Podcast: Lunches, letches, and 'lectorates.

What the Hell is Going On? Episode 1: David Seymour

The conflict we can see echoing across the world is being imported directly into New Zealand by outside powers and monetary influences that we don't want in our politics. It makes our politics messy and confusing, but untangling the puppet strings can help make sense of how we got here.

This first episode of “What the Hell is Going On?” is going to be, appropriately, about David Seymour, who’s had a busy time recently. David Seymour is the leader of the ACT Party, soon to be Deputy Prime Minister, and the person who has brought the furthest right politics ever in our history into New Zealand's Parliament.

But to start talking about David Seymour and his party, we have to look back before the start of his tenure, back to the split of Labour and National into ACT, and a little bit after it as ACT secured its role in New Zealand political system, and especially secured its seat.

This was done through a deal with National that gave them access to a very wealthy area of Auckland that had been campaigned on by Rodney Hyde. Rodney Hyde managed to win the seat off National after the MMP system was introduced. Our politics had been thrown into the air and it was a real toss-up as to who stayed in and who got out. Some parties formed between National and Labour didn't make -- there was a blue-red party that formed an environmental centre-right party that got no votes and never made it back into parliament.

But ACT survived. They survived because of Rodney Hyde. Hyde knew that his party were not going to break the 5% threshold, but he could win his MP seat. Once you have your seat, of course, it doesn't matter if you're under the 5% threshold -- this is how the Maori Party also get in when they're low on percentages, so it's not like these seats aren't also used by the left in a similar way.

RODNEY HYDE: Dancing with the Stars will probably remain more of our unusual strategies to win an election.

But the Epsom seat is different.

The strategy Hyde went with was to say to his constituents, his future constituents, “If you elect me, you'll basically have two electorate MPs.”

I expect David Seymour’s constituents are the happiest constituents in the country. They must be, because his party entirely relies on that seat, usually, to get into parliament.

Since the late 2000s National have run safe candidates against the ACT candidate, first Rodney Hyde and then David Seymour, in order to have a partner in government. National would push one tick for National and your member tick for Seymour. This means that in the electorate, National can run an MP who sits very high on their list and is guaranteed to get in anyway. For example, in the latest election, and for several before that, National ran Paul Goldsmith. He still attracted 9000 votes. But the feature of this electorate is that votes that go to David Seymour still far outnumber the votes that go to Labour and National combined. Right-wing voters are so overwhelmingly present that Labour don't stand any chance of winning Epsom, even when National and ACT split the vote.

The Epsom voter base believes in smaller government, in less regulation, and in lower taxes. You don't need to believe in too much more than that to be on side with National and ACT. The voting block is more than happy to have David Seymour in the Beehive representing their interests and furthering the general agenda of feeding money to businesses, keeping taxes low, keeping land prices hige: the things that keep them wealthy.

This vote has meant a lot to ACT. It’s kept their party in Parliament where almost every other party has fallen out (except for the Greens, who also formed around the time of MMP).

That's because the 5% threshold is incredibly high. No one has made it into parliament who hasn't already been from Parliament since its introduction.

After we introduced MMP, the ACT Party joined with National in a deal where the richest suburb in New Zealand has a vote that counts more than every other New Zealander.

It doesn't seem like in a democracy you should have a postcode where you have more control over the entire political system than everyone else outside of your postcode. It certainly doesn't seem the case that that postcode should belong to the richest people. But the introduction of the MMP system has created an accord between the National Party and the ACT Party that National are about to discover they can't walk away from so easily. When they do, they might not get the Epsom seat back.

When David Seymour holds things over Luxon’s head, or isn’t challenged by him, part of it is because of this strand of this politics beneath. Luxon doesn't want to lose ACT as an ally.

This technique of placing safe candidates for National and David Seymour in for ACT (or Rodney Hyde, as it was when Hyde was leader) was presented to the Epson electorate as giving them two electorate MPs. Perhaps that was convincing back in 2005 and 2008, but since then, whoever sits on the Epsom seat has not actually functioned as an electorate MP for Epsom. They never planned or hoped to win it. They don't want to win it in future. So they're not working for Epsom in a constituency sense.

