Labour came to power “astonishingly prepared to carry on with its policy agenda”, making it almost impossible to stand in the Government’s way.
That’s according to David Seymour, who alongside the rest of ACT has spent more than two years struggling to land any blows on the one-party Government.
“The Government’s agenda has been unbelievably hard to stop. If you look at three waters, look at healthcare reform, until very recently the ANZ public media merger,” he says.
For most of the first two years of this term, ACT and National failed to sink any of Labour’s policies. Recall that Kiwibuild, the flagship policy of the last coalition government, was dead in the water hardly a year after Jacinda Ardern became Prime Minister.
“New Zealand hadn’t had a one-party government for 24 years, when this one came in. Probably if you were around in the time of Muldoon and Lange and others, what we’re experiencing now probably was a lot more normal. And now it hasn’t been,” he says.
“I think it’s probably unlikely that the people will elect a single-party government for another generation.”
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While substantive opposition has been nearly impossible, rhetorical opposition has been surprisingly successful.
“If you saw today with the PM’s comments – and exactly a week ago when she said I was dishonest – I think we have been quite effective at piercing the idea that all is well and this is a wonderful government. I think that they have responded to us in a way they haven’t responded to other opposition MPs, because our job of representation is to ask the question that the person sitting, watching the TV wants asked,” Seymour says.
He’s referring to the now-infamous incident when Ardern was caught referring to Seymour as an “arrogant prick” on a hot mic in the House. He thinks he’s starting to get under her skin. But then again, everyone slips up from time to time – Seymour himself called National MP Jacqui Dean an “idiot” in an aside during our conversation, just four hours after the “prick” incident.
Where the rhetoric has been a quantifiable success is in the polls. Seymour says the left-wing parties came out of the 2020 election with a 10-point lead over the right, but that gap has now been almost fully reversed.
ACT itself has fared surprisingly well in the polls as well. Conventional wisdom indicated that, with Christopher Luxon’s ascendance to the head of the National Party and the end of Judith Collins’ disastrous and unpopular leadership, ACT would diminish.
While the party is now down a bit from regularly polling above 15 percent during the Delta lockdown, it still earns a healthy 10 to 12 percent – well above its result at the last election. That’s despite National’s surge in the polls, from a low of 21 percent to a recent high above 40 percent.
“In 12 months, our polling has stayed almost exactly the same,” Seymour says.
“The difference between the same number now and the number we had then, I think now that number reflects the wider team than an individual effort.”
His priorities if he’s in a position to shape government policy after the election are settling the issue of co-governance with a referendum, education reform to boost long-term productivity, cutting red tape, reducing public spending and rolling back the progressiveness of the tax system.
“The tax structure is far too progressive. I can think of rich countries that have more progressive taxation but I struggle to think of countries that have got rich with such a progressive approach to taxation,” he says.
“We are now at a point where we are not a rich country, we’re a country that needs to get rich if we’re going to have as many nurses per capita as Australia, for example. I do think that we’re in a fight to maintain being unequivocally a first-world country.”
These are the sorts of issues that are a bottom line for Seymour. He hasn’t spent too much time thinking about optimal coalition arrangements and suggests leaving National in a minority government position could be beneficial. It would give ACT more of a say on policy, which he thinks National has been light on.
“The frank and blunt truth is that they’re not releasing policy like we are,” he says.
“Our resource management reform, love it or hate it, it’s 20 pages of quite serious policy discussion. The truancy policy paper set out five ideas over three or four pages. I’m not aware that they’re doing that. I don’t think we can really compare with something that doesn’t exist.”
That doesn’t mean he has a poor relationship with Luxon, who was once his next-door neighbour. But it does mean he hopes to see a more vigorous and substantive debate on all sorts of issues next year.
“We think this [election] cycle is more important than, say – you take your mind back to 2016, what were the big issues? Should we replace the flag with a tea towel? Will John Key get pandas to Wellington Zoo?” he says.
“They were happier, simpler times. We’re not in those times now.”
