OPINION
David Seymour knew he risked some ribbing for his proposed Ministry of Regulation, but strategically, it was a stroke of genius.
For Seymour, it was worth suffering comparisons with Jim Hacker’s Ministry of Administrative Affairs in Yes, Minister, in order to make clear the necessary bureaucratic structures for Act and National to work constructively together in a formal coalition.
Act prefers a coalition, with National’s and Act’s seats around the Cabinet table reflecting their respective party votes.
Based on the Herald Poll of Polls, that would mean 15 Cabinet ministers from National and five from Act, including Seymour and his deputy Brooke van Velden – the only MP in the entire Parliament with an economics degree – plus firearms reform and free-speech advocate Nicole McKee, former police officer and special-needs teacher Chris Baillie and civil and environmental engineer Simon Court.
Act accepts that National’s Christopher Luxon would be Prime Minister and his deputy Nicola Willis Minister of Finance, perhaps with van Velden as a deputy for some spine.
That’s pragmatic. Smaller coalition partners must accept that the bigger party runs fiscal policy. Just as the Greens want Grant Robertson to spend more, Act would unsuccessfully demand that Willis spend less.
Seymour would be Deputy Prime Minister, with the authority over the bureaucracy and other ministers that comes with it, and Minister of Regulation, running the new department.
But Seymour is no Hacker. Restoring Act after its 0.7 per cent catastrophe in 2014 to 11 per cent in the Herald Poll of Polls marks the 39-year-old as the most talented centre-right retail politician of his generation.
More importantly, Seymour proved he could work successfully even with far-left bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education when he delivered charter schools, first as a staffer after 2011 and then as a junior minister in the Key Government when he won Epsom in 2014, keeping Act alive.
Nor would Seymour’s Ministry of Regulation be anything like Hacker’s Ministry of Administrative Affairs. Seymour sees it as more like the lean, dynamic and intellectually rigorous New Zealand Treasury of the 1980s and 1990s, before it become just another bloated Wellington bureaucracy.
Like the Attorney-General with the Bill of Rights Act (BoRA), Seymour would report to Parliament on every bill before it, assessing whether it enhanced or hindered the rule of law, protected or undermined individual liberties and property rights, and increased or reduced taxes and other costs.
Little of what National Party ministers proposed would pass those tests, and nothing from Labour. Sadly, as with the Attorney-General and the BoRA, Parliament would mostly ignore Seymour’s warnings, but at least they would be made.
The more powerful part of Seymour’s proposal – and one which is surely a bottom line – is that the Minister of Regulation would work with the private sector and his new think-tank-style ministry to review existing red tape, and present omnibus bills to Parliament to get rid of it.
Parliament would still vote on the bills, but in practice, Act would consider National’s backing mandatory for the coalition to continue. In return, Act would tolerate National’s higher taxes and overspending. Act’s fiscal policy will always be too ambitious for Luxon and Willis.
The genius of Seymour’s proposal is that it respects the status, perks and control over fiscal policy that National will demand, while giving Act the power to take charge of solving New Zealand’s deep and inter-related productivity and underclass crises.
Seymour knows that it’s not so much the amount National or Labour allocate to schools, hospitals, housing, mental health services, infrastructure and corporate welfare, but how it is then spent or invested by the government or private sector to deliver whatever is sought.
If Act can’t stop Luxon and Willis from taxing and spending too much, it at least wants to ensure bang for the buck and that red tape doesn’t prevent either the private or public sectors from delivering on projects, improving social outcomes and thus raising productivity.
National isn’t quite so stupid that it doesn’t understand what this means, including that it would force Luxon to lead a reformist government. That terrifies many of them.
National continues to prefer the Key approach. It would be elected without making any controversial promises, hold some summits and set up some working groups, further open the floodgates to immigrants to make headline GDP look better, and hope to stumble to re-election in 2026 having done as little as possible while relying on an improving global economy.
Too harsh? Not really. The Key-English Government spent nine years developing its “social investment approach” to help the underclass – longer than the constitutional maximum for a US president to hold office – but hadn’t quite got around to putting it in place before its time ran out.
National is probably right that mimicking the purposelessness of the Key years would work for it politically, but it won’t work for Seymour, van Velden and Act.
Relatively young – van Velden is still only 30 – they genuinely believe their policy programme is necessary to improve the lives of the poor, the rich and those in between. While this is mystifying to most National MPs, if Seymour and van Velden must wait three, six or nine more years for a government that is serious about addressing the productivity and underclass crises, then so be it.
As Seymour and van Velden say, this may mean sitting on the cross benches while a Luxon Government fiddles, negotiating issue-by-issue, but Act is not prepared to once again go along with a passive and pointless National Government on the grounds that Labour would be worse.
Office is not what drives them personally. Politically, they believe Act wouldn’t survive another round as a lapdog to Luxon, as with John Key and Jenny Shipley.
Seymour and van Velden see their life’s work as ensuring there is a proper classical-liberal reformist party to vote for when they are old and retired.
Of course, everyone may be getting ahead of themselves. The recession was not as deep as feared, and the economy may be on the mend.
Even if not, Labour and its allies have so far come through it basically intact. According to the Herald Poll of Polls, were an election held tomorrow, there is roughly a 50 per cent probability of a Labour-Green-Te Pāti Māori Government, a 30 per cent likelihood of a hung Parliament, and just a 20 per cent chance of a National-Act win.
Still, at least one party is interested in what it would do if it won, rather than thinking that just winning on the day is enough.
- Matthew Hooton has previously worked for the National and Act parties and the Mayor of Auckland.
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