Kiota.
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast.
Presented by the New Zealand Herald.
ACT Party leader David Seymour will become a New Zealand's Deputy Prime Minister tomorrow, taking over from Winston Peters. Will be the nineteenth person to be the country's second in command. First elected to Parliament in twenty fourteen, the last decade and a bit has seen Seymour's meteoric rise from being his party's sole mpte now sitting alongside ten colleagues after Act's best ever result in the twenty twenty three election.
That result has allowed him to push through big changes around issues like regulation and government spending, but championing legislations such as the Treaty Principles Bill has also made him a lightning rod for controversy and backlash. Today, on the Front Page Age, Seymour joins us to talk about his new role. Backlash has faced, regulations and his thoughts on the opposition. So, David, this Deputy Prime minister handover has been on the cards for some time now.
Are you excited about this change?
Yeah? Look, it's one of those things you probably didn't think would happen in your life, but here we are. I think it's good for New Zeland. Shows a few bit quirky, but if your heart's in the right place and you put in the work, you know it's crowded house, so you can get somewhere.
And can you believe it's come around so quickly?
Though?
As well?
I think it's just one of those times in life where you know, everything goes at a million miles an hour. Idea reading on Sunday, kebinet on Monday, caucus on Tuesday, question time on Wednesday, go campaigning on Thursday, ipsom on Friday, have Saturday off and rinse and repeat. It's pretty much what it's been like for the last seventy weeks.
Do you expect this to be a shift in power in the coalition? Is act in the front seat now alongside National or has it been kind of a three way from the get go?
No? I don't think so. The coalition is a very respectful one. Everyone has a role to play, everyone has their own interest. I don't think it's fair to say that New Zealand First have been in any way leading actors a larger party, and that has been the case for the last eighteen months and will be for the next eighteen months.
Are you happy how the coalitions work together?
Yeah? I think the coalition has been dangerously united. Our opponents thought it would all fall.
Apart, the Coalition of chaos.
Well they said all those things, didn't they, But they underestimated that even though we're all quite different, we're all quite committed to trying to dig New Zealand out of a pretty big hole. And look where the crime race, relations, cost of living, the healthcare system. I mean, hell, there's a lot of shoffling to do.
Winston Peters has ruled out working with the Chris Hepkins permanently.
What about you? Would you roll out working with Hepkins?
Well, the difference is I don't need to say it. Look, I mean, this is a guy who was the Police Minister when the crime got out of control. He was in charge of the COVID response, which speaks for itself. He was the Minister of Education when kids stopped going to school on mass and he was the Minister of Health when the health budget went up sixty percent and
the outcomes got worse. So you know, this guy has got the opposite of the Midas touch I think they call him a pooh midas and he's suddenly done some damage.
So you wouldn't work with him?
Well, no, because that would require him to be working, and as far as I can see, he doesn't work.
Is there anyone else that you wouldn't work with that you'd rule out working with?
I am constantly astonished that our country has a political party that is named for a race of people that cast everything in racial terms and is somehow given a
free pass. Funnily enough, the fact that Tiparty Maori held to a lower standard, not just by other politicians, not just by the media, but actually by themselves, I think is really shameful, and we need to start working towards a vision of New Zealand as a nation of human beings with hopes and dreams, rather than different collectives sharing common ancestry and forever divided, which seems to be their vision of Tonga Tongua Ta Titi are different partners and
on each side of a compact. It's never worked anywhere in the world, but it's been disastrous where it's gone wrong.
Well, speaking of the Treaty Principal's bill, I mean, I'm sure you're sick of talking about it.
But no, no, not at all.
We haven't had you on since the bill was actually officially voted down. Are you surprised by how much backlash there was towards the bill over the last year.
Not at all. We took on a direction in this country which is toxic and corrosive, but also quite profitable for a lot of people. If you think about John Tamaheri, who is behind Toyitu Teti, which is really just the Maldi party, who makes a huge amount of money through
the ypered Aida Trust. They're a major provider. My experience of working with him is that he believes that they should not be accountable for what they deliver on behalf of the taxpayer, because the treaty elevates them above accountability to the crown. They're rather a partner to the crown. I had this whole experience with John Tammaheadak signing up to run a partnership school or charter school kudahodu call it what you will, and then trying to renegotiate the
contract at the last minute for no accountability. Now, if you're a person who believes that you basically are a parallel state, that you are not accountable to the same government and crown and taxpayer as everyone else. Then, of course, when someone comes along with a treaty principal spill that says, hey, guess what, folks were all equal. You don't like that
very much. And I look at some of those people who came and gave submissions, know how many of them are lawyers or advocates advocate casing in a world where as a treaty partner, some people have different rights from others. Then I come along and say, guess what, folks, everyone has equal rights. That will get you a backlash. But at the end of the day, because a lot of the opponents were covering for I guess vested interests that they masqueraded as moral principle, they weren't able to put
forward convincing arguments. And you watch that debate on the second reading. Yeah, we lost the vote, but we won the argument because nobody who was against the bill said the bill says X, I don't believe X, because Y, I instead believe that New Zealand should be run according to Z. You didn't hear that X, y Z. You
just heard lots of Haystien rhetoric. On the other hand, the idea that Parliament has the rights to make laws, that Parliament and the government have the obligation to uphold all people's rights and duties, and that all people's rights and duties are equal. Those three principles weren't No one laid a glove on them.