But where they are really working for Epsom is in shared ideology, their harsh neoliberalism, the trickle-down economic theory that greatly benefits the wealthy, the protection of house prices and, especially for Epsom, of school zones.

Students cannot attend a school outside of their zone, and this has created massive inequalities in our education system. NZQA forbids the use of Scholarship statistics for league tables, but if they did not, the league tables would show you exactly how far ahead the top few schools are from everyone else. Epsom is in the zone for many of the objectively best schools in the country. Due to roll restrictions, only those who live in the area can access this superior education.

Epsom’s interests have been fought for hard by David Seymour. He knows what his role is, and he fulfils it well. I am sure that he is a fantastic electorate MP. We know this from some of the things that have happened this week: one of his many controversies has been with a constituent named Polkinghorne, who allegedly killed his wife and was found not guilty in a trial in which the police pursued -- despite a letter from David Seymour identifying their pursuit as inappropriate. Whether this is police interference, especially as Seymour is now a Justice Minister, has been a matter for debate.

This is why it's so important to talk about the Epsom seat. It's not just that David Seymour was potentially cosying up to a influential person. It's not just that he was looking out for his mate and wrote a letter to warn the cops off. It's about the fact that Seymour is so beholden to this electorate he will go to any lengths to keep them satisfied and happy because it is there's his ticket back into parliament in those off-years where ACT find themselves below the threshold and thus, outside of Parliament.

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Outside of Parliament last week, David was a very busy boy.

He began his week at Waitangi Treaty Grounds, where the national Treaty of Waitangi celebrations are held every year. This year, David Seymour was asked not to go by his hapu. He wasn't restricted from going, but they felt that his actions in Parliament, and his Treaty Bill especially, were an insult and did not represent him or them well. They were ashamed for him to be there. Seymour, of course, didn't care about any of that, and went anyway.

Luxon, on the other hand, was explicitly asked to go to the Treaty Grounds for his Waitangi celebration, and he fled as far away as he could, down Canterbury to spend his day at Akaroa with Ngai Tahu. He saw some protests there, and some challenge from Ngai Tahu, so it's not like he escaped all the controversy. But he certainly evaded the big show and dance at Waitangi that he was trying to avoid.

Seymour, however, loves showing and dancing, and he got to have a little one-two with Guy Williams on the press pulpit stage outside, where Williams wanted to say his piece. To Seymour's utter delight, Williams provided a lot of openings for Seymour to get in zingy one-liners and put his ideals out there in short snippet sound bites.

This annoyed a lot of journalists, who felt that Williams was not asking good questions because he's a comedian, and not, initially, a journalist. That itself gave David Seymour fodder, and he pointed it out to Williams in a comeback (that David Seymour was obviously very proud of because he posted it all over TikTok and Facebook).

I don't think David Seymour came off as well as he thinks he did. Guy Williams seemed angry, and that's the mood of a lot of people right now, the mood that needed to be communicated to him. But David Seymour treated it like it was a circus.

Another thing that David Seymour had fun doing outside Parliament was drive a Jeep up its steps. This seems a strange thing for someone to have done, but it has precedent. The truck in question was very old, and several decades ago, it was brought to Parliament for a photo shoot. Back in the day, being the good old days, they drove it up the top of the steps for the shot.

We have security at Parliament now.

Maybe David Seymour has forgotten, but we had COVID, and we had a mass demonstration outside Parliament that wrecked Parliament's grounds. We take things a little bit more seriously in the 21st century, and in the 2020s, than we have in the past.

Seymour was unsurprisingly told that he wasn't allowed up the steps. What was surprising is that he had to be told twice.

He obviously didn't think much of the rule, and he said so afterwards, giving quite a criticism of society, and it's rules and restrictions.

David Seymour, being a libertarian, is a big fan of not having any consequences applied to him, ever. It doesn't occur to him that it's not great for the Government if someone drives a truck up the steps and chips them, or cracks them, or hits someone, or damages the Jeep itself.

All are issues that would be considered by someone responsible, who understands why we we do the things we do. David understands this too. He knew that it would not be allowed in this day and age. He knew that he would be stopped by the security, the security that he knew was there. I don't know if he knew already at that point that Jerry Brownlee wouldn't let him, but I reckon he had a good hunch, at least.

So why did he do it, if he knew it was going to be so controversial?

