ANALYSIS
Act leader David Seymour depends on a range of people for advice and inspiration in his political life – and not all of them are who you might expect.
Perhaps the least surprising is that his go-to former Act leader of choice is Richard Prebble, who is also a Herald columnist.
“Jamie Whyte remains the most interesting former leader and best raconteur the party has ever produced,” Seymour tells the Herald.
“However, for political advice, Richard Prebble is unbelievably wise, a brilliant political tactician and he also has an incredibly self-effacing loyalty to the party.”
As far as Seymour is aware, Prebble has not publicly criticised the party in the 20 years since he stepped down as leader.
Seymour also received advice from Ruth Richardson, who continued with Roger Douglas’ economic reforms when she became National’s Finance Minister in 1990, and he often sought her out.
“I would honestly say my relationship with Ruth is not one-way; it’s two-way. I occasionally get messages from her and I occasionally ask her for advice.
“I admire immensely her clarity of thought about the role of government and the astonishing political courage that she took.”
More surprisingly, Seymour identifies former Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark among the people he finds inspiring.
He met her for the first time only recently at a dinner with a mutual friend.
“I was very impressed with her,” he said.
“I was a bit of a convert. In some ways, she is a marker for how New Zealand politics has shifted in the last 15 years.
“If you look at the Government she ran in terms of the size of government, and the fiscal parameters, today she and [Michael] Cullen would be considered hard right.
“They maintained a bottom tax structure of 19.5 per cent with a tax credit for low-earners – the idea that tax rates should be low and flat.”
Getting back to that position was seen as ambitious and Act was the only party advancing it, Seymour said.
In terms of his Beehive office, Seymour has retained the hardcore of people who joined him as a solo MP in 2017 and has added more ministerial advisers to cover his responsibilities in education, health and in establishing a Ministry for Regulation.
“If I’ve got anything right in politics, I’ve been lucky with the quality of people who have come to work with me, and I say ‘with me,’ not ‘for me,’ and the time that they have stayed.”
Whether they be part of a Beehive office, a staffer or an MP in the parliamentary wing, he gives someone a “freedom fighter of the week” award if they have made a difference in their job that week.
Asked whom he relies on for advice on issues related to Māori, he again includes Prebble who, he says, “always has a more nuanced view than most people would believe actually”.
Others include Sir Chris Mace and Gary Judd KC. Judd, who is the partner of Seymour’s aunt Nicola Faithfull, has complained to Parliament’s regulations review committee about tikanga being included as a compulsory subject in law studies at university from next year.
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Seymour studied both electrical engineering and philosophy at Auckland University and takes inspiration from a group of economists and/or philosophers.
“I’m inspired in part by some of the thinkers and economists who have written with clarity about the role of government and what freedom is and isn’t,” he said.
“I think a lot of people are confused about that.”
Among those he cited were Sir Karl Popper, who wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies during a stint lecturing in philosophy at Canterbury University; Friedrich von Hayek, the Nobel-winning economist; Mancur Olson and Bryan Caplan, whom he described as “people who were at the top of their fields in public choice economics”; and Nobel prize winner Ronald Coase, who came up with the concept of transaction costs.
“Quite arcane stuff, I’m sure, but if you don’t have a deep understanding about ‘what is the role of government’ – it’s not as simple as the market is always good and the government is always bad – it is a lot more nuanced.
“There’s those intellectual figures. Then there’s also people like Prebs, Roger and Ruth, who have done tremendous good for New Zealand.”
So what is the best advice he has ever received? Seymour immediately recalls an observation his father, Breen, once made.
“I remember watching the film Traffic (2000) with my dad … it’s about the drug trade and nearly everyone gets killed. But there’s one guy, a Mexican cop who cuts a deal with the Americans to hand over the bad guys in return for a baseball field being built for Mexican children.
“At the end of the film, my dad said, ‘He was only one who didn’t want something for himself,’ which is a good observation – and very typical of Dad, too.”
THE BEEHIVE TEAM
David Seymour and his chief of staff, Andrew Ketels, have stuck together for better and for worse for almost seven years.
Ketels wrote to Seymour offering himself as a potential staff member after 2017 when, for the third election running, Act returned only one MP. Ketels had previously worked for National ministers Maggie Barry and Louise Upston but told Seymour he had been an Act member for five years.
In the interests of disclosure, he also revealed he was the partner of Newshub journalist Jenna Lynch. Ketels was one of only three staff with Seymour in those “wilderness” years and got to do a bit of everything, from policy research to parliamentary tactics.
He became chief of staff in opposition after the party went from one MP to 10, a role he has kept in Government.
