Seymour feels his chance slipping away

A string of high-profile political losses is making it harder to control the narrative. Could Seymour's time be almost up?

Is Seymour all out of moves? Photo: NZ Herald

It’s easy when trying to take the political pulse to swing from extreme to extreme. This is caused in large part by the media, who publish the most sensational headlines and focus on the most divisive stories. This strategy of amplifying the most dramatic and controversial happenings and dissecting what politicians say about what they are doing rather than what they are actually doing or what is actually happening politically makes it harder to focus on the broader political picture.

And the broader political picture is this. We are a year and a half into the coalition government’s term. All of the coalition partners are going to be starting to think about the next election. Because these three parties have to fight each other for the rightwing vote the infighting is going to ramp up, and National especially is going to see ACT as a drag on their electoral chances and will begin to distance themselves from them. Winston and NZ First will pivot hard to culture war stuff (this has already started), as the only way they can maintain their relevance in today’s discourse is by inflaming the hatred of the bigots and racists. ACT will continue to sell themselves as the only adults in the room, making those tough choices for common-sense policy and standing up for what’s right because it’s the right thing to do. And National will continue to blame all of the problems their disastrous policy has caused on Labour, hoping that voters will remember, against all available evidence, that they are the better party for economic management.

The first 18 months was a bonanza for policy for the wealthy. The government rammed through a huge amount of legislation against popular opinion and in a lot of cases without public input, nearly all of which will result in a massive transfer of wealth to the already wealthy. But unfortunately for them, their promise to focus on and ameliorate the cost of living has not been fulfilled. Despite Luxon’s assurance that he is laser focused on growth, nothing is growing, and people are losing what confidence they had in him, which was never much to begin with.

All of this positions David Seymour, ACT’s leader, to make huge political gains leading up to next election. Unfortunately for him, while he and ACT have driven a large part of the coalition’s agenda, those policies that he has personally been associated with have either been a disaster or have been wildly unpopular, resulting in a huge public backlash against him. Given the vastly different practicalities of the first half vs the last half of the government’s term, I think there is a very real chance that Seymour has missed his window of opportunity and may shortly see his political star dimming. His own hubris and cocksure arrogance have made him forget that he heads a party that got only 8% of the vote in the last election. He has instead behaved as if he has a personal mandate to transform Aotearoa into a libertarian paradise, and while his policies may be fine for those rightwing voters who defected from National at the last election, they are wildly unpopular with the general public of New Zealand. He has been given outsized influence in the coalition government either due to Luxon’s ineptitude as a Prime Minister, the fact that Luxon actually agrees with his agenda, or both, but political expediency will now see Luxon distancing himself both from Seymour and ACT’s policies.

So with National and NZ First trying to distance themselves from ACT over the next 18 months, what we’re left with is Seymour’s political record. And, really, it’s not great. As I said above, aside from some of the policies that National has taken co-credit for, the policies that Seymour has spearheaded or is most associated with are 1) school lunches, 2) the Treaty Principles Bill, 3) the Regulatory Standards Bill. These three policy positions alone have the potential to see his political capital severely diminished. Let’s review each of them briefly.

First, school lunches. Seymour targeted the Labour government’s school lunch program as wasteful, and said he would revamp it to save $130 million a year. Seymour’s program, in a word, has been a disaster. It was covered solidly in the media for months, with reports of inedible food, late or missed deliveries, meals frozen or too hot to eat and in some cases so hot they led to students being hospitalized, and flies crawling out of lunches. The optics of firing all-kiwi providers and workers to bring in an international corporation under investigation for its business practices are also really poor for someone who claims to be wanting to revitalize New Zealand’s productivity. While Seymour has said that the government is fixing the issues and that the media has blown them out of proportion, the public perception is that the new lunches are an unmitigated disaster.

