Category: Political Parties

Source: ACT Party

The Haps

Public hearings for the Treaty Principles Bill have begun. David Seymour kicked off proceedings, throwing down the gauntlet on equal rights and fielding questions from hostile MPs. His submission to the Justice Committee is a must-watch.

Even people who say there should be no bill seem to want the debate. The hearings are a major milestone for New Zealand, it is now possible for ordinary people to go to Parliament and say they are equal.

The State of the Nation

David Seymour’s 2025 State of the Nation speech has been overwhelmed with praise from those who attended and watched it online. If you missed it, the video is here and we have reproduced the text below.

Thank you, Brooke, for your kind introduction. I’m biased, but I think you’re the Government’s most quietly effective Minister. Your labour law reforms are making it easier to employ workers and to be employed. Your minimum wage increases are announced early to give business certainty, and relief. You are taking on two of the hardest chestnuts in the workplace – holiday pay and health and safety – by listening to the people affected. You’ve put together an honest Royal Commission on COVID-19, and got wait times down for new passports and Citizenships. All the while you attract growing respect as a hard-working local MP here in Tamaki.

It’s easy to forget Brooke’s 32. She has the biggest future in New Zealand politics.

The only problem with mentioning one ACT MP is they’re all kicking goals with both feet, so you have to mention the lot. Nicole McKee is speeding up the court system, rewriting the entire Arms Act to make New Zealand safer, and reforming anti-money laundering laws so people can business done.

Andrew Hoggard handles the country’s biosecurity, managing would-be outbreaks with steady hands. He is also dealing to Significant Natural Areas that erode farmers’ property rights and correcting the naïve treatment of methane that punishes the whole country.

He’s able to do that in large part because of the work Mark Cameron did, and continues to do. From 2020 onwards he scared the bejesus out of every other party in rural New Zealand. He shifted the whole political spectrum right on the split gas approach, SNAs, and freshwater laws. Now the Government is changing those policies. As Chair of the Primary Production Committee, Mark stays in the headlines championing rural New Zealand every week. He is the definition of an effective MP.

Karen Chhour is the embodiment of ACT values. Her life gives her more excuses than anyone in Parliament, but she makes none, and she accepts none. She is reforming the government department that let her down when she was small. If every New Zealander had Karen’s attitude and values, we’d be a country with no problems.

Perhaps the biggest single policy problem we face is the Resource Management Act. Somone once said you can fill a town hall to stop anything in this country, but you can’t fill a telephone box to get something started. In steps Simon Court who, with Chris Bishop, is designing new resource management laws based on property rights. That’s an ACT policy designed to unleash the latent wealth our country has by letting people develop and use the property they own.

Our new MPs that you helped elect last year are also making their marks. Todd Stephenson has picked up the End of Life Choice baton, with a bill to extend compassion and choice to those who suffer the most: those with long-term, degenerative illnesses. Parmjeet Parmar is one of the hardest working MPs I have seen, and a great chair of the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee. Cam Luxton and Laura McClure speak to a new generation of young parents who want their children to grow up in a free society.

If you gave your Party Vote to ACT last year, you can be proud of the New Zealanders you put in Parliament to represent you. I am proud to lead this team of free thinkers in our House of Representatives, and I think we can all be proud of their efforts.

New Zealand’s origin story: a nation of immigrants

The summer is a good time to think about the state of our nation, and I got to thinking about who we are and how we got here. Whatever troubles we may face today, I couldn’t help coming back to something that unites New Zealand.

Our country at its best is a place that welcomes hopeful people from all over the earth. People with different languages, religions and cultures united by one thing. When you look at the map it jumps out at you. We are the most remote country on Earth. If you’ve never stood at Cape Reinga and looked out to see wide open spaces for 10,000 kilometres, you owe it to yourself just once.

It shows that one thing makes us all different from the rest of the world. No matter when or where you came from, you or your ancestors once travelled farther than anyone to give your children and theirs a better tomorrow.

That is the true Kiwi spirit. Taking a leap into the unknown for a chance at better. Compared with what divides us, our spirit as a nation of pioneers unites us ten times over. Migrating from oppression and poverty for freedom and prosperity is what it means to be Kiwi.

If that bright and optimistic side of our psyche, got half as much time as the whinging, we would all be better off. We would see ourselves as people unafraid of challenges, freed from conformity, with the power to decide our best days are always ahead of us.

New Zealand’s inherent tension: two tribes

I got to wondering why that isn’t a more popular story. Why do we cut down tall poppies? Why do we value conformity over truth? Why do people who came here for a better life grow up disappointed and move away again?