Because it's controversial.

The Waitangi incident with Guy Williams might have seemingly gone well for Seymour, but his party is in a lot of PR trouble. On Friday two weeks ago, Tim Jago, former ACT president and current convicted pedophile, dropped his name suppression. It was nicely timed for the end of the news week, so it didn't get a ton of coverage, and it got quickly swallowed up by Seymour's antics at Waitangi and on the parliament steps.

This is the Boris Johnson strategy: Bojo’s patented method of distracting the public from all the horrible things happening behind the scenes -- or quite openly, perhaps, but you don't want people to look at it. You want them to look at you being a clown; that way, they'll remember that you're funny when they vote for you.

David Seymour seeks to annoy people. He wants people to be talking about him, but about the stuff he’s saying. He doesn't care if you don't like him, just so long as you’re not talking about the fact that ACT’s former president abused two teen boys. That way, you can't make the connections to the wider ACT Party rape culture that becomes really, really concerning in this new context.

There have numerous complaints of misogyny and sexual abuse within ACT. A former young ACT president stepped down several years ago, during Jago’s tenure, because she felt her concerns were so poorly handled by the ACT Party.

But that can’t just be pinned on Jago, as we can see their poor handling in Tim Jago’s own case too. David Seymour was approached directly over this -- he was tagged on Facebook. He replied to the partner of the now-adult boy who'd been abused, and suggested that she go to an employment lawyer, who they also had contact her when she didn't get in contact with them.

They were quite keen for her to talk to this lawyer. Given how sexual abuse allegations are often handled by people in the public eye, we have to ask if it was so they could lock the complainant up in an NDA and intimidate them into never speaking out. Fortunately, the woman went to the police instead, perhaps feeling that an employment lawyer wasn't the serious way of dealing with it that she'd hoped from the ACT Party.

The absent address of this issue is notable. David Seymour had plenty to say when Labour dealt with the sexual assault that happened at their camp. One of the things Seymour said at the time was that Labour were trying to “cover up” these sexual assaults and their internal culture – somehow -- by doing an official investigation into what had occurred.

This is incredibly interesting, because Seymour also did an investigation into the problematic culture within his party after the Young ACT allegations. But we never got that report. It hasn't come out yet, which is strange because it was commissioned some years ago now.

So it seems that what David was saying is true: when he commissions a report, it is to cover up a crime that occurred or a culture they’re hiding.

Ali Gammeter resigned over ACT’s culture, which she says persists.

ACT did not release their report in the end, unlike Labour, who eventually even got a resignation where someone took responsibility for the aftermath, which the victims felt wasn't handled very well. As a result of Labour’s investigation, they uncovered these issues and acted on them. This was done visibly for the public. But we don't know anything about ACT’s supposed rape culture because the ACT Party have not told us the results of their investigation.

So this was a bad news week for ACT. They didn't want lots of time and attention spent on it, which worked out well because they had plenty of other failures for people to point their fingers at.

The school lunch fiasco is kicking off currently as we enter term time and David Seymour's chosen school lunch provider, Compass Group, has failed to deliver the school lunches.

This was predicted. This was expected. Compass Group have failed to deliver for many schools in the past, and that’s why many of our schools have refused to use them. David Seymour was warned about this, but he needed to get a very low cost for his lunches because that is what he had campaigned on.

He got that low cost, and our kids got served absolute crap.

The photos we come out from these schools -- it was slop. It was it was not food that an adult would want to eat, and I doubt you could make many children eat it. And that’s is a tragedy, because we had an amazing healthy lunch program that kids loved, where children who had been missing out on meals, who may not get fed when they go home, were coming to school, were spending the day with a full stomach, and were having a good learning experience because of it.

And David Seymour came in and said, “We don't want you to expand this program like you're promising to do, Labour, so we're going to threaten to cut it, and that way we can remove all talk of the possibility that every child in New Zealand could be fed five days a week, breakfast and lunch, at some point in the future. “

Labour wanted to expand it out, roll it out slowly, so that more children in need were getting fed. ACT instead wanted to can it entirely. But during the run-up to the election, ACT discovered the public quite like feeding hungry kids. They don't like our kids starving, and they don't like child poverty. So Seymour came up with a new plan where he would feed more kids for much less money.

