He suffered years of poor poll results and jibes about his dancing, but Act leader David Seymour is on the cusp of becoming Deputy Prime Minister. Photography: Hagen Hopkins
‘Wanker!” The woman has bobbed silver hair and wears designer yoga gear. She has lowered her passenger window and leaned across the seat of her gleaming new Porsche Cayenne hybrid to shout insults at David Seymour, who stands on the side of Parnell Rd speaking to a crowd of his constituents. “Good morning, madam,” Seymour replies brightly, turning to walk towards her, and then, “Perhaps not,” as she raises the window again and glides silently, carbon-lightly, away.
It is just before noon on a glorious mid-autumn Sunday in the Auckland electorate of Epsom, where Seymour has been the local MP for 10 years: he’s on the third of seven street-corner meetings to engage with his constituents. There are a handful of hecklers – it’s only three days since the Treaty Principles Bill was voted down before second reading – but the general mood is one of warm approval. For every insult or blared car horn there are a dozen people yelling, “Good on you, David!” when they spot the Act leader in his natural habitat: the calm, spacious streets of the nation’s wealthiest electorate.
If there’s any unhappiness among the crowds that gather about him – most of whom look like models in an ad for exclusive retirement villages or luxury cruises (white-haired, gleaming teeth, elegant linen shirts), their groomed toy dogs panting gently in the midday warmth – it’s that he hasn’t done enough. There are still too many bureaucrats in Wellington, too many ridiculous zero-carbon laws making life tough for our hard-working farmers, still too many te reo names in government departments.
Seymour pushes back against this last point. He’s learnt some te reo, enough to deliver an address at Waitangi in 2023. “We shouldn’t be afraid of the language,” he gently chides the good people of Epsom, some of whom shuffle back and stare at their feet while others murmur and nod approvingly. A Ferrari glides up to the lights behind him, its engine a deep subsonic rumble, felt rather than heard. Seymour is an admirer of fine automobiles – he sometimes urges audiences, “Vote Act if you love cars” – and he briefly closes his eyes in appreciation then tells his audience, “I’d rather listen to that than to me.”
Suddenly Seymour
In the first 18 months of the government he co-leads alongside Christopher Luxon and Winston Peters, Seymour has been one of the most pivotal ministers in a sweeping, fast-moving government. He’s established his Ministry for Regulation and a charter schools agency. He fought a losing battle over his Treaty Principles Bill but looks set to pass his Regulatory Standards Bill, currently the subject of an emergency Waitangi Tribunal hearing; he’s driven reform in Pharmac, the state’s drug-buying agency, undertaken a savings exercise in his capacity as Associate Finance Minister, and tried to roll back school absenteeism and deliver cheaper school lunches.
The latter project has not been a triumph – schools and parents outraged over late or inedible meals, a major provider placed into liquidation, the Auditor-General announcing an inquiry. Seymour insists history will judge it well. “Half the price and the delivery will be slightly better than we had before.” He wants to reform both the structure of cabinet and the public sector, describing the crown’s ministerial portfolios as bloated, filled with meaningless titles. And on June 1, he’ll replace Winston Peters as Deputy Prime Minister.
The Listener asked Seymour in his Beehive office: does the title of Deputy Prime Minister actually mean anything? Or is it just a legacy of an era when the head of government would spend three months overseas travelling to London and back, and the deputy ran the country?
“It means everything and it means nothing,” he replies. “Everything in the sense that it shows in this country you can be a bit quirky, but if you have a good heart and you put in the work – which are three claims I would make for myself – that you can actually succeed in what you do, and I think it is a success to hold that position.
“It’s also, in many ways, nothing, because functionally, I remain one of 20 people around the cabinet table, and my efforts are still on regulation, education, finance and health. My portfolios don’t change.” Will the position mean a strategic shift? A more statesman-like Seymour? There will be “a continuation of a shift that’s been happening for a long time. If you look at the kind of politician I was at 31, first elected to Epsom, versus at 41, becoming the Deputy PM, I take stuff a lot more seriously than I would have 10 years ago, and that change continues.”
Seymour grew up in Whangārei. His father was a draughtsman, his mother, Victoria, a pharmacist. She was born in April 1956, a time when the polio virus was still endemic but about to be eradicated. “The Salk vaccine arrived in New Zealand in September that year and you were supposed to get it – I understand, this is the family oral history – at six months. But apparently they screwed up their refrigeration so the vaccine was ineffective and she caught polio. She was, sadly, the very last train off the station in that regard, but it shaped her and indirectly, me, because she was an incredibly determined person.
