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12:57 pm, August 26th, 2025 - 24 comments
Categories: act, david seymour, law, Parliament -
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Act’s proposal for a four year Parliamentary term with safeguards built in has been reported back by the Justice Select Committee.
It has by majority recommended that there be a referendum on the concept of a four year term. The provision allowing a four year term to occur only if the elected Government agreed to select committee reform was not supported. This would mean that the term of Parliament could fluctuate from Government to Government. This would result in no long term certainty and complicate voting in that there would be no certainty about how long a Government would last. There would also be the occasional election where Local Government and Central Government elections coincided.
There was one dissent to the proposal, the Act representative who would only support the change IF its proposed reforms of the select committee structure also occurred.
David Seymour was on RNZ this morning and attempted to occupy the moral high ground. He complained that there was a lack of trust in politicians and that New Zealand has “some of the most anemic governing arrangements in the world constitutionally”.
He denied that if select committees were given more power then Governments would push through law changes under urgency.
He then heaped praise on the Epidemic Response Committee, the one Labour set up to give some balance to its powers during Covid.
Note to Seymour you are part of a Goverment that could agree to your suggested select committee changes tomorrow.
And you are part of a Government that has engaged in such monstrous constitutional anomalies such as undermining Fair Pay legislation and discontinuing currently filed proceedings using urgency and without even the scantist of select committee processes, and all in order to rob workers of $17 billion over four years to pay for tax cuts for landlords and tobacco companies. As I said previously discontinuing every single claim was not justified. Doing it under urgency is in constitutional terms atrocious. Doing it to “avoid legal risks” is as cynical an abuse of parliamentary power I can ever recall seeing.
There are numerous other examples. Here are just a few. Seymour’s Government has:
There are many, many other examples.
It is all very well for Seymour to talk about “anemic governing arrangements”. This Government’s behaviour has snown that it is not interested in democratic reform or principled law making. If he was he would not be engaging in the sort of behaviour we have seen since this Government took over.
Seymour is a completely useless as a governing politician, and a compete hypocrite as a political thinker. For exactly the reasons you outlined above.
That was what I thought while reading his remarks this morning. So far everything that he has been behind, has attempted to manipulate parliamentary processes.
From supporting urgency for legislation that shouldn't have been urgent. The support of retroactive legislation to overturn judicial decisions. The abbreviated times for select committee submissions. The technically illiterate claim about 'bots' writing submissions when he clearly hadn't looked at the vetting process.
I have no idea what tinpot engineering school gave him a engineering degree, but they clearly failed to imbue the quality of trying understand engineering and system processes. You don't have to look far to see that.
Just look at his fiasco of screwing around with the school lunches – which look to be more expensive in total – while delivering poor nutritional outcomes.
Or the ongoing fiasco of the fraud without oversight of taxpayers money in charter schools.
David Seymour – he really is a dimwitted dickhead.
I get the impression he was never going to practice engineering long being groomed in canada to end up in front of the libertarian think tank that ACT represents.
Nice for some to know no matter how hypocritical and deceptive you are there will always be a role for you.
Especially in this coalition.
Unfortunately for us, he’s a dimwitted dickhead with somewhere between 8–10% of the electorate behind him, depending on the polling.
And that’s the real problem: as much as we may mock him for being the smarmy, slimy prick that he is, what he says carries weight. He’s in Cabinet. He’s shaping policy. He’s helping decide how urgency gets used, how committees function, and what “reform” looks like.
Mocking him is easy. Ignoring him would be dangerous.
Willie Jackson once said he's the most dangerous politician in New Zealand. I agree.
I wasn't mocking him. That was a quite serious assessment.
I long viewed him as being a threat because he is a competent in maintaining and building a coalition of voters in opposition. Mainly a loose set of anti-voters who are against some particular government policy, and others who'd like fiscal policies to favour themselves.
Being in government has been useful. Like Rodney Hide, there he has shown a lot of energy and very little competence to follow through to results that would be widely accepted. Ones that would stick. Hides only contribution to government was the Auckland super-city, a structure that that few in Auckland would support even now 15 years later.
As a politician, David Seymour looks to me to be similar to Shane Jones. All mouth, an addiction to flashy headlines, and no competence at follow through to changes that matter and stick.
Problem for both is that kiwi voters prefer governing politicians who aren't just entertainment.
By way of comparison, in my view Winston Peters is pretty competent at both sets of roles.
A zealot with concentrated energy, second-rate intellect and no common sense: a truly toxic combination.
