I don’t trust The Spinoff, which I regard as the online, 21st century version of The Listener, hitting all the notes of whatever is currently trendy with the Left.

However, they have given space to Danyl Mclauchlan, the man behind the fabulous blog The Dim Post, which has sadly been locked in private limbo since Danyl got proper writing jobs. As much as I enjoy his serious essays, like this one on the Administrative State, his satire was brilliant and biting during the Key era (** see below for three examples). It’s no great surprise to see him now writing for…. The Listener.

And so I was willing to give this lengthy article a crack and I think you should too, as it covers the history of Seymour in ACT from its nadir in the 2017 polls to now: The fall and rise of David Seymour and the Act Party. There’s a lot of detail about how the Party itself dealt with all that, especially in terms of candidate selection and management, with a notable avoidance of letting MP’s vanish into their own corners with their own advisors. Some notable excerpts:

It was critical that the MPs didn’t get swollen heads. Of other parties, said Seymour, “I don’t know what these other guys are all going on about. It’s just insane. They think being an MP is important. I mean, it’s an opportunity to do good stuff, but it’s not in itself important. Some of the self-important behaviour, it’s unbelievable.” 

We see a lot of that, and have done for decades. Labour’s Michael Wood is merely the latest example.

With that in mind, there was little to lose in taking up an invitation from the producers of Dancing with the Stars. He insists it wasn’t for political reasons. “You’ve got to remember this is the end of 2017. I just thought, you know, we just got half a per cent, everything’s so screwed. I thought, whatever happens now, what will I regret more – going on a live televised celebrity dancing competition, or not going on it?”

Had Act been even 3.5% in the polls, Seymour probably would have decided against appearing on the show.

I am so thankful I don’t watch broadcast or cable TV. Even the 5 second Twitter glimpse I got of Seymour twerking was major cringe, but I appreciate his honesty about the polling and it shows up in another story he tells:

At the time, Seymour says today, he only had one experience of meeting a group of gun owners. He’d been judging a charity version of Dancing with the Stars in Whakatāne. “And these guys fed me Panhead Pilsner the whole night – the scores were going up through the roof,” he recalled. “I got up on Sunday morning, and God knows why but I’d been scheduled – this was a time when I’d go to the opening of an envelope – to go and visit the Whakatāne pistol club. So I’m there, Sunday morning, in a cloud of ethanol, it’s amazing that it didn’t ignite with these guns going off. But they were a hell of a nice people. Really responsible. It was a family thing. A lot of kids there. And they were absolutely anal about safety.”

He said: “I don’t even know how the hell I got invited. But it struck me that these were good people. And the way that the government went about [the reforms], the idea that legislating against them was gonna stop that guy – well, actually, the real problem was, that guy should never have been allowed to buy one of them.” 

Speaking as a long-time gun-owner, one who’s been shooting since I was 12, and one who never owned a semi-automatic rifle (never liked them), I can tell you that it wasn’t just the “reforms” that pissed people like me off but the stupid, pig-ignorant hatred that came with it. As an aside my solution would have been to simply bump such rifle owners into the pistol class, since that requires more hoops and scrutiny to jump through because many pistols are semi-autos. And I suppose I’m letting the cat out of the bag here a bit – especially with the largely ignorant gun-haters – but that class still exists in the wake of the reforms, there are hundreds of pistol owners across NZ, and you can kill a lot of people with them alone, as demonstrated in the 2007 Virginia Tech mass shooting.

But getting back to ACT, Seymour’s lone stand against that bullshit in 2019 is what has made his caving on the lockdown, mask and vaccine mandates so very disappointing. Perhaps one can say that the public and MSM pressure was even greater on those issues than it was in the wake of the 2019 mass shooting and perhaps Seymour, looking at the flak that Simon Bridges took for even trying to argue a little against the lockdowns, simply decided to avoid a fight he couldn’t win for the sake of future political gains, a decision that has – politically – turned out to be correct.

There’s also the simple fact that in spite of what I regard as a gross failure to measure up to his and ACT’s principles of freedom, I’ll vote ACT this year simply because the nation cannot afford another three years of Labour or, god forbid, a Labour-Green-Te Pati Maori government – but also because it cannot afford another go-along-to-get-along National government; we’ve slipped too far already and just bumbling along with the status quo will see things get worse. And on that note:

After 2020, he said, “we were probably more in competition with National than any other party, which sounds weird, but it drove us to be good … We were frustrated that they didn’t seem to believe in anything. And we wanted to be the conscience of the right.”

In his first term in parliament, Seymour said, his relationship with National was strong. “They needed my vote to stay in government. So they’d do anything for me. Not that I really asked.” That changed after 2017. “The Nats became almost totally hostile,” he said, citing a promo video of Bill English visiting a charter school, from which Seymour had been “very, very carefully edited out.” That mood led to a “new kind of independence” – one that he was on balance grateful for. 

Having watched what happened to ACT during Key’s first term (Rodney given the hospital pass of building the godforsaken Super City), the Maori Party with National from 2008-2014, and what Labour has done to their coalition partners over the years, from the Alliance (1999-2002), and the hapless Greens forever, I’m going to be taking a very close interest in how Seymour and his MP’s manage the next transformation when or if they attempt to join the next National Government, which I think they will after this year’s election.

There has been some talk about merely sitting on the cross-benches and while that might enable more of their policy to be passed it would mean their MP’s would not be blooded in deputy ministerial roles, something that is important when it comes to getting things done. The article notes that Seymour himself was offered a ministerial by Key but turned it down in favour of an under-secretary position, enabling him to be in the executive, but able to pursue legislation independently. Perhaps we’ll see that for other ACT MP’s?

** I’ve put in three old Dim Post satirical pieces that can be found on the Wayback Machine. Enjoy.