He clearly decided the best way to handle the Guy Fawkes joke controversy was to win the argument.
To be fair to him, he was right to feel aggrieved. His opponents twisted it into something he hadn’t meant. He was talking about ending wastage of taxpayer money. They accused him of racism.
What he said was, “in my fantasy, we’d send a guy called Guy Fawkes in there and it’d be all over, but we’ll probably have to have a more formal approach than that”.
What he was talking about was the Ministry for Pacific Peoples blowing $40,000 on a farewell party for its former chief executive.
But Seymour (Ngāpuhi) looks completely Pākehā and the subject of his joke was an ethnic ministry so it was always going to turn into a controversy about racism.
He refused to apologise. He doubled down. He brought it up himself in Parliament to prosecute his opponents’ reasons for criticising him. He extracted an apology from TVNZ for misquoting him.
But he didn’t win the argument in the end. Instead, he dragged the thing on for days and amplified the accusations of racism thrown at him.
The Prime Minister started it. Then accused him of racism again. Te Pāti Māori piled in. Labour Pasifika MP Barbara Edmonds wrote to Seymour asking for an apology and the letter found its way to the media. It was on the radio, on the TV, in the papers.
And then the whacky candidates attack happened.
It probably wasn’t an accident that the media learned of ACT’s three candidates with weird vaccine-related views. One compared vax mandates to Nazi concentration camp, one linked drownings to the vaccine and one wrote a song about Jacinda Ardern throwing folks into gulags.
Digging up dodgy candidates at the bottom of a small party’s list is a stock standard political attack. But Act left itself wide open to it. It should’ve learned from the experience of small parties, including itself, in every other previous election to vet new candidates thoroughly.
It didn’t learn. One candidate is a mistake. Three is not not vetting properly.
The week ended up being a hard one for Seymour. A lot of that could’ve been avoided had Seymour said sorry immediately. Not because he had to, but because this wasn’t the hill he needed to die on when there is an election to fight.
This week is a warning to Act and Seymour. This is a taste of what’s to come. Act will come under some of the heaviest fire this election campaign by dint of their bold and unapologetic policies on controversial subjects like climate change and The Treaty. They are the vulnerable flank on the centre right, like the Greens are the vulnerable flank on the centre left. Either side attacks the minor coalition partner to freak out middle New Zealand about what the major coalition partner might be forced to agree to.
Hence the racism accusations. Act had better get used to that. It won’t be the last time they’ll hear that thrown at them.
Which is to say, Act has enough on its plate just defending and explaining its policies without having to fight battles over weird candidates and bad jokes.
Sometimes the best thing for the smartest guy in the room to do is to admit that he’s not done the smartest thing.