Well, we had British philosopher ac Grailing on the podcast a few weeks ago when he was here for the Writers' Festival. He said, to treat people equally is not always to treat them fairly.
If you had an Olympic athlete who needed five thousand calories a day and you had a little old lady who needed fifteen hundred calories a day, and you forced them to eat the same number of calories let's say three thousand calories a day each, you're unfair to both. You're treating them equally, but you're unfair to both. Equity or fairness is the goal, not just crude equality. However, equality matters when it comes to what are sometimes called
equality of concern. So people should be treated equally before the law.
Now, how would you respond to that?
Because I know that act believes the bill promises equal rights for all new Zealanders.
But would that still be fair?
Well, I went to see Ac Grayling because I actually quoted his book Towards the Light of Liberty in my maiden statement to Parliament, and I was so disappointed with the speech he gave his I think in the last ten to fifteen years he's deteriorated from being quite a principal person to an apologist, which is a real shame because I quoted him in my speech first speech to Parliament. However, putting him aside, it's possible to address inequities amongst people
without categorizing us into racial groups. I just give you one little example. We have recently changed beow cancer screening from sixty years old for European people and fifty years old for Mara and Pacific people to just fifty eight for all people. And why because the data is really clear people have the same chance of contracting bowl cancer
for any given age, regardless of their ancestry. So not only are we better targeting need because fifty nine year olds and fifty eight year olds who are European and have the same risk now gets access, we are also removing the sickness of having to partition the population based on their ancestry. I don't want that aickiness. I just want to treat each person as a fallow human being and deal with people based on their actual need rather than their ancestry.
There are worse health outcomes though, for Mali and Pacifica in certain circumstances.
Though, isn't there that is true? But you've said something that you may not have realized. You've also said that your preferred lens for partitioning human beings is race. Actually, there are differences between rich and poor. There are differences based on education. There are differences based on whether people choose to spoke crites. There are differences based on dietary There are so many different ways that you can categorize people.
I just reject choosing one which is quite clumsy, quite icky, and doesn't actually get us to target the people in greatest need.
If we move on to the budget twenty twenty five, now, it feels like a key message from this budget was that people need to do more for themselves. So look at the key we saver change is that seems to be signaling that people need to do a bit more for themselves to save for retirement, rather than relying on the government contributions.
Is that a fair takeaway, Well, it's probably a clarification of the situation. You see before people were getting the five hundred and twenty dollars, but it was all being borrowed. Every extra dollar the government spends at the moment is part of the deficit, and therefore the Debt Management Office at the Treasury has to go out to the market
and say, will you loan us some money? Now, sure it feels like something was being done for you because you were getting that five hundred and twenty dollars, but also your future tax bill or money that's not available for your future healthcare or some other benefit, it was also being taken away. You may not have heard of the debt Management officer, Tree's true, but that's where it
was happening. So I think what we've really done, rather than saying making people more reliant on themselves, we've just made it more transparent that the government cannot actually solve as many problems as may have been promised under our predecessors.
The Regulatory Standards Bill is the next big bill from the act Party.
I know, I see you grinning. This is a big area for you.
As regulations Minister, it's going through Parliament at the moment. Can you explain what it is to people who may have only heard of it in passing?
Sure? Well, go back to our core problem. Why are we poor? We are compared with Australia, in fact, compared with most of the Pacific RIM. We are a comparatively poor country and that hits in so many ways. Only to go through them all, but it dispirits people. It's the younger people leaving the country, and particularly when it comes to housing poverty, you're being able to afford your own place. So that isn't my view. Our big problem has two basic kinds of activity. One is taxing and
spending money. So we just talked a bit about that, and we have a pretty good system for publishing the accounts, showing people who's responsible for what, and what results are they getting and how much data are they taking on them. You may not agree with everything the government does, but it's pretty easy to find out. It's pretty easy for the media to report it, pretty easy for voters to make decisions if they like it or don't like it.
The other thing that the government can do, apart from taking your money, taxing it and then spending it on stuff. Is it can make rules for how you use the property that you still own. Are you what it hasn't taxed?
And I would argue that power of making rules about who can lend money to who, how you can run a daycare, how you can develop your property, who can build a water treatment plant, to build a new subdivision, whatever it is, those rule making powers, I would argue, you have a bigger effect on our long term productivity and prosperity and ultimately how long we live and how healthy and wealthy we are effect than the government spending money.
I mean, I think this government spending money is important, but regulating your property is more important. All we're trying to do with the regulatory standard spill is have a similar framework where you know, if our government makes a law, it's got to publish the effects of it on your property, on your liberties, got to state what problem it was trying to solve, and why I thought this was the
best solution. It's really just making sure that voters can start to get a handle on the impact of regulation as easily as they can on spending.