I believe our nation is dominated by two invisible tribes. One, I call ‘Change Makers’. People who act out the pioneering spirit that built our country every day. We don’t just believe it is possible to make a difference in our own lives; we believe it’s an obligation.

Change makers load up their mortgage to start a business and give other people jobs. They work the land to feed the world. They save up and buy a home that they maintain for someone else to live in. They study hard to extend themselves. They volunteer and help out where they can. They take each person as they find them. They don’t need to know your ancestry before they know how to treat you.

Too often, they get vilified for all of the above. I know there’s many people like that in this room today. ACT people are Change Makers; we carry the pioneering spirit in our hearts.

Then there’s the other tribe – people building a Majority for Mediocrity. They would love nothing more than to go into lockdown again, make some more sourdough, and worry about the billions in debt another day.

They blame one of the most successful societies in history for every problem they have. They believe that ancestry is destiny. They believe people are responsible for things that happened before they were born, but criminals aren’t responsible for what they did last week.

Far from believing people can make a difference in their own lives, they believe that their troubles are caused by other people’s success. They look for politicians who’ll cut tall poppies down – politicians who say to young New Zealanders ‘if you study hard, get good grades, get a good job, save money, and invest wisely, we’ll tax you harder’.

I wasn’t kidding about the lockdowns; they were a litmus test. In early 2022, after this city had been locked down for months, and the borders had been closed for two years, a pollster asked New Zealanders if they’d like to be locked down again for Omicron.

Now, I know it’s painful to think back, but bear with me. Omicron spread more easily than any earlier variant. It was also less harmful if you caught it. That was especially so because we were then among the most vaccinated nations on earth. The damage to business, education, non-COVID healthcare, and the government’s books was already massive and painful.

And yet, 48 per cent of New Zealanders wanted another lockdown for Omicron. 46 per cent didn’t. That for me put the tribes into sharp relief. If you were a business owner who needed to open, a parent worried about missed education, a migrant missing their family, or just someone who wanted their life back, you wanted to open.

When the Government finally lifted restrictions, many of those people left. Real estate agents report people selling because they’re moving to Australia every day. This is where the balance between these two invisible tribes comes into focus.

Remember the gap in that poll was two per cent. Since the borders opened a net 116,000 citizens have left New Zealand. That’s a touch over two per cent.

A tipping point

The more people with get up and go choose to get up and leave, the less attractive it is for motivated people to stay here.

Muldoon once quipped, ‘New Zealanders who leave for Australia raise the IQ of both countries.’ Actually, New Zealanders who leave for Australia  are tipping us towards a Majority for Mediocrity. Motivated New Zealanders leaving is good news for the shoplifters, conspiracy theorists, and hollow men who make up the political opposition.

A few more good people leaving is all they need for their Majority of Mediocrity. The more that aspirational, hardworking people get up and leave New Zealand, the more likely it is we’ll get left-wing governments in the future.

That’s why I say we’re at a tipping point.

There’s another reason why the mediocrity majority is growing, young people feel betrayed and disillusioned.

A new generation looks at the housing market and sees little hope. Imagine you’re someone who’s done it all right, you listened to your teacher and did your homework. You studied for a tertiary education like everyone told you. Now you have $34,000 in debt, you start on $60,000, and you see the average house is 900,000 or fifteen times your (before tax) income.

Nobody can blame a young person for wondering if they aren’t better off overseas. Many decide they are. Those who stay are infected  by universities  with the woke mind viruses of identity politics, Marxism, and post-modernism.

Feeling like you’ll never own your own capital asset at the same time as some professor left over from the Cold War tells you about Marx is a dangerous combination.

This is the other political tipping point that risks manufacturing a majority for mediocrity. A bad housing market and a woke education system combined are a production line for left-wing voters.

The hard left prey on young New Zealanders. They tell them that their problems are caused by others’ success. That they are held back by their identity, but if they embrace identity politics, they can take back what’s theirs. Their mechanism is a new tax on wealth.

These are the opposite of the spirit brings New Zealanders to our shores in the first place. The state of our nation is that we’re at a tipping point , and what we do in the next few years will decide which way we go.

The short-term outlook is sunny, but only because Labour was so bad.

We can afford to hope that this year will be better than 2024. By that standard, 2025 will be a success. Interest rates will be lower. The Government will have stopped wasting borrowed money, banning things, punishing employers, landlords, farmers, and anyone else trying to make a difference, with another layer of red tape.

In fact, we have a Government that’s saving money, cutting red tape, and paring back identity politics. With those changes we will see more hope than we’ve seen in years, and hopefully a slowdown in citizens leaving. That is good, it’s welcome, and ACT is proud to be part of the coalition Government that’s doing it.

