetorical campaign, Seymour has been able to cast himself as the true friend of democracy, and those who oppose the bill as favouring different and unequal rights based on ancestry. This framing has been all but impossible to counter because any talk of the obvious racism in the bill plays right into Seymour’s hands.

While a late push to redefine the debate in terms of its goal of opening up Aotearoa to corporate exploitation by voiding any barriers that resulted from the legal interpretation of the Treaty principles gained steam in the closing weeks of the consultation period, it remains to be seen whether trying to reframe the narrative of the bill as a corporate landgrab has affected the tone and tenor of the public debate in any substantive way.

So Seymour, because he was in on all stages of the bill from the conceptualization to the drafting to the editing, was able to spend a lot of time thinking about the framing of the public discourse that would most benefit him and his corporate donors. He’s been able to settle on an extremely effective rhetorical strategy.

No doubt this is one of the main reasons for this seeming-innocuous change in administrative policy. By requiring all agencies to submit their legislative and policy work to him and his Ministry of Regulation, Seymour gets a months-long headstart on crafting the public terms of debate. These are very likely to be defined in terms of his pet libertarian principles such as freedom, equality, rule of law, etc… As I discussed here this language has been used by libertarian/neoliberal policymakers and think tanks to frame their explicitly corporate agendas in terms that are more palatable to the public.

The timing of the circular alongside the recent introduction of the Regulatory Standards Bill is not coincidental. As stated by Cooke in his piece “After all, the circular comes alongside the larger Regulatory Standards Bill, which sets an Act Party view of “good” lawmaking into law and creates a new board, appointed by Seymour, able to pass non-binding judgment on whether existing laws meet these standards.”

Thus, this seems like another piece in Seymour’s agenda to leverage government power in the service of his and ACT’s corporate agenda.

In trying to understand the many seemingly small and insignificant administrative moves made by the government over its first year and into the new year, we need to keep in mind where Seymour got his political training. He cut his political teeth working for free-market libertarian think tanks in Canada. As I covered here and as explained in detail by Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway in their book The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, the entire purpose of these think tanks is to influence public opinion and craft government policy to favour corporate interests and increase profits.

Seymour has longstanding affiliations with the Atlas Network, an international organization of think tanks (such as the Heritage Foundation in the US, the organisation behind the infamous Project 2025) and lobbying groups that coordinate efforts toward free-market economic reforms that benefit the wealthy and corporations (this relationship was first covered in a Reddit post last year by essential political Substack writer Mountain Tui). The Atlas Network is funded by billionaires and works to lobby for corporate interests and to spread political propaganda to influence public opinion in pro-corporate ways.

Seymour knows his ties to these organizations are a liability. That’s why when he was asked about his ties to the Atlas Network during an interview with Mihingaranghi Forbes on RNZ, Seymour flatly denied any association, going so far as to accuse her and others of making up conspiracy theories (Chris Bishop, National MP and former lobbyist for tobacco company Philip Morris, another Atlas Network affiliate, has also promoted the conspiracy theory rhetoric).

It’s no surprise, given the fundamental importance of controlling the public narrative around legislation and policy, that Seymour has gifted himself and his hand-picked board the power to see any legislation and policy from its earliest stages. Aside from being able to influence the actual content of the legislation in ways that benefit his corporate donors, this will allow him to gain valuable time for crafting a public narrative that will stymie any attempts to counter the rhetorical framing he adopts. This could prove politically fatal to his opponents.

Rather than an administrative power move, this could very much amount to a rhetorical coup d'état, granting Seymour dangerous and limitless power to set the political terms of policy debate.