Sorry Seymour, but it's perfectly fine for councils to oppose your legislation
An AI-generated image of a politician getting angry at a smartphone.
In a bizarre post across his social media channels, ACT Party leader David Seymour has taken aim at Porirua City Councillor Kathleen Filo (Ngāti Toa Rangitira) for getting her council to oppose his Treaty Principles Bill and encouraging other councils to do likewise.
Seymour’s caption to a screenshot of The Post’s story stated “If you support or oppose the Treaty Principles Bill, that's up to you. But if you’re a councillor who hiked rates by 17.5 percent in some of New Zealand's poorest communities, try getting your own house in order”.
He went further in a reply in the comments section to someone who called him out for his personal attacks on opponents of the bill, saying: “Do you disagree that councillors should focus on managing their ratepayers' money and delivering services for their residents before engaging in policitics[sic]?”
According to Seymour’s logic, councils and their democratically elected representatives apparently aren’t allowed to have thoughts on legislation before Parliament that is going to directly impact them and their constituents unless their council is humming along perfectly.
This is, of course, utter nonsense, and Seymour knows it. Much like central government, local government is perfectly within its rights to weigh in on this legislation. Not least because the impact it will have on both the partnerships they have with mana whenua, and how their specific legislative requirements to work with Māori are interpreted.
Even beyond that, along with being Ngāti Toa Rangitira herself - an iwi who hosted the hīkoi and have been fierce opponents of the legislation - Kathleen Filo is a politician (as all councillors and mayors are) and politicians are well within their rights to express views and lobby their colleagues on political issues. She was elected by her community, a significant number of whom will be Ngāti Toa Rangitira given Porirua is in the middle of their rohe, and no doubt her stance represents the views of many of them.
Of course, you could easily turn Seymour’s logic around on him. The economy is in a ditch, the government’s books and forecasts are worsening, unemployment - including long-term unemployment - is rising, and people are leaving in record numbers, especially for Australia - in droves, so shouldn’t Seymour be focusing on addressing those issues rather than pursuing a piece of legislation that the rest of Parliament - including his coalition partners - has told him is ultimately going nowhere?
Seymour’s retort to that is obvious. He’d likely claim that the Coalition is working hard to address all those things (citing things like tax cuts, slashing public sector roles, and falling interest rates), but that this is an important debate to have, he represents a constituency that wants it debated, and doing so won’t impact the government’s ability to deliver elsewhere. And he’d be right. Even if the money spent developing the legislation and going through Parliament as far as a second reading is going to be for naught when Labour, National, New Zealand First, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori vote it down, the cost incurred is going to be an accounting error in terms of the government’s books.
So what’s good for the goose (Seymour) is good for the gander (local government).
The amount of time it will take for a council to consider, develop a submission, get it signed off, submit it to Parliament, and possibly have someone speak to it is going to be an accounting error for nearly every council. I should know because I regularly work on submissions like this.
It will have zero impact on a council’s ability to deliver services for their residents, or their attempts to catch up on the decades long under-investment in core infrastructure that councils like Porirua are having to grapple with (which is driving the bulk of the current rate increases that has drawn Seymour’s ire). Likewise, councillors around the country are politicians who were elected to represent their constituents, so they’re allowed to politic over this just as much as Seymour is.
As John Key used to say, it’s possible to walk and chew gum at the same time, and that applies for both central and local government.
David Seymour knows all of this. But this after all, politics, and politicians are going to politic.
Though it should be noted that for a man who keeps claiming he just wants to have the debate about the Treaty Principles Bill, Seymour is spending a lot of time trying to police whose views should count in the debate.
When former Prime Minister Jenny Shipley criticised the bill for “inviting civil war”, Seymour launched into a vicious personal attack on her previous business experience. He then did likewise when former Treaty Negotiations minister and former Attorney-General Chris Finlayson critiqued the bill, telling Finlayson that his opposition was “unbecoming of someone who has had their time as a politician and should really be proud of their achievements and be ready to move on.”
It’s all part of Seymour’s grab bag of tricks to generate engagement bait for his supporters. Whether it’s personal attacks, policing whose opinion is allowed to count, or constructing strawmen to argue against, Seymour’s tactics are as old as time. And that’s ultimately what this is all about - using this bill as a wedge issue to win and retain voters from National and New Zealand First to ensure ACT’s survival at the 2026 election. Whatever you think of Seymour, he is a ruthlessly opportunistic politician who single-handedly brought ACT back from the brink of irrelevancy when he was first elected to Parliament in 2014.
Kathleen Filo is just the latest target of Seymour’s rage baiting.
To paraphrase David Lange: if Seymour could hold his breath just for a moment. I can smell the hypocrisy on it.