Then there is the Treaty Principles Bill. It’s hard to adequately convey how poorly this whole thing has reflected on Seymour. The bill has created a massive public outcry, with a hikoi of tens of thousands (over 100,000 depending on who is counting) converging on Parliament, massive demonstrations throughout the country, and 300,000 submissions during the select-committee process. Of these, 90% of written and 85% of oral submissions were against the bill. This despite campaigns by rightwing organizations such as Hobson’s Pledge to garner support for the bill. The support did not materialize, and the public as a whole came out against Seymour’s divisive bill, which was then voted down by all parties except ACT at its second reading.

Seymour, despite this huge and widely-publicized political wipeout, was defiant. He dismissed the huge number of oppositions as not based in logic or failing to provide any reasonable points against the bill. In the ACT newsletter, the Treaty Bill was front and center. The newsletter echoed much of what he said in the media

Seymour had framed the bill as being about whether or not New Zealanders’ should have equal rights (even though it is about dismantling Treaty protections against corporate exploitation), and this was the line he took in the post-vote spin. For Seymour, only ACT has the courage to stand up for equality, everyone else would rather people have special privileges based on race. It was a winning strategy which played on and inflamed race-based and anti-Māori prejudice. But the scale of the backlash showed that he was not able to divide the public as he wished and the vast majority saw through his equality rhetoric, even if they didn’t see through to the corporate motivations behind the bill.

And now comes the Regulatory Standards Bill. There’s a good case that this bill was Seymour’s real goal all along and that the Treaty Principles Bill was only a diversion from the actual goal of passing this one. This bill, which ACT claims is only about improving the quality of regulation in New Zealand, has been a darling of the business interests in New Zealand for over 20 years. It’s been brought to Parliament three times in various iterations over that time, and it’s been rejected all three times. Business interests in New Zealand really want this bill to pass. It is the brainchild of the NZ Initiative, having been proposed originally by Bryce Wilkinson.

It seems suspect to me that business interests would push so hard for this bill which is ostensibly just about sensible regulation. For business interests to push for something, it means that their profits are on the line. And when you read past the “transparent regulation” and “cutting red tape” to the real purpose of the bill, it’s clear that what is really going on here is that ACT and its business sponsors would like to enshrine in law a bill that will guarantee that property holders and corporations are able to operate with an extra layer of legal protections, with provisions that allow them to bring legal action if the government attempts to regulate in a way that impacts their profits.

So under cover of the Treaty Principles Bill, Seymour tried to sneak this one in under the radar. But a number of people caught wind of what the bill was really about, and after a concerted effort and public campaigns the discussion paper ended up getting 23,000 submissions, 88% of which were against the bill, and only 0.33% of which were in favor (the remainder did not express a position). Seymour, despite being destroyed in the court of public opinion, of course, was not fazed, and vowed to bring the bill to Cabinet this week before introducing it to the House. Passage of the bill is part of the coalition government’s agreement.

So why am I mentioning this as a political loss for Seymour? It feels like a done deal, and this is the end goal of Seymour’s political agenda—to open up Aotearoa to unfettered corporate exploitation. It very much seems like he is on the verge of his crowning achievement.

But Seymour’s wins and losses hinge on whether or not he is able to craft and control a narrative about them. The narrative has to be carefully shaped because it has to be able to accommodate facts and reshape what they mean, but it can’t be transparently incompatible with the facts. Our media here in New Zealand is not as propagandistic as that in the US. We don’t have entire media empires dedicated to spreading falsehoods as if they are true statements of the facts. Not yet at least. So this means that in order for Seymour to notch political wins, he has to pay careful attention to controlling the narrative.

