Were politicians ever honest?

Let us not dance daintily around the elephant in the room.

Our politicians who serve us in the present are not honest, certainly not as honest as they should be, and while the right are taking out most of the trophies for warping narratives and literally redefining “facts”, the kiwi left have created their own controversies around deceptions and mistruths, too, such as Te Pāti Māori’s alleged misuse of census data and ex-Green MP Darlene Tana’s lack of forthrightness with their party around their husband’s migrant abuse allegations, as well as their seeming inability to understand that it was this very dishonesty through omission posing the problem the Greens had with them.

But that is quite a different matter to running a campaign on an opportunistic platform of exacerbating racial tensions via dishonest rhetoric in order to sneak constitution-changing legislation through Parliament.

The (Lack of) Treaty Principles Debate

True to their usual slimy and cretinous form, ACT are leading the dialogue on the Treaty Principles bill by avoiding any criticisms about it with witty redirection and personal attacks. That’s in spite of constant complaints from Seymour that no one seems to want to engage with him.

It’s purely personal, David.

In response to questions and criticisms of his Bill and his stance toward Maori, David Seymour told Guy Williams that back in his day, “Comedians were funny”. To which Williams replied, when he grew up, politicians were “a bit more honest.”

I don’t know how funny Williams is. I’m ashamedly unpatriotic in my comedy tastes. But I do know that historically the role of bards and jesters has been to relay the words of the common people to leaders and kings. Celtic bards and Roman poets both were composers of political satires. Poland’s most famous court jester, Stańczyk, was known especially for his political wit and he was praised by many who recorded him for standing against hypocrisy and fighting for truth.

Those who have been give a voice to entertain us and make us laugh have frequently found ways to use their platform to stand up to people in positions of power.

Grievances can be brought through performance arts to the attention of politicians and to the populace. Satirists in any society are usually granted some degree of performance protection or artistic license. Insults might be aired in songs or quips that would be too offensive in conversation or petition — but which are strongly felt and agreed to by the audience, whose frustrations can be channelled through and into popular culture and media.

Bards, fools, jesters, poets, and comedians so often share this common purpose in any given society: to do much more than just tell jokes.

Guy Williams did not seem like he was telling jokes when he confronted David Seymour. He seemed angry. He seemed like a citizen confronting his king, as helpless to stop his devastating decisions and their effects on society as the rest of us, but at least wanting to publicly set the record straight.

Screenshotted from ACT’s social media — they’re very proud of this moment

For me, his words hit close to home. This substack was created to post a public record of an OIA I filed after watching several of Seymour’s obvious mistruths aired unquestioningly on broadcast media.

This is Seymour’s favourite time-honoured tactic of repeating statements to the nation that people “have told him”, without ever bothering to see if this is true — though it is also sometimes just Seymour outright lying about what’s actually been said to him.

It’s a technicality, you see, that Seymour conveys to the country something other than what he meant or what was true. You should have listened more closely. He never said Maori are taking this country for a ride. He only implied it, while standing on a podium on behalf of those who think that, and that makes you the racist for identifying it. Only racists see race. Only bigots call out other people for racism.

And it’s not a lie if there’s a grain of truth at the bottom of the bucket. That’s why in June last year, Seymour justified cutting regulations for preschools by saying that schools are being told they can’t teach phonics.

"Telling a school that they can't actually teach phonics, that they can't teach young children the ABC, I mean the average New Zealander would just throw up their hands at that ... there's no shortage of silly rules and regulations we can get rid of, that will do nothing to impact child safety and child welfare.

"I think it's fair to say that this sort of stuff is legion and it's seriously impeding people in the sector's ability to get the business done of providing safe and constructive education in childcare for parents at a price they can afford.”

What a reasonable guy.

Except preschools were never told that. True to the critical thinking skills of someone who supports David Seymour to solve their political problems, Seymour’s televised claims were based off information from a constituent who “expressed concern” to him that their preschool was being prevented from teaching phonics.

