Election 2023: Heather du Plessis-Allan: David Seymour needs to stop the panic statements

OPINION

The best explanation for David Seymour weirdly threatening National last weekend is that he’s panicking.

His party is slipping in the polls. Under sustained attack on his candidates, Act has slipped from the mid-teens to around 10 in just a few months.

That’ll be sobering for the guy who’s probably got used to being the centre-right’s overachiever. Maybe he also got used to the thought of power. Act was expecting to bring a third of the votes to a new government. That would’ve meant a third of the seats in Cabinet. Now they’re bringing a fifth. The difference between 33 per cent and 20 per cent is massive in terms of power.

It might also - rightly - have bugged him to hear National unilaterally ruling things in or out in a future government with no regard to Act’s policy. The Zero Carbon Act was staying. Act wants to bin it. Partial sales of state-owned enterprises was out. Act wants a sell-down. Fees free for year one university students was staying. Act wants to scrap it.

With every rule in or out by National, Act voters had less reason to stick around. A vote for any party on the centre right was is as good as the other if National is calling all the shots.

So it seems to me that Seymour calculated that he had to give voters a reason to come back to Act. And that was to paint his party as the only one that would hold the line on careful, considered spending.

And so last weekend, he attacked National. He said they were no better than Labour at blowing taxpayer dollars, it’s just that they wear blue-coloured ties.

He threatened to give a National government confidence, but no supply. He’d help them take power, but wouldn’t let them pass budgets without his explicit tick of approval on the spending first.

To Seymour it must’ve sounded principled. To too many voters it sounded petulant. Even Act members reportedly told the party they weren’t happy with his hard line.

And so he walked it back within days. By Monday it was basically a media beat-up.

By Tuesday he was back to being an adult, attacking the Labour Government for bad spending and differentiating his party by being the most serious with taxpayer money. Within hours of the Government opening the books, Seymour was gravely announcing Act would have to rethink its promised tax cuts, as if it was ever going to be in a position to really deliver them.

What Seymour miscalculated was voters’ appetite for high-stakes brinkmanship. After the disruption and fear of the pandemic and then the upset of Labour forcing a race relations debate on the country, tired voters just want to go back to the good old days. For a lot of those voters, the good old days look like the stability and slow-moving progress of the John Key National Government.

What Seymour’s given National is the excuse it needs to choose NZ First as their coalition partner if they can after the election. Even if centre-right voters are still nursing a grudge against Winston Peters for choosing Jacinda Ardern over Bill English, NZ First might be a prettier option than Act causing chaos in the lead up to every budget.

What Seymour needs to bear in mind is the disappointment of Act voters and donors if he stuffs this up at the eleventh hour. Sure, they’ll be gutted if Act ends up with 20 per cent of the power instead of 33 per cent. But both those numbers are better than zero, which is what could happen if Peters becomes National’s first choice.

Seymour would be best not to panic. It’d drop his polls faster than they already have.

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive, Newstalk ZB, 4pm-7pm, weekdays.