“She was told she wouldn’t be able to have children, which she obviously did. She was told she wouldn’t be able to drive, and I would argue that was partly correct. And she was told she’d never go to university, but she finished up as the chief pharmacist for Northland DHB, so she got to the top of her profession.”
He remembers hours after class hanging around the dispensary, the smell of the medicines. Seymour went to a predominantly Māori primary school and a decile one intermediate. Then his parents downsized their house so they could afford to send him to board at Auckland Grammar, the sought-after school in the electorate he’d represent as an MP 20 years later.
Free falling
The most famous term in modern media theory is “the Overton window”, which argues that journalists and editors restrict the range of news stories down to a narrow subset of topics they consider acceptable. Most politicians think there’s some truth to this – the questions their constituents pose them are very different from the issues reporters pester them about.
As Seymour works his way around Parnell or Remuera and Newmarket, voters ask him what his government is doing to prepare the Defence Force for our upcoming war against China, and why New Zealand can’t switch to nuclear power with small-scale reactors around the country.
Seymour is mostly unflappable, but when a respectable-looking Epsom matriarch asks him why locally produced products are so expensive in New Zealand, and suggests free trade is a scam, his nostrils flare and his eyes widen. It takes him a few seconds to recover his poise, to explain that the solution to high prices is markets, competition, free trade.
At every single meeting, someone asks him why the New Zealand media is so terrible – also not a question journalists often ask. His answer is that the media sector needs more entrepreneurship, more competition. It’s not up to politicians to fix everything; that’s a job for the market.
He studied engineering and philosophy at the University of Auckland and formed his political identity around the post-war liberal theorists, especially the Viennese intellectuals Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek. Both thinkers identified the horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism – the Nazis, Soviet communism, Maoism – as failed utopian projects.
Intellectuals mistakenly believed that if you created a powerful enough state to impose a just society by force, you could build heaven on Earth. Instead, these authoritarian governments and the people leading them went mad; enslaving and murdering their own citizens.
The only thing that’s worth fighting for is human freedom, and that leads you to a conception of government.
Popper and Hayek argued the closest you could get to utopia was to give individuals agency over their own lives, protecting them from overpowered states and leaving them free to make their own decisions – right or wrong – then live with the consequences. The mechanisms to deliver this semi-utopia are democracy, rule of law, human rights and free markets, with trade between nations incentivising co-operation rather than conquest.
Their critics would refer to the economic framework around this ideology as neoliberalism, a term Seymour is suspicious of.
He’s more comfortable with plain old-fashioned liberalism. “The only thing that’s truly worth fighting for is human freedom, and that leads you to a conception of the role of government, which is that there’s some things that it must do to protect people from each other and from harm. But most politicians have an incentive to place restrictions on others – to say, ‘Vote for me, I’ll give you his taxes, vote for me, I’ll regulate her freedom.’ My goal is to win office without promising incursions on other people’s freedom.”
Act sometimes describes itself as “the liberal party”, although its dedication to liberal principles has waxed and waned. It was founded in the 1990s after Roger Douglas, Richard Prebble and their disciples parted ways with Labour. Seymour joined Act on Campus (now Young Act) in the early 2000s, a time of conflict and decline marking the end of Prebble’s leadership and the emergence of the more populist era of Rodney Hide.
“In ’04, they said to me, ‘Well, why don’t you become president of Act on Campus?’ I said, ‘All right. What does that mean?’ and they gave me the name of the other member. At that point, Act was polling about 6%. And then Don Brash gave the Ōrewa speech and then it was polling about 1%. That happened overnight. After that, it was hungry years for a decade until I became a leader. And then it got worse.”
Last Dance
In 2014, Seymour became the Act candidate for Epsom. John Key endorsed him over the National candidate, Paul Goldsmith. He won the seat with a sizable majority, but nationally, the party vote declined from 0.69% in 2014 to 0.5% in 2017. “It was really five years – nothing I did made a jot of difference. There was a Facebook page: is Act polling over 1%? And it went on for years and felt like it could never change. So that was a severe test of character. But we never gave up. And then things changed. I mean the dancing.”
In 2018, Seymour was a contestant on Dancing With the Stars, where he was somehow both a terrible dancer and an audience favourite, finally voted out in the second-to-last episode after subjecting the nation to the unforgivable spectacle of himself twerking in yellow spandex.
Act’s polling doubled to 1%, and in 2019 it doubled again. Seymour cites the work he did progressing the end-of-life bill, the euthanasia legislation that had languished on Parliament’s ballot for years. He won cross-party support for the legislation, and this led to the 2020 euthanasia referendum, which dovetailed with the Covid lockdowns and a sequence of bizarre scandals within National that saw it haemorrhaging support to rivals.