When I asked if it actually had been the case that any preschool had been instructed not to teach phonics, I was informed that — no surprise — it was not. Instead, the Ministry of Education had quite reasonably advised a preschool to revise its phonics education to make it more appealing and interesting to children.

The Ministry of Education has confirmed that the service was not told that it couldn't, or shouldn't, run specific programmes. The Ministry did, however, ask the service to consider how responding to children's interests could be better incorporated into the service's planning processes. This is because creating opportunities for children to make choices about their own learning is a key part of the early childhood curriculum, Te Whäriki.

To translate: David Seymour’s supporter was incensed that the Ministry of Education had told them their preschool couldn’t run a phonics programme that forced children to participate in a structured activity they didn’t want to take part in, as per the curriculum. So they went and complained to their libertarian liar of an MP that MoE had prevented them from teaching phonics altogether.

David Seymour obviously didn’t think this sounded strange or unlikely at all, nor did he think to check that this actually happened before spouting off about it on the news or seemingly basing his policy of deregulation around regulations that had never, ever been imposed.

Or, more likely, Seymour realised this story was much more useful in its exaggerated and untruthful form. So he didn’t dig any further, because the lies he knew he was about to broadcast benefitted him.

Personally, I think a Minister for Education has an obligation to get his facts straight before he repeats them on National TV or before he uses them to justify a regime of regulatory cuts that apparently aim to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

“This sort of stuff is legion”, Seymour says, of something that never existed in the first place. How can we possibly trust his assessment of anything else?

But if you squint, it might have been true, or at least sounded true if you have a certain world view, and that’s what matters when you’re an ACT MP. Or an ACT voter.

(FYI: It’s a studied phenomenon that people on the right care less about facts when forming their political opinion than people on the left)

A selection of Seymour’s taller tales include:

• Positioning himself as an “old-fashioned lefty” in 2024 — a favourite strategy of the libertarian right when they can get away with not having their actual beliefs interrogated. This claim only works if you remember Roger Douglas was a Labour MP in 1985 before he was booted out and founded New Zealand’s furtherest-right Parliamentary party in history.

• Andrea Vance of the Post pointed out that the entire idea of Seymour “starting” the Treaty conversation is a lie — we have been democratically discussing and developing the Treaty for years.

• The Treaty Principles Bill itself is a mistranslation and a misrepresentation of the Treaty, as attested to by 27 Te Reo translators. This is probably because David Seymour did not use translators and consulted no experts, as confirmed to me in an OIA request. It is not a serious interpretation of the Treaty, just an idea of what Seymour wishes existed instead.

• Seymour has no need to cite historical or contemporary sources when interpreting the thoughts of the Rangatira who signed the Treaty. Much like with not needing a translator to translate the Treaty, he just knows. A bit like how he just knew Nelson Mandela would campaign for ACT if he were alive today, despite Mandela’s descendants strenuously denying this.

• His unsubstantiated claims that students are being unwillingly pulled out of science and maths to learn Māori. This came after the government diverted $30 million Te Reo funding to maths resources.

• Seymour denied any links to the ATLAS network despite having previously worked for them — this a lie so huge it’s hard to even start debunking it because ACT are so ATLAS-affiliated

• Claimed reusable shopping bags were killing up to 20 New Zealanders a year

But it’s so much bigger than this.

Seymour seeds a deep distrust in the media that attempts to hold him accountable, especially when it attempts to holds him accountable. He refuses to appear on RNZ due to feeling “belittled and abused”. He took the opportunity provided by revelations of distrust in the mainstream media to promote his ACT newsletter (named “Free Press”), and posed that if people are happy with media like Netflix and Youtube, then “What’s the problem?”

Quite apart from the lack of pride he and his party clearly hold for New Zealand culture and media, the problem is that Netflix is not interviewing him or commenting about bills passed by Parliament. Youtube does not feature true kiwi journalists joining the dots the nation needs to connect and inform us and keep our society open and free. And our news programmes, our state-sponsored and run television networks and channels, have all been left to wither and die, unhelped by our rightwing politicians as the 21st Century transforms the media landscape into something too unhospitable for old-fashioned media organisations to survive.

