Seymour causes thousands of unjustified absences by forcing kids to fight for their rights instead of attending class

The State would like to remind you that they are in control.

They manage your employment prospects, and can destroy the job market you and yours rely on by mass-cancelling construction projects, cutting funding, and firing a good chunk of our public servants. They wield the mechanisms that provide scrutiny for their decisions, and will refuse interviews, expel journalists, appoint ideological plants to commissioner roles, replace boards who speak out about them, place watchdogs over councils struggling to cope with the fall-out of the fiscal responsibility for water that the government themselves dumped right back on their shoulders, breach comity in response to a court summons to keep the Waitangi Tribunal from inquiring about their decisions, reverse anti-corruption measures by previous governments, threaten via their employment whistleblowers and commentators who speak out against cuts, undermine the public service whenever they disagree with them (could have linked a LOT more examples there), shorten submission periods of unpopular bills, fast track controversial legislation and projects, and then waste time with patsy questions during the single week for questions they introduced to make up for the fact that they’ve made it impossible to scrutinise them. And if you want to protest about ANY of it, they will inform you that they control what you do with your kids during weekdays by “reminding” parents that the government is cracking down on unjustified absences.

Oh, I wish we had a system that recorded these justifications. We don’t — it just marks down justified and unjustified. Imagine the gems we could get from this if those justifications could be pulled via OIA.

“Had to pull my kid out of school to fight for the future of this country 🙄”

“Sorry, Tamati missed school for over a week because the deputy prime minister introduced a bill we all know won’t pass and the Prime Minister told him he could slow-roll it for two years even though no one wants it, no one is voting for it, and Luxon himself refuses to allow a conscience vote on the issue because of how harmful and unpopular this bill is.”

Or maybe a simple:

“Timmy did not attend class today because David Seymour is a prick.”

I gotta be honest, if I was a parent, I’d probably be sending a note along the lines of that last one.

The irony of course is that Seymour himself is the one motivating parents to pull children from school, and much like how this government issued a warning against violence to a movement known for being entirely peaceful, Seymour makes this warning to parents not to actually intimidate or inform them, but as a signal to his voters, a further attempt to shape the narrative that these are people operating on the margins, on the fringes of what is allowed, that perhaps these are even a group of people doing immoral and borderline-illegal things at these protests like inciting violence and taking truant children along.

Where was his concern when it was anti-mandate protestors taking their kids to their Parliament occupation? You know, the protest that actually featured violence from protestors?

The responsibility for every single absence caused by this protest rests squarely on Seymour’s shoulders for introducing a race-baiting bill to Parliament and artificially extending its airtime under the guise of “scrutiny”, while his government rush through all the bills that they actually intend to pass and that the public and media are crying out for the ability to scrutinise.

People have pointed out that this will be an educational opportunity for children, and while that sounds trite, I agree. An observation I made at the regular Palestine protests held in Christchurch was the role young children took in leading the march, leading the chants, and leading the organising. My heart broke for them a little as I watched them round up and head a parade of several hundred protestors, having to spend their weekends campaigning against a genocide that, in an ideal world, they wouldn’t even know is a possibility. But it also made me think that this is the sort of ‘leadership opportunity’ we throw money into speakers and courses and programmes to create for our kids — and yet we never scratch the surface of the experience and skills that these leaders of today and tomorrow will get from having the people of their city follow them and their chants in protest against the deaths of tens of thousands of their own people on the other side of the world.

And that’s a hell of a burden for a ten-year-old to shoulder — but it’s also hard to prioritise the adverse effects of these weekly protests upon those children leading the cause in safe cities and countries when you remember the situations the children of Gaza are in.

Note the kids on loudspeakers

Seymour does this attendance dog whistle any time students skip school to participate in democracy — you’ll also see him pull it out for the annual climate change protests. Every year, he misses or ignores the education and awareness that come from participating in a protest, the connection, the culture, the belonging, and the way it engages kids with society and with current events. So his response here in defence of his own bill is no surprise — in fact, it’s getting quite tired.

He wanted a conversation. He just also wants to keep kids out of that conversation.

Isn’t that weird?

It would be really nice if Seymour would drop the hypocrisy, or perhaps pick up a second brain cell to help him form some obvious conclusions everyone else seems to have already reached.