Echoes of Brash in Seymour’s Ōrewa speech

The fact that it’s election year may have got a bit lost with all the weatherrelated disasters happening around the country – but not if you’re a politician.

First to take his campaign to the Hibiscus Coast was Act’s David Seymour who addressed a crowd of around 250 people in Ōrewa Community Hall on the evening of Thursday, March 9.

A number of those gathered to hear Seymour said they were there because he’s “a straight talker”, and because they are “disappointed with National”.

Seymour, pleased with the large turnout, said it is clear people are fed up and ready for change, noting, in particular, that people are struggling with the rising cost of living. He said what he is hearing about this in places such as South Auckland could bring about a shift in voting, even in long held Labour seats.

“I have spoken with hard working young people who tell me there is no way forward,” Seymour said. “My view is that the last few years of excessive spending and regulation is to blame.”

On tackling crime, Seymour said should Act form part of the next Government, the party’s Three Strikes policy, which automatically hands maximum sentences to those who commit three serious crimes, would be back. He also stressed the need to reduce reoffending by building self-improvement into the corrections system – things such as teaching those in prison to read – to assist their chances of rehabilitation on release.

He said Act also favours a bottom-up, not top-down approach, exemplified by a plan to ask the country’s best school principals what they want from the Ministry of Education, and actioning that, rather than the other way around.

There were echoes of Don Brash’s infamous Ōrewa speech in 2004, when Seymour addressed the topics of co-governance and equality.

At the time, Brash was National Party

Leader. His speech in Ōrewa included his views on race relations, arguing that there was no need for “affirmative action (also known as reverse discrimination)” [for Maori] and that the Treaty of Waitangi provisions were poorly understood.

“We are one country with many peoples, not simply a society of Pakeha and Maori where the minority has a birthright to the upper hand, as the Labour Government seems to believe,” Brash said. “Over the last 20 years, the Treaty has been wrenched out of its 1840s context and become the plaything of those who would divide New Zealanders from one another, not unite us,” Brash said. In similar fashion, Seymour said that equal human rights should be paramount, not different rights by ethnic background. In his view, this is what the Treaty envisioned. “The chiefs who signed the Treaty would have been Act supporters,” he said. “The vision was for limited government, selfdetermination and equality before the law –all Act policies. The issue is how it has been interpreted, dividing people. We must stop constantly apologising for our past.”

Seymour said there are undoubted challenges, with Maori doing less well in areas such as education, health and home ownership. He said targeting problems such as mouldy homes, and “not moving people from motel to motel” would better deal with those issues.

The topics covered in the one-and-a-half hour meeting were wide-ranging and included questions from the floor on subjects such as the 3 Waters reforms, Covid-19 vaccination, the Resource Management Act and mining on conservation land. Many among the audience were unhappy at what they see as Government imposing its values on them.

“It’s not the job of Government to change people’s behaviour,” Seymour said. “We are here to change the Government’s behaviour. Act wants Government to get out of the way.”