ACT is needed to be brave, articulate, and patriotic

The truth is, though, it’s easy to do a better job of Labour over 12 months. It’s much harder to muster the courage to keep making difficult decisions over several years, even if they’re not immediately popular. Our nation is in a century of decline. Just stopping one Government’s stupid stuff and waiting for a cyclical recovery won’t change the long-term trend. We need to be honest about the challenges we face and the changes needed to overcome them.

We need to act like a country at risk of reaching a tipping point and losing its first world status. We are facing some tough times, and tough times require tough choices to be made.

ACT’s goal is to keep the Government, and make it better. We may have gone into Government, but we never went into groupthink. It’s the role of ACT to be the squeaky wheel, pointing out where the Government needs to do better.

The Government cannot measure itself by just being better than Labour. Instead, we need to ask ourselves, is this policy good enough to make New Zealand a first world country that people want to stay in?

It’s easy to have big plans, we are the world, but charity begins at home. We need to focus only on what the government does, and ensure it does it well.

We need to think carefully about three areas of government activity: spending, owning, and regulating. There is nothing the government does that doesn’t come down to one of those three things.

Why government spends a dollar it has taxed or borrowed, and whether the benefits of that outweigh the costs.

Why government owns an asset, and whether the benefits to citizens outweigh the costs to taxpayers of owning it.

Why a restriction is placed on the use and exchange of private property, and whether the benefits of that regulation outweigh the costs on the property owner.

When it comes to spending, we have a burning platform.

Last year the economy shrunk by one per cent, even as the population grew slightly thanks to births and inbound migration. This year the Government is planning to borrow $17 billion, about $10 billion is for interest on debt, and we’ll have to pay interest on that debt the following year. Next year, government debt will exceed $200 billion.

There lots of reasons why this situation will get harder.

We’ve claimed an exclusive economic zone of four million square kilometres by drawing a circle around every offshore island we could name. We spend less than one per cent of GDP defending it, while our only ally, across the ditch, spends twice that.

Put another way, we’re a country whose government gives out $45 billion in payments each year but spends only $3.2 billion defending the place. Does that sound prudent to you? Doubling defense would cost another $3.2 billion per year, effectively paying more for what we already have. We may face pressure to do just that thanks to US foreign policy.

There’s a tail wind on balancing the books, and it’s affecting every developed country, our population is ageing faster than it’s growing.

Every year around 60,000 people turn sixty-five and become eligible for a pension. To the taxpayer, superannuation expenses increase by $1.4 billion each year.

Healthcare spending has gone from $20 billion to $30 billion in five years, but people are so dissatisfied that healthcare is now the third biggest political issue. Put it another way, we are now spending nearly $6,000 per citizen on healthcare.

How many people here would give up their right to the public healthcare system if they got $6,000 for their own private insurance? Should we allow people to opt out of the public healthcare system, and take their portion of funding with them so they can go private?

Education is similar. We spend $20 billion of taxpayer money every year, and every year 60,000 children are born. By my count that’s $333,000 of lifetime education spending for each citizen.

How many people would take their $333,000 and pay for their own education? How many young New Zealanders would be better off if they did it that way?

Instead of spending next year because we did it this year, we need to ask ourselves, if we want to remain a first world country, then do New Zealanders get a return on this spending that justifies taking the money off taxpayers in the first place? If spending doesn’t stack up, it should stop so we can repay debt or spend the money on something that does.

Then there’s the $570 billion, over half a trillion dollars of assets, the government owns. The one thing we know from state houses, hospital projects, and farms with high levels of animal death, is that the government is hopeless at owning things.

But did you know you own Quotable Value, a property valuation company chaired by a former race relations conciliator that contracts to the government of New South Wales?

What about 60,000 homes? The government doesn’t need to own a home to house someone. We know this because it also spends billions subsidising people to live in homes it doesn’t own. On the other hand, the taxpayer is paying $10 billion a year servicing debt, and the KiwiBuild and Kainga Ora debacles show the government should do as little in housing as possible.

There are greater needs for government capital. We haven’t built a harbour crossing for nearly seven decades. Four hundred people die every year on a substandard road network. Beaches around here get closed thanks to sewerage overflow, but we need more core infrastructure. Sections of this city are being red zoned from having more homes built because the council cannot afford the pipes and pumping stations.

We need to get past squeamishness about privatisation and ask a simple question: if we want to be a first world country, then are we making the best use of the government’s half a trillion dollars’ plus worth of assets? If something isn’t getting a return, the government should sell it so we can afford to buy something that does.