In October 2020, Act won 7.69% of the party vote, bringing 10 MPs into Parliament. Commentators predicted they would be liabilities, that Seymour might work as a goofy lone electorate MP but he’d fail as a leader. This new incarnation of Act would tear itself apart, the same as the old one.
This did not come to pass. “I coached rugby for seven years,” Seymour says. “I knew a little bit about what it took to create a team environment. I knew a lot of business leaders, so I got some good advice. We completely redesigned our workspace – first, we shape our buildings, then our buildings shape us. We created one big open plan space. I didn’t have an office – I was in the open plan. And the reason for all that is I look at what happens normally.
“This place” – he makes a gesture that takes in the larger parliamentary precinct – “is designed in silos. You get someone who’s under a huge amount of pressure, possibly never managed anyone in their life. You give them one staff member who’s on an events-based contract they can just dismiss. And the only real miracle is how little abuse and dysfunction there is.”
Seymour’s caucus collectivised its resources, building a cohesive team instead of the model of individual MPs and their advisers plotting against each other favoured by the other parties. Act’s polling continued to improve, and in 2023 they were the fourth-largest party in Parliament, bringing in 11 MPs and forming a government with National and New Zealand First. The concessions Seymour negotiated in the coalition arrangement were surprisingly broad-ranging, and included support for his Treaty Principles Bill through to select committee.
In principle
In Seymour’s home town of Whangārei, there’s a stark juxtaposition between poor people sleeping in the doorways of empty shops in the city centre, who are mostly Māori, and wealthy people drinking wine at the cafes and yachts along the river, who are predominantly white.
Doesn’t the argument behind the Treaty Principles Bill boil down to a claim that the courts and government privilege the former over the latter, promoting the children at decile one schools ahead of the students at Auckland Grammar? Isn’t that unlikely?
Seymour always uses his most composed, soothing tones when debating the treaty. His critics are wide-eyed radicals and he is the voice of reason.
“That’s a zero-sum argument,” he replies. “When people say you’re attacking the privilege of people in decile one schools holding back wealthier people it’s because their whole world view is that there’s only so much to go around, and the job of government is to share it out.
“We don’t buy into that. I said it in my maiden statement, you can understand everything you need to know about a person’s political philosophy by whether they believe that life is zero-sum or positive-sum.”
He wasn’t impressed by the level of debate around the issue, complaining many of his critics didn’t appear to have read his bill. They were attacking a straw man, furious about positions he hadn’t taken, arguments he never made.
I think the key issue has been to legitimise a different view. Now, there is an alternative position.
But some of his critics had read his bill, and they attacked it as illiberal. Liberals believe in the separation of powers, in strong courts that protect the public from executive overreach.
Former attorney-general Chris Finlayson was scathing about Seymour’s intention to roll back decades of court decisions and legal precedents. Ngāi Tahu chair Justin Tipa argued the tino rangatiratanga defined in article 2 was supposed to empower iwi and hapū to exercise authority over their own affairs, free from interference of central government – a position Act should theoretically support. Instead, Seymour wanted to use the power of the state to define this right out of existence.
Seymour’s problem with the first argument is that “the courts have based their jurisprudence on the idea there are treaty principles, which Parliament itself introduced. I believe Parliament has the right to clarify its voice every 50 years. And ultimately you’ve got to ask: where does the court’s legitimacy and power come from? Parliament has it because it ultimately enjoys the support of the people. We’re not interfering with the independence of the courts. We’re not interfering with their ability to interpret our statutes. We just reserve the right to say what those statutes are.”
As for the second point, Seymour argues the treaty must apply to people who are not signatories. “So the question is, are we going to apply it to people who are not Māori? And I think we should. Does that remove any of the rights that Ngāi Tahu have? No. Does it share them to other people? Yes. Does that have the effect of diluting them or building a consensus around them? I would argue the latter.”
Struggle without end
Seymour’s stated goal at the beginning of his bill’s progress through Parliament was to have a constructive conversation about the treaty and its definition in law. And that’s what happened, although the outcome wasn’t the one he expected.
The debate was less divisive than the rage and polarisation over the vaccine mandates, more substantive than the inane flag referendum that took place under the Key government.
The Hīkoi mō te Tiriti was the nation’s largest parliamentary protest, but it was peaceful and dignified and in the end Seymour lost the debate, failing to create public pressure for his coalition partners to support it into law. His bill was voted down on its second reading by every party other than Act.