That's why we have this disgusting trash that's being served up: lovely lunches that were being made for under $8 a day are being served for under $3 a day. As you might expect, the lunches are now not so lovely. The trays don’t even have separators in them like they used to, because presumably a divider takes more plastic and that's too expensive. That would come out of Compass’s margins, so instead meals have gravies mixing in with your potatoes or your carbs to create mush. There's no colour. They don't look appealing.

There's a real lack of diversity to the food, too, although this is probably deliberate on Seymour’s part. Seymour wanted “Not Woke” foods for his school lunches, and criticized previous schools for serving things like sushi, which children famously hate. So Seymour is instead making them eat material that you can't even recognize as food.

The lunches are halal-friendly, which is NOT the same as halal, creating problems for Muslim students. Principals have said that students are noticeably worse behaved. They are playing up in class, they are not learning -- all of the advantages that we gained from a program that was working fine before Seymour came in and said, “I can do it better” -- those have disappeared because ACT wanted to save a few dollars.

And where did those dollars go?

Tax cuts.

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So that's how the wealthiest school district in the country controls what the poorest students in the country have to eat, and whether they eat. That is like the true dystopia of this lunch fiasco. And it’s impossible to take glee at Seymour’s failure because this program was feeding our most malnourished kids, the most in-need children in the country, the children who most need good nutrition at school because they aren’t getting it at home. And Seymour took that away from them, this one small headstart we’d given them to help them catch up to the kids who have money to eat every single day.

Seymour didn't want poor kids to have $8 meals, so he said, “We can do it for less”.

Which is very much the philosophy of the ACT Party.

David Seymour has also had to retract a comment he made before the start of the school year, when he told teachers that there would be a crackdown on teacher-only days, that they could no longer use them “willy nilly”, and they were to be approved by the Ministry of Education.

This plays up his propaganda that public servants are, essentially, taking the piss. Seymour wants to present this sort of admin time as unnecessary to justify his rhetoric and his budget cuts that are supposedly caused by blowouts from “luxuries like this”.

In response, teachers pointed out, and now Erica Stanford, Minister of Education, has pointed out, that teacher-only days are not luxuries; they are important, and are most important when you're rewriting a curriculum, which National and ACT are.

Seymour’s statement had not been run past Erica Stanford. She describes what he said as overreach, and he describes it as them getting their wires crossed. But it seems a lot more like David Seymour had an ideological bone to pick with the education system, while Eric Stanford was busy trying to run an education system.

This leaves Luxon stuck in this coalition where Seymour is trying to take the reins, where Winston Peters, our most seasoned politician who could out-think Luxon in his sleep, is getting a lot of what he wants, where ACT is getting almost everything they want, and Luxon is desperately trying to present this as National getting what they want too.

But people are pointing out thatm actually, it doesn’t seem like National want these things that New Zealand First and ACT are trying to push. The anti-Maori, anti-woke, ideological-based decisions that can be attributed back to to ACT are landing Luxon in hot water with the public. That these small radical parties are pulling our centrist party to the right because they've got a leader that's not pulling back. And people are noticing.

The other big story this week was Drag Story Time.

Drag performance is an issue that comes up in the news every few months whenever Brian Tamaki and his protesters kick off about it. But never have they kicked off as much as they did this weekend, when parents and children had to barricade themselves in a room while angry protesters terrified innocent children during a performance about science. (As I understand it, it was an educational-based drag performance by a well-liked drag king).

Brian Tamaki and his Destiny Church object to drag people a lot. Tamaki gets a lot of promotion and followers for his church by preaching anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-woke messages. His congregants were responsible for an incident where the Auckland rainbow crossing was painted over, and then another Rainbow crossing was painted over in a copycat vandalism, also done by a member of Brian Tamaki church.

Destiny Church are the primary anti-gay organization in the country. They are also funded by the Government and are tax exempt. They hold men's mental health contracts with the government, run men's support groups, and they host an educational program run in prisons, under the name “Man Up”. They are exempt from the patch ban, and some people are now pointing out that they are very like a gang themselves. The protesters who were frightening children at the library were wearing Man Up shirts.

Brian Tamaki has planted his flag. He encouraged this. Instigated it. He has told his followers, “This is what we are doing as a group.