And the Regulatory Standards Bill presents him with a challenge in this regard. Not just a challenge. In fact, this particular bill seems tailor-made to resist the narrative that Seymour is trying to spin about it. The bill is ostensibly about creating reasonable and transparent regulation. However, it has been rejected by Parliament not one, not two, but three times. The main reason for its rejection has been that after consideration, it has been decided that it will not accomplish its stated aims or that it has been unclear in what exactly it is trying to accomplish. That’s right. It’s unnecessary and duplicates existing legislation. But Seymour has once again introduced this bill, this time with a commitment from National to get it passed. As part of his new regime when he became part of the coalition, he established the Ministry of Regulation, with himself as the minister. When he introduced his idea for the Regulatory Standards Bill to them, they said it wasn’t necessary and advised that it be rejected. Seymour’s own ministry said his bill wasn’t necessary. Given the stated purpose of the bill is to achieve good regulation, the fact that the ministry that Seymour set up for that explicit purpose rejected his bill is a damning indictment.

Furthermore, the impending introduction of the bill resulted in an emergency hearing by the Waitangi Tribunal. Their report indicated that the Crown had failed in its obligations to the Treaty by failing to engage in targeted talks with Māori, excluding them from the legislative process. Furthermore, the tribunal also found that the bill would fundamentally alter the constitutional framework of New Zealand, resulting in further Crown breaches of its Treaty obligations. They recommended that the government immediately halt any further work on the bill until Māori are consulted and the Treaty obligations are considered.

Seymour’s response to this was, unsurprisingly, petulant. He vows to still bring the bill to Parliament, accusing the tribunal of “fearmongering and manufactured outrage”. It’s clear that Seymour views the tribunal as being in the way of him realizing his legislative agenda, as evidenced by his recent announcement of a review into the tribunal to clarify its scope and remit.

On the surface, this seems like typical Seymour, but when you consider that Seymour will be very aware of the political stakes of the next 18 months, he must also be aware that both of his coalition partners will be considering the public response to everything much more carefully. In fact, after the initial results from the submissions on the discussion paper were announced, NZ First came out and said that they had issues with the bill, and that they would be pushing for changes. Given the massive levels of popular opposition to the bill, we can expect National to begin to distance themselves from it as well. And while the passage of the bill is a part of the coalition agreement, if the results of the select committee process show an equal or even greater public opposition to the bill as registered in the discussion document submissions, in the long shadow of the hugely unpopular killing of the pay equity agreements, National or NZ First may see the writing on the wall and kill it, or at the very least, we will see a much watered-down version passed. Either way, expect this to be a big political issue for all parties, much bigger than Seymour had hoped.

All of this leads me to the conclusion that Seymour senses his window of opportunity may be closing. His usual unflappable demeanor is feeling more and more desperate, and I think he feels his chances slipping away. As the leader of a small party, he hasn’t ever faced the same pressure as National. He doesn’t have to worry about taking a more palatable position on anything to court the center right because he’s only worried about peeling off National voters who don’t think they are extreme enough and his position is more ideological/corporate-aligned and less populist so he isn’t likely to be as successful at courting the racists and bigots as NZ First. His agenda for this term has always been to try to ram through as much as he can, because this might be it for him and his party and he has said he doesn’t plan on being in politics long term. While I could be reading this wrong, I have to think that National will be thinking more of their electoral prospects than backing up Seymour’s toxic policy agenda. Luxon stands a real chance of getting rolled before the election, and if that happens, expect National to distance themselves even further from Seymour and ACT.

It will be an interesting 18 months and we’d be a fool to rule Seymour out at this point. He has been trained well, and is a master at manipulating the narrative around his policies. But the public backlash to his Treaty Bill has now bled over into the Regulatory Standards Bill, and the bill itself seems to be opposed to many of its own stated aims. If Seymour loses control of the narrative, he’s sunk and the pressure will only intensify as National looks to separate themselves from ACT in the runup to the election. That’s why I think that Seymour may be on the verge of a political fall. And I think he sees it coming and will only get more unhinged and combative in the near future, especially during and after the public consultation on his bill. We should do everything we can to oppose the bill, to amplify the disconnect of his narrative from reality, and to divide the coalition partners against one another.