Seymour’s specialist ministerial adviser is Stu Wilson, a familiar figure to Act lifers, who is working mainly on regulation. The pair first met in Auckland more than 20 years ago during a campaign for voluntary student association membership. Wilson worked with Hide on creating the Auckland supercity before heading overseas. He has been working with Seymour since 2020.
Another ministerial adviser is John Brinsley-Pirie (JBP for short). He works mainly on health and finance and is deputy chief of staff. He rejoined Seymour’s staff as an adviser after a stint at MBIE and Federated Farmers. He previously worked for several National MPs and United Future’s Peter Dunne.
Simon Clarke, Seymour’s quietly efficient director of communications, has not known Seymour long but came highly recommended by his former boss, Rachel Morton. She had been in and out of Parliament’s revolving door as a 3 News reporter and press secretary to Steven Joyce, Paula Bennett and Simon Bridges when he was National leader until he was rolled. She returned to work for Act for a couple of years until Air NZ lured her away last year and she recommended Clarke to Act.
The latest ministerial adviser to join the office is Anya Zohrab, who works mainly on education policy issues and did a lot of work around the school lunch programme. She was a transport policy specialist and worked in the Beehive for former Labour Transport Ministers Pete Hodgson, David Parker and Annette King before joining ANZ for eight years as an adviser. Zohrab comes to Seymour’s office with a family pedigree in economics, being the daughter of the late John Zohrab, who set up Treasury’s Debt Management Office during the Rogernomics era and went on to work for the IMF.
Rachel Beauchamp, like many senior private secretaries, is the lynchpin of Seymour’s office. She has been with him for four years he calls her the boss. She has a black belt in karate.
OFFICIALS AND OFFICE-HOLDERS
Grainne Moss has taken an interim job to set up the Ministry for Regulation, one of the main planks of Act’s coalition agreement with National. She has about 30 staff so far. She was formerly head of the pay equity taskforce within the Public Service Commission, is a former head of Oranga Tamariki and a former managing director of Bupa Care Services.
The other senior public servants who regularly advise Seymour are the Secretary of Education, Iona Holsted, and the Secretary of Justice, Andrew Kibblewhite. They are long-serving public service leaders and have professional working relationships with Seymour.
The main projects in education have been the review of the school lunch programme and the revival of charter schools, with funding for up to 50. The charter school project, however, will be handled by a unit within the Ministry of Education but independent of it, Seymour announced on Tuesday. The revival of charter schools will be overseen by an establishment board of eight, led by former St Cuthbert’s College school principal Justine Mahon, who will work closely with Seymour.
Kibblewhite and officials are giving Seymour advice on the bill he will introduce as Associate Justice Minister to define the principle of the Treaty of Waitangi in terms of Act’s preferences. He gave evidence to the Waitangi Tribunal’s urgent inquiry into the bill, which has been incorporated into the tribunal’s constitutional inquiry. While the advice has not been publicly released, because it is still part of a confidential Cabinet process, he said the Government had been left in no doubt about the ministry’s view about its obligations under the Treaty.
In his responsibility as Associate Health Minister and the Minister in Charge of Pharmac, Seymour has appointed former Deputy Prime Minister Paula Bennett to chair the Pharmac board and is expected to work closely with her on any reforms. Act list MP Todd Stephenson, who worked as a pharmaceutical company executive in Australia for many years, is also likely to be giving Seymour advice in that area.
THE PARTY
Without a doubt, Act deputy leader Brooke Van Velden is the closest MP to Seymour. He poached her as a staffer from Matthew Hooton’s PR firm, Exceltium, after the 2017 election when he was still a solo MP. She worked with Seymour on getting his voluntary euthanasia bill passed into law. She became party deputy in 2020 and was elected to Parliament later that year in a caucus of 10. After a term in opposition, she is one of the youngest cabinet ministers in history at 31. She won the Tāmaki electorate in 2023, neighbouring Seymour’s Epsom seat.
Act has held Epsom since 2005, when Hide first won it. John Banks held it for a term and Seymour first won it in 2014. His aim is not to over-politicise his role as the Epsom MP but to try to be a good local MP. Among his electorate agents is one of the earliest Act activists, Brian Nicolle, who has taken a backseat role in the party these days.
Catherine Isaac, a former Act president from 2001 to 2006, remains an important figure in the party and an influence on Seymour. She was head of the charter schools establishment board in their previous incarnation and is now acting president of the party. She was president when the Act leadership transitioned from Prebble to Hide. Her efforts to accentuate the party’s liberal credentials over populist policies were not successful.
As Seymour himself has testified, Richard Prebble is the former party leader he turns to most. Prebble took over the leadership from Sir Roger Douglas in 1996 when the party won eight seats and stepped down a year before the 2005 election when a slump in support returned only two MPs.
Audrey Young is the New Zealand Herald’s senior political correspondent. She was named Political Journalist of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards in 2023, 2020 and 2018.