This isn't just members of his congregation who decided to do this on their own. These are members of his congregation who showed up wearing his branded t-shirts, his organization that’s supposed to be about empowering men and showing the correct form of masculinity.

Brian Tamaki believes that the correct form of masculinity is to bash queer people.

Luxon has been forced to condemn this protest, which he did weakly. But ACT is much more relevant to this situation because they are the party that created it.

There are many spin-off organizations associated with ACT, made up of people that vote, support and push ACT’s messages. They are there with them on the anti-Maori campaign, they are on the ground as they're ACT make their free speech forays. In our current politics, what we’re actually witnessing is a coordinated response from ACT and several of their pressure groups, most of which were started by Jordan Williams and David Farrar. These include groups like the Taxpayers Union, the Free Speech Union, and Groundswell. Many, many groups are pretending to be a wide variety of people but all have a very, very similar membership, are pushing specific ideas from within this group and are creating this all-consuming wall of noise that makes it look like a real democratic conversation.

But it's just money; money, and very, very passionate people being very, very loud.

One of these groups mentioned is the Free Speech Union. They have been particularly disgusting in how they've pushed their ideas of free speech, which is that people should be allowed and even encouraged to spread anti-trans rhetoric wherever they go – and the FSU believe this to the point that they facilitated it. They hired an anti-trans speaker from the UK and paid him to do speaking gigs up and down New Zealand.

This stunt followed the Posie Parker incident where she was hounded from the country by pro-trans protesters objecting to having her hate speech here. At the final protest against her in Wellington (she didn't make it down to Christchurch) there was an assault by an anti-Posie Parker protester. There was red paint thrown on Posie Parker, too, which is also an assault (although it's much more of a protest action akin to throwing a dildo at Stephen Joyce.)

The Free Speech Union took the public response to Parker and said to the nation, “Your speech is being oppressed. This is a form of speech oppression, and your freedom is being stifled.” And they invited a renowned anti-trans campaigner, Graham Lineham to tour the country.

Linehan is a former writer of several well-liked BBC comedy shows. He wrote Black Books, he wrote The IT Crowd, he wrote Father Ted, and then he didn't write anymore after that because he lost his career and his family, as he’d started only ranting about trans people on Twitter and became, by all accounts, quite a bitter person about “the trans agenda” he believes ruined his life.

And so he was invited to New Zealand. He was set up to speak across the country. He was deliberately put in public buildings – that’s where the Free Speech union booked for him to do his gigs, knowing there would be outcry from the public to cancel the booking and putting the building in an awkward position.

The Christchurch venue did cancel, though I would hazard a guess that they had a backup venue already.

This was a tactic to stir people up, but much, much more important was the content of what was discussed.

It was largely a lot of lies about trans people. A lot of incorrect science, a lot of mispresented facts, a lot of throwing things at people without explaining them properly, a lot of letting people draw conclusions that aren't true from the things that were said.

But most alarming was the way they described and presented drag performers.

I could see where this was going even back then. It was going to be a campaign against drag, and it was going to especially be a pushback against drag performances in libraries, because how it was explained to the people who are already the most transphobic people in the country was that these are sexual predators. They're not trans people. It’s nothing to do with gender. They're not drag queens. It's not about trans people at all, even. This is just gay men dressing up as women. They are appropriating womanhood. (He was a bit of a feminist before he became a real transphobe.)

Confusingly, he also later said they're not even gay; they're just doing it for the money. They're doing it because they get paid, Linehan thinks. It pays really well, supposedly, this hobby performance art watched by small niche audience.

I doubt it pays anywhere near as well as he made out. But the way he pitched it to his audience was that drag performers had been making a lot of money out by dressing up as women and giving sexual performances to people. And now they're being invited to public libraries to give these sexual performances to children.

There was a line he used at one point that summed it up perfectly for his crowd, where the picture he was painting was: They are taking your children, they are putting them in a locked room with sexual predators, those predators are performing sexualized dances for them, performing sexual acts for them, and those predators being paid by your city council to do this. Your taxpayer money is being spent on pedophiles to molest your children.

That’s what a lot of people will have taken away from Linehan’s Free Speech Union tour. So a year later, no, I’m not at all surprised Destiny Church is assaulting people outside a library because of a drag performance happening there.