So how much would the build cost per anim across an estimated twenty years. I'm sure you saw that reporting from the Herald last week. It said that it was twenty million per anim what of officials that the Ministry of Regulation actually said, well, that's true.
I mean that's from the Ministry for Regulations analysis. If you start making the bureaucracy analyze the rules that it's pushing on people, it'll cost twenty million to do it. And then the criticism has been well, what will the
benefits of that be? And the truth is, it's very hard to calculate, but we know that the benefits are going to be much greater than the cost for the simple reason that if it's going to cost this much money just for the bureaucracy to write up and monitor the rules it's making, imagine the cost of all the poor buggers out there that have to follow the rules.
Are there many jobs that are going to be like I can imagine that a lot of consultancy firms and everything like that making pretty big bank over these kind of regulatory changes.
Well, I'll just give you one example. I mean that the estimate of the town planning industry is one point three billion dollars a year, So to put that in perspective, that's sixty five times the twenty million we just talked about just in one area, which is resource management. That the cost of this red tape and regulation is enormous, but that's actually a tiny portion of the overall cost the real cost of that urban planning industry, and my view is not for the cost for the projects that
go ahead. It's the projects that don't go ahead. And when pros don't go ahead, there's less supply of housing, and when there's less supply, the price goes up for what remains. And so the real cost to a younger generation of New Zealanders of bad regulation and land use development make it more expensive to put in place of
water treatment plant, et cetera, is incalculable. So anything we can do to get some transparency around regulation making I believe we'll have a major payoff, just basically getting the country's mojo back and making a few things, especially housing, more affordable.
I think, you know, I think New Zealand is a right to be concerned that democracy will be under threat. David Seymour's Deputy Prime Ministy doesn't it, ever, so he doesn't have any respect for basic democratic norms, doesn't have any respect for the idea that people should ever say on the law changes that affect them. This government seems to think that everything can be passed through with no scrutiny, you know, just ram it through under agency and hope
no one notices. Like cutting the future paychecks of women who have been claiming pay equity, pushed that through hope no one notices. And David Seymour is right at the heart of that, as regulatory rules should apply to everybody else except for him. Almost everything he does seems to be exempt from the high principles that he seems to espouse for other people.
Do you ever feel like people have just got it in for you because you read comments online? I mean, you go to a comedy show, you talk to people in the street, and it feels like a lot of people are blaming you personally for a lot of tension that the government faces.
What do you reckon about that?
Yeah? I get that. I think there's a couple of reasons for it. One is that a lot of what AX proposes is for the government to do less, and people assume that if we want the government to do less, it's because we disagree with underlying intention. So, for example, I look at a minimum wage. I want everyone to be rich. I want everyone to be paid more. I just happen to think that the government making a law saying people have to be paid more is silly. It
can't really work. If it did work, we'd make it much higher, but it's just kind of a pantomime. We make it about as high as we can without too many people getting priced out of having a job at all. So I think it's a silly law. Then people say, oh, well, David Seama obviously wants poor people to be paid less. No, I don't. I just don't think that the solution that people have cu up with is a very good one. But people mix it up with the intention simply healthy homes.
You know.
I know of people who have homes that they could be renting out where a person could live, but doesn't. It's been made illegal to rent it out. They've looked at the cost of upgrading it to healthy homes, that they're not doing it, and as a result, people are actually missing out. So I think healthy homes are silly. I think people want to go to renovate their homes as much as they can afford, and when they can afford to do it, better, they'll do some more. Why
make a law? But people say, oh, well, David Seymour wants, you know, people to live in drafting No. I don't want people to live in drafting homes. I just think the solution. So I think it's a big part of the problems because we're often opposed to the government's solution. People think we're opposed to the intention. I think the other reason is that I don't do conformity. I unashamably
o me. I'm quirky, I am going to I believe I have a good heart and I work hard, but I'm going to be myself and I'm not going to apologize. And I think in New Zealand, you know, that's a dangerous way to be because sometimes one of the things I don't like so much about our culture, which I mostly love, is that we tend to value conformity over truth.
And I don't do conformity for the sake of it. Plus, as a bonus, I'm actually providing a huge public service because I am providing the left and the losers and many in the media, and sometimes I repeat myself with something they desperately need after their election loss, and that is someone to blame. You're welcome And.
Finally, David, you're going to be Deputy PM. As we head into the next election, are you in planning more for twenty twenty six yet?
Well both, I mean you start planning for the next election a day after the election. That's just the reality of what they call the continuous campaign. However, it's also true that take the job really seriously. Are going to be a good deputy for christ and for New Zealand. And I think one of the best things I can do for the next election as show people that if you like X ideas, you also have competent operators that you can work with.
Thanks for joining us, David.
Thank you.
That's it for this episode of The Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzdherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is also our sound engineer.
I'm Chelsea Daniels.
Subscribe to The Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in on Monday for another look behind the headlines.