It wasn’t the worst week for the real PM and ministers to take off.
Most of the news was happening in the United States anyway, courtesy of Donald Trump appearing at the Republican National Convention just after an assassination attempt, President Joe Biden getting Covid-19 and the escalating calls for Biden to give up on standing for President again.
All those years of being a one-man band in Opposition prepared Seymour well for being able to wax lyrical about a broad range of topics and summon up a reckon on any topic under the sun.
Even Acting Prime Ministers can’t really comment on another country’s politics but it takes more than that to stop Seymour. By the end of the week, he’d sorted out the conundrum the Democrats faced over Biden and declared his money was on Michelle Obama, given she was the only one who could beat Trump. He even reckoned she might just step up in the circumstances – despite her repeatedly ruling out any such move.
Back at home, Seymour’s second stint standing in for Christopher Luxon fell in a sleepy recess week but the man knows how to make a silk purse of his sow’s ears.
He was blessed by the PM’s overseas holiday meaning a raft of other ministers decided to go on a break too.
Transport Minister Simeon Brown put in a few bids for attention with speed camera signs, before squeezing one more drop of publicity out of his promises to fix potholes faster and well.
Otherwise, Seymour was left with a fairly empty field.
Illustration / Guy Body
He was doubly blessed by his week at the top coinciding with the release of the best number to land so far under the coalition Government’s watch.
That was in the form of the latest Consumer Price Index. Inflation was a mere 3.3% – slightly above the Reserve Bank’s golden range of between 1-3 % but lower than forecast and a happy midwinter glow amid the doom.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis was around to comment on it but nobody puts Seymour in a corner.
The Acting PM decided that the Real PM would have done a press conference on it, so he organised one for himself.
There was a collective eyebrow-raise, given the dangers of anything that might be seen as impingeing on the governor’s independence.
In response to that, Seymour adopted his slightly wounded, butter-wouldn’t-melt face and denied he was instructing Orr but simply making “an observation”.
His real audience was not Orr, who would be immune to any such nudging anyway.
Seymour’s audience was the hard-working Kiwis and businesses waiting for interest rates to fall. He wanted them to know the Government had pulled in its belt so that inflation would drop, ergo interest rates should follow and the people would celebrate with their cheaper apples and oranges and mortgages.
If that didn’t happen, he wanted to be sure Orr bore the wrath rather than the Government.
From inflation to Pharmac to the waka-jumping law via his reckons on Joe Biden, David Seymour had an enjoyable time in the spotlight as Acting Prime Minister. Photo / Mark Mitchell
In the traditions of a real Prime Minister’s press conference, his one on the CPI turned into a 24-minute stand-up on all manner of things, from Pharmac and the Health New Zealand board to the ins and outs of invoking the waka-jumping law: the law by which a party can try to force an expelled MP to leave Parliament. It is an odd law, given that only NZ First really supports it. Since it passed, National, Labour and now the Greens have all had the opportunity to use it courtesy of MPs going rogue – but have not done so on principle.
NZ First is one of the few parties which has not (yet) had the chance to use it.
Seymour’s efforts at criticising the law, saying it allowed MPs to be “bullied” out of Parliament, saw him become an unlikely defender of ousted Green and newly independent MP Darleen Tana. He deemed it was possible that Tana’s presence on the Green Party list could well have convinced some of the party’s voters to vote for it. He said she had an impressive CV and was “an impressive person”, regardless of what we thought of the current allegations.
His next few days delivered the first round of statistics showing the fruits of the coalition Government’s promise to get tough on things.
That started with the increase in the number of tenants evicted from state houses for bad behaviour since Housing Minister Chris Bishop issued his crackdown ruling to Kāinga Ora.
Next up came the latest benefit numbers. Seymour opted to focus on the figure showing a 50% boost in the number of sanctions applied to beneficiaries who had been naughty and had not turned up to job interviews or training courses or the likes.
He did not focus on the figures showing the numbers on the unemployment benefit for the June quarter were at a record high – even higher than in June 2022, the peak of Covid-19.
Those were most inconvenient since they spoiled the glow of that lovely inflation figure and because the governing parties had made a big deal about the Jobseeker numbers going up under Labour.
Then came provisional school attendance data showing 53.1% of students attended school regularly during Term 2 this year, compared with 47% during the same term last year.
Since the Acting PM was also the minister in charge of putting truants in their place (that place being school and not vaping in the park or on early holidays), he took as much credit as he could from that – although it was still well short of the 90% target he has set by 2030.
While there was near silence from National Party ministers, he did have a bit of competition for attention. Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa Packer took him to task for his edict to Pharmac to dispense with the requirement to consider the Treaty of Waitangi in its decisions – prompting yet another round of name-calling and castigations for using divisive language.
NZ First’s Shane Jones was left to try to keep up the party’s profile during the sleepy week while Foreign Minister Winston Peters was overseas.
Jones filled the void by travelling the regions and sporadically posting inspirational quotes and positive affirmations on his social media account.
All were by that renowned philosopher, Shane Jones.
The real Prime Minister – Christopher Luxon – returns today.
Seymour gets one last event as Acting PM, going with Children’s Minister Karen Chhour to inspect the facilities where boot camps for young offenders will be held.
Then his time in the sun will be over for a while as he counts down the days until he becomes Deputy Prime Minister – and gets more chances to be Acting Prime Minister.