I’m a Cantabrian, and Christchurch is a city that knows all too well how powerful child molestation accusations can be because we were the city that convicted Peter Ellis of crimes that he could not possibly have committed.

Satanic abuse as a concept is another thing that was imported into New Zealand. It was another concept that was used to persecute queer people. Peter Ellis was a was a gay/bisexual man working in childcare in the 90s. He was open about it, he was flamboyant. He was a very visible target.

Peter Ellis

He fell afoul of a false accusation that was not investigated correctly. The detective was homophobic, and the psychologist working with him really, really wanted these children to have been abused. She wanted to help them, and she could only help them if they'd been abused. So they had to have been abused.

It's the worst case of confirmation bias you could ever find, and it all comes from a fear of child predation that prevents people from thinking critically.

The problem with fascism and authoritarianism and bigotry and hate crimes, etc, is that the people doing them never think that in the wrong. Fascism, Nazism, they’re presented to us as, “Oh, these are the bad guys. And you'll know that they're the bad guys. They'll they'll be doing bad things.”

But they're not, in their minds, doing bad things. They're doing very, very good things. Very, very justifiable things. Brian Tamaki himself says, “Is it not okay to punch a predator?”

There are a lot of people who would agree with that statement.

This is a related problem on Tiktok. People go out and “catch” pedophiles for content and money, but the people instigating these literal witchhunts (pedo hunts?) are not good people, and they’re sometimes punching people who aren't predators. They are men who want to get their anger out, who will go out and and use this boogeyman of child molestation as an excuse to assault people. They want to assault people, so they go out and assault people and then claim there is a moral justification behind it. But this vigilante justice is just an excuse for them to enact violence on others.

The same mentality is behind these protests. Man Up protestors believe they're in the right because they’ve been told they are by Graham Linehan, Brian Tamaki, and the ACT party.

This brings us to the future of the Epsom electorate.

For the first time, the status quo may be shaken up. The Epson electorate may be disbanded.

It can't be a political decision. The Electoral Commission can neither take into account for or against the Epsom electorate being important to the ACT Party.

It’s likely to be the Epsom electorate that gets cut because the South Island has grown in population while the North Island has shrunk. To keep electorates even in size, and thus keep our voting power even, (which is supposedly a philosophy of our voting system) the Electoral Commission are going to redraw the boundaries, and the Epsom electorate sits in the center of other electorates that need to consume it. Purely due to location, its demise is looking likely.

David Seymour has objected, pointing out that electorates are also about communities, and that legally, the Commission has to take into account dividing communities when they draw boundaries. I think that if they're going to be considering that argument, the Commission should also have to account for why it's such a close community. Epsom is a tight community because it's the richest, most influential neighbourhood in the country, where residents band together to politically manipulate the entire electoral system. They have the best school zone in the country and this has inflated their land values. So it's a community that's based on incredible privilege, and this unevenness in our electoral system has almost created the idea of this community. We think of Epsom as a hub because it is this electorate, this electorate that has so much power over the country and so gets so muh discussion.

It has affected how we perceive the suburb, and it’s possible Seymour will succeed with this argument that Epsom is a community that can't possibly be divided. But it is a corrupt electorate that should never have been allowed to keep a far-right party in parliament while other legitimate parties were kept out by an arbitrary threshold that only ever benefited the MPs already in Parliament when this new system was introduced.

Despite all of the controversy that David Seymour is facing right now, he's still going to be pretty happy with the topics people are talking about. At the end of the day, he wants people to be moaning about the Waitangi Bill. He wants there to be a lot of strong emotion surrounding it because he knows strong emotion will generate opposing strong emotion. One of the challenges he's had is that there has been a passionate “anti” response while his Bill supporters have been a lot more passive. The people with money have got in, and the think tanks have published their opinions, and Hobson’s Pledge said their piece. They've all had their say, but it's, it's been a bit muted, a bit muffled and no one's really supporting Seymour’s bill all that enthusiastically. Including Seymour himself.

There were over 300,000 submissions on the Waitangi Bill over Christmas, and notably there were also 23,000 on the Regulatory Standards Bill, which was had been covered by the hullabaloo of the bigger bill until Melanie Nelson brought it to the public's attention, and a last minute campaign was launched on the back of the Waitangi Bill campaign to get in these submissions.