How unfortunate for those organisations that their structure and purpose is mandated by an act of Parliament. And how unfortunate we have people in power who would rather let them disappear than help mould them into the sort of public broadcaster that can thrive in a modern environment.

Isn’t this just what politicians are like, though?

No.

There is this idea in the zeitgeist that politicians are all inevitably liars and go about constantly misrepresenting the truth. This how politics works, supposedly, and it’s how it always has been.

This is a dangerous idea to propagate uncritically because our Parliamentary system actually operates on a high-trust model, as David Wilson, Clerk of the House, explains:

“MPs are not allowed to lie in the House,” says Wilson. “It's called ‘deliberately misleading Parliament’, and it can be treated as a contempt of Parliament. Members are allowed to be wrong, …if they find out they were wrong about something they've said they're expected to come to the House and correct it. Because Parliament operates on a trust basis, and on the assumption that all members are honourable and tell the truth, it's seen as a cardinal sin not to – to deliberately mislead the House.”

This is why you cannot call someone a liar in Parliament.

“We don't call each other names like racists and liars, even if what is being said is untrue. We assume that they have simply made a mistake, which is different from lying, and that it should be pointed out, and they should be given an opportunity to correct. If they choose not to, then there's a whole different process for that right, which is the privileges process.”

Creating a culture in which politicians are expected to lie just gives politicians permission to lie to and mislead us.

The reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

Knowingly false statements are not the same as mistaken mistruths. This incorrect assumption otherwise serves Seymour well because, as we’ve established, if you just repeat things that have been told to you by unreliable people, you’re never lying. You’re just signal-boosting their misunderstanding of the world in the hope that others become similarly confused.

ACT use this strategy a lot.

Seymour’s base position is one of dishonesty. He presents as a leftist or a centrist or a political outsider wherever possible to mask his radical right leanings. He hides behind his mantle of libertarianism to appear concerned with the rights of ordinary people, when really he is mostly concerned with the property rights of the rich. He claims to be starting needed conversations or amplifying constituents’ existing concerns, all while he targets vulnerable demographics with rhetoric that preys on fear and stokes emotion, rather than educating and informing. He spreads mistruths and promotes views of the world that are fundamentally incorrect in order to advance his own political positions.

This type of lying is a different sort of dishonesty to what we usually see in politics, to what we used to see in politics.

I think of the figures in our past who we rightly revere for the contribution they’ve made to this country: the likes of Holyoake, Fraser, Seddon, Massey — even Muldoon had a deep- seated integrity that our post-neoliberal politicians lack. It is alarming to think that our most authoritarian Prime Minister ever, and the only one to cause a constitutional crisis by refusing to relinquish the reigns of power as appropriate at the end of his term, was in fact operating under the sort of probity we no longer see from the neoliberal right.

Muldoon may have demonstrated plenty of instances of dishonesty and political manipulation which I personally find distasteful, but at the end of the day I can still begrudgingly respect a man who believed he was doing right by the common people right to the end, even when he was very, very wrong about it.

Seymour has no such motivations, and that is the defining difference between the rightwing politicians of today and those of yesteryear. Oh, sure, there are politicians who still have honour, even on the right — less and less though, it seems, as neoliberalism takes out the old guard and replaces them with the right’s new regime of business interests and those who will curtail to them. The systemic poison that Nicky Hager revealed in his exposé book Dirty Politics has worked its way well into the roots of the parties now, and it has warped their worldviews too. No longer is politics about making things better for kiwis; it is about our quest for endless economic growth at any cost and the apparent need to put profit above people if we want people do well. Counterintuitively.

Seymour’s politics are about opportunistic racism and consolidating power under himself in a very Musk-esque fashion.

And if he needs to tell a few lies and break a few eggs to get there?

Why, he simply never knew any better.