Seymour uses soothing tones when debating the treaty. His critics are wide-eyed radicals and he is the voice of reason.
He identifies the media as part of the problem. “We didn’t get it communicated through press. You just have to look at TVNZ Breakfast. They did this absurd interview with me – which, in fairness, got viewed nearly 300,000 times – and TVNZ actually wrote to us complaining that we’d put it online even though they’re a broadcaster.
“On the other hand, one of their journalists interviewed the leader of the hīkoi … and basically sung a song with them instead of interviewing them live on TV.
“There were a limited number of people – Jack Tame would be an exception – who were prepared as journalists to really challenge the other side of the argument.
“I think the key issue has been to legitimise a different view. If you go back to the midst of the Ardern term, the idea of what we’re saying getting any kind of airtime, being legitimate, being debated in Parliament is totally unthinkable. Now, there’s an alternative position.”
He believes the fight to define treaty principles in law will continue, comparing it to the long campaign for euthanasia, first introduced to Parliament in 1995 and voted down. The referendum established by Seymour’s End of Life Choice Bill finally legalised assisted dying in 2021.
Future frontiers
Seymour is not an especially unpopular politician, despite some critical media coverage and the occasional passerby yelling at him from a $200,000 car. He tends to poll about where you’d expect in the preferred PM stakes, jostling for position with Winston Peters and Chlöe Swarbrick, some distance behind Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins.
But those who dislike him tend to do so intensely. He thinks they’ve made the mistake of confusing his politics – “which they have every right to disagree with” – with his motivations, assuming his intentions are malign.
A month before his ascension to the deputy prime ministership, he announced there were too many ministerial portfolios. He’s proposed the abolition of some of the 82 current warrants, suggesting the removal of racing, hospitality, Auckland, the South Island, hunting and fishing, the voluntary sector, and space – all of which happen to be held by National or New Zealand First MPs. He also thinks there are too many departments.
But hasn’t Seymour created two new government entities – the Charter Schools Agency and the Ministry of Regulation? And with the latter, a new ministerial portfolio – which he now holds. Why can’t that just come under the Department of Internal Affairs or the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment?
“You’ve got to have clear lines of accountability. I had the experience of trying to start charters under the auspices of the Ministry of Education. And what I found was that everything the Treasury [and] the ministry did was designed to ensure the charter policy did not require too much change from the Ministry of Education. So we’re trying to do a different model here.”
Voters of liberal democracies are turning to authoritarians to give them certainty. Is Seymour’s ideology dying?
He’s still considering whether to take his scheme to radically downscale the cabinet and public service into the next election. Both Labour and National are likely to ferociously resist reducing the number of portfolios – it’s a useful way for prime ministers to dominate their party’s caucus. All ministers are bound by cabinet collective responsibility, even if they’re not actually members of cabinet, so inventing spurious new portfolios is a common pastime for both major party leaders.
Seymour tends to see things as an engineer, diagnosing these as bad systems that need to be fixed. “The lines of communication are so complex the bureaucrats never know who to listen to. The ministers never know what to focus on.” He believes a smaller government is a more efficient government, and intends to leave behind a state that maximises human freedom.
These are dark days for liberals. The current occupant of the White House also believes free trade is a scam. In Europe, the traditional centre-right parties are losing ground to populist nationalists, who are hostile to markets, open borders, the broader liberal project. Donald Trump’s liberation day kicked off a global trade war.
Behind this trajectory lies an argument that liberalism has failed because it has succeeded, that globalisation hollows out economies, destroys cultures, homogenises everything. All that freedom leaves people alienated and isolated, voters of liberal democracies are turning to authoritarians to give them certainty, a sense of belonging. Is his ideology dying?
“Liberalism’s always had its miscontents,” Seymour replies. “But it’s a bit rich for people to complain about liberalism without seeing the alternative. People have forgotten what an illiberal society’s like. And if you said to them, ‘So, are you telling me that you want to reverse women’s rights, gay rights, that you want to go back to pre-civil-rights-movement discrimination in the States? Are they really saying they want to reverse all that stuff? I don’t think so.
“Then they say, oh, we want to reverse globalisation. Well, yeah, for about two weeks. There’ll always be neo-tribalism and I see it in Toitū Te Tiriti [the Honour the Treaty movement]. That’s our local version of that.
“But at the end of the day, people have never lived this long, this happy, this healthy, this free from violence, this prosperous and well-nourished. I think the jury is in, and liberalism won. And our job is to keep expanding those spheres of liberty.”