And this all happened over Christmas. Organisations had closed down for the holidays. Everyone wanted to take a break and not think about politics for a while.

Instead, 23,000 people wrote up submissions to oppose this sneaky power-grab of a bill.

Seymour’s facing a way stronger opposition than he was prepared for, and he’s looking to bring the conversation back to his ideological rhetoric where he can spit out ideas and pull funny stunts to steal the headline for the week, or for the day, and wait while the news just passes over him to the next thing.

He’s not going to linger on his lunches and his bills and his seats and his pedophiles and all the controversies that his party are facing at the moment because he just want to distract from this in the same way that Boris Johnson accidentally clowned his way up to the Prime Ministership.

We're heading, I think, towards a confrontation where Luxon is going to have to deal with Seymour in some way. He's going to have to pull him into the line. Luxon hasn’t wanted to touch any of Seymour’s (or Winnie’s) ministers. He hasn’t really wanted to harshly criticize Seymour’s bill, but he's faced a lot of criticism for going along with it, for supporting it to second reading, even though he promises he won't support it beyond that. It’s pointless of him, and people don’t like that, but he's signed to this coalition agreement and he can't get out of it, even when the decisions it binds him to are bad.

And they are bad. The budget’s bad, the Waitangi Bill is bad, the Regulatory Standards Bill is bad, the health revamp is bad, the education is… going kind of all right when Seymour’s not involved. But they could be doing a lot better.

There are just so many flaws in everything Luxon is doing, and he can't walk back any of it. Not just because he's promised people. Because he's got David Seymour right beside him, pushing him further along every minute of every day, spurring him further down this path that already isn't going well for his party.

So that's the current state of politics. We have a not-Deputy-Prime-Minister who seems to hold more sway over the country than our actual Prime Minister. And as usual, ACT have enormous power over our government, disproportionate power, and far greater than they ever have in the past. That all comes back to the seat of power that has kept them in parliament for 20 years when rightfully they shouldn't have been there.

Given what's occurring overseas, given that under Trump, Musk is launching a bureaucratic coup, and he's using similar techniques to what we have seen used over here, I am alarmed. We are witnessing attacks on the judiciary in America and deliberate undermining of constitutional checks that mirrors ACT’s modus operandi.

America didn't fall to oligarchy the day Trump took power. America's system had been set up to enable oligarchy for a long time, probably well before the 80s when Reagan bought in Reaganomics and neoliberalism to make everyone who was already rich way, way richer, promising that everyone would benefit from this. Somehow.

That's Seymour’s driving philosophy too. That's why he has his libertarian values. He believes in property rights. He believes he can do whatever he wants, and that he should face limited consequences for it. That he should face fewer consequences than the average person.

He told the media that he should be able to drive that truck up the steps of Parliament because he works there. But the security guard who stopped him wouldn't be able to do that just because he works there. If it had been anyone other than David Seymour, if it had just been a guy, they wouldn’t be allowed either. But David Seymour thinks these rules shouldn't apply to him. Taxes are for other people to pay, and consequences are for other people to worry about. He should get to do whatever he wants, and who cares about the rest?

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Thank you for reading, for listening, for following and supporting!

I haven’t been posting so much lately because my mental health has been, ah, not great, but I always appreciate your patience and those of you who were still reading and commenting while I was away. It was very motivating to see people finding and enjoying my posts even while I wasn’t updating so often – hopefully this podcast episode marks a return to my normal still-erratic-but-more-frequent schedule.

This was recorded on Monday and it’s not being posted until Friday due to delays from not knowing how to make a podcast, so some of the timeline may seem confusing or more recent in how it’s framed than it really was. I'm hoping this podcast is going to be on Apple, Spotify, and maybe some other places, but it will definitely be attached to my substack writings, with an edited write-up that is slightly stronger in its wording than this podcast.

If you listened to the audio version of this, I’d love to know what you thought of the new format, and if you’re interested in hearing more in future. I mostly started recording myself as a way to get my thoughts together after the Christmas break and all the chaos that unfolded over it, and I wondered if it could be a piece of engaging content in itself.

We will see how it goes!