But I don't believe he's dimwitted. He knows very well what he's about, understands the consequences, and doesn't give a monkey's damn. And nor do his adherents.
Surely everyone has to watch this RNZ documentary – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtNvbCW3ris
Tui, I put in the alternate link 'be' which you can get via right click on the youtube
https://youtu.be/OtNvbCW3ris
It will display in the comment. Not sure why the www doesn't…
The government would have a much stronger case for extending Parliament’s term if it were also prepared to accept greater oversight, empower select committees, and meaningfully limit the abuse of urgency.
Right now, we’re being asked to trust an executive that has repeatedly concentrated power while reducing scrutiny.
I don’t think we’re sliding into authoritarianism. But we are watching the slow erosion of New Zealand’s consensus-driven politics. Parliament is becoming more partisan by the year, and as partisanship rises, the executive gets stronger while institutional checks grow weaker.
That’s a long-term problem, regardless of who’s in government.
History shows how fragile democratic norms can be. From Sulla’s claims of “defending the constitution” to justify his brutal reign of terror in the late Roman Republic to modern leaders exploiting procedural shortcuts, the pattern is consistent: weaken the guardrails, and power flows upward.
If we have to start somewhere, it isn’t with the term of Parliament: it’s with urgency. Until we restore meaningful scrutiny, stronger select committee processes, and real constraints on executive power, a four-year term risks deepening the very problems it’s meant to solve.
Exactly!
Totally agree.
Politicians scrutinising each other in parliamentary debates and Select Committee hearings is not restoring anything, it’s entrenching status quo or worse, allowing the backslide into less transparency, accountability, and less oversight. The Speaker is at times acting more like a ringmaster overseeing circus acts by clowns and (semantic) acrobats and SCs are starting to mirror this.
The main or perhaps even only stakeholders are the people who are aided by media, academia, and public intellectuals, for example, to lift the curtain and peek behind it to see what is really going on and become more discerning and sceptical of the magicians’ trickery.
To improve means of public scrutiny OIA rules could be made more demanding [of officials] and more stringently enforced. Let’s ‘unleash’ AI tools (including transcription of meetings behind closed doors) on Government and open the lid wider.
Trashed BORA
Completely sidelined Select Committees
All major legislation under urgency
Takeover of Speaker with bias
Can't trust this lot.
The current Government, is an excellent argument for one year terms.
I will never vote for a for year term while there are so few checks on our democracy.
Same
A heroic Rimmer has come to end the era of the inefficient "Bristow" bureaucracy and introduce the modern era of AI processing of regulatory criteria.
A 21st C upgrade on the ambitions of Samuel Bush and Henry Ford for technocracy for American in the 1930's (best applied by IBM in Germany).
We have a rule in my weekly pub quiz team where, if a certain member (who shall remain nameless) gives an answer we know that answer must be wrong, so we go for a different answer.
It's the same with Seymour. If Seymour supports it then it must be wrong.
I'll be voting for the status quo.
Burn!
lol, this should be a post.
The George Costanza theory of politics!
Does David have the capability to reflect on why that is? He could start by analysing the numerous "monstrous constitutional anomalies" listed in MickySavage's post.
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2025/08/20/guest-blog-ian-powell-when-the-privatising-rubber-hits-the-climate-change-denial-roads/
I’d be happy with a 4 year term, provided we had an upper chamber.
What chance an independent inquiry into the numerous "monstrous constitutional anomalies" undertaken by our CoC government? I'm sure Luxon, Seymour, Peters, Willis, van Velden, Jones et al. would give such an inquiry their full cooperation.
A blast from the past:
A four year term? We need to strengthen our systems first, so they are not circumvented to suit lobbyists and vested interests.
What hubris and disconnect from what is the usual for safety measures.
Urgency coupled with an extension, and current behaviours. No sir!!
The short cuts to regulations defunding and working under "urgency" to remove community and public rights, replacing them with property and individual rights to allow litigation by billionaires and corporations against "possible earnings loss" would hamstring future governments wanting to protect special areas or interests.
They have practiced this for two years now, and Seymore says "We (the public) don't trust governments" Hi Ho Noddy, your duplicity is much of the reason.
We do not wish to have a bad government in too long, it would be too destructive.
Further, agreed future planning or contracts being overturned should require a 75% vote, this would avoid the wild swings, and recognition of Court decisions should be mandatory. Funding for Elections should be strictly capped as well.
We are not D Trump, or Atlas. imagine 5 years? The timing is abysmal, as referendums cost, and trust is at an all time low. imo.