Finally, there’s regulation. That is placing restrictions on the use and exchange of property that the government doesn’t own or hasn’t taxed off the people who earned it already. That is, your property. Bad regulation is killing our prosperity in three ways.

It adds costs to the things we do. It’s the delays, the paperwork, and the fees that make too many activities cost more than they ought to. It’s the builder saying it takes longer to get the consent than it took to build the thing. It’s the anti-money laundering palaver that ties people in knots doing basic things but somehow doesn’t stop criminals bringing in half a billion dollars of P each year. It’s the daycare centre that took four years to open because different departments couldn’t agree about the road noise outside. I could go on all afternoon.

Then there’s the things that just don’t happen because people decide the costs don’t add up once the red tape is factored in.

Then there’s the big one that goes to the heart of our identity and culture. It’s all the kids who grow up in a country where people gave up or weren’t allowed to try. It’s the climbing wall at Sir Edmund Hillary’s old school with signs saying don’t climb. It’s the lack of nightlife because it’s too hard to get a license. It’s the fear that comes from worrying WorkSafe or some other regulator will come and shut you down. You can’t measure it, but we all know it’s there.

The Kiwi spirit we are so proud of is being chipped away and killing our vibe. Nobody migrated here to be compliant, but compliance is infantilising our culture, and I haven’t even mentioned orange cones yet.

If we want to remain first world, we need to change how we regulate. No law should be passed without showing what problem is being solved, whether the benefits outweigh the costs, and who pays the costs and gets the benefits. These are the basic principles of the Regulatory Standards Bill that the Government will pass this year.

Conclusion

Of course, the Government IS doing many things that will change how it operates. There is a drive to reduce waste. There is a drive to get more money from overseas investment. The Regulatory Standards Bill will change how we regulate. The Resource Management Act is being replaced. Anti-money laundering laws are being simplified. Charter schools are opening, more roads are being built. These are all good things.

But make no mistake, our country has always been the site of a battle between two tribes. The effect of emigration, and the world faced by young New Zealanders risks creating a permanent majority for mediocrity. Our country is at a tipping point.

We need honest conversations about why government spends, owns, and regulates, and whether those policies are good enough to secure our future as a first world nation.

You may have seen the ACT Party has been involved in a battle to define the principles of the Treaty democratically. It’s caused quite a stir. If you missed it, please check out treaty.nz where we outline what it’s about. It may still succeed this time, or it may be one of those bills that simply breaks the ground so something like it can proceed in the future.

Either way, the tribe of change makers has a voice. People who want equal rights for all New Zealanders to be treated with respect and dignity because they’re citizens have a position that others need to refute. Good luck to them arguing against equal rights.

It also shows something else, that ACT is the party prepared to stand up when it’s not easy and it’s not popular. That’s exactly the type of party our country needs in our Government.

To all the Change Makers who proudly put us there, thank you, and no matter how daunting this tipping point may feel, together we can ensure our best days are still ahead of us.

Source: ACT Party

Delivered by Hon David Seymour on 26 January 2025, hosted by the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand in Remuera.

Thank you Gillian, and the Board of the Holocaust Centre for inviting me to give this address. I am humbled to speak the day before the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

I have long feared that the horrors of World War Two would slip from living memory. As a nine year old, I had a teacher who talked often about her own schooling in fear of a Japanese invasion. It stuck with me that children had to practice evacuating and sit in trenches with cotton wool in their ears and corks between their teeth. That teacher retired at the end of that year, and I wondered how students in the next class would know about the war.

Of course, I couldn’t have known about the Holocaust Centre, it was founded fifteen years later. The Centre could be seen as a response to the task of keeping these memories real when only a precious few, whom I acknowledge today, can remind us of the horrors first hand.

It falls on each of us to make a conscious effort keep the lessons learned alive. One of the most helpful tools we have for doing that is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed at Paris in the aftermath of World War Two by our then Prime Minister Peter Fraser.

World War Two and the Holocaust gave people clarity of thought. In those painful times it didn’t take much effort to think clearly about what was right, what was wrong, and what must be avoided at all costs.

The preamble of the Declaration begins

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable
rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice
and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous
acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world
in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom
from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common
people …

The Declaration then lists Human Rights in a series of articles.

Article One says:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are
endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a
spirit of brotherhood.

Article Two is more specific, saying:

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration,
without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion,
political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political,
jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person
belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other
limitation of sovereignty.

Reading these words, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Holocaust weighed heavily on the minds of the drafters of and Parties to this declaration. It was far from the only evil of World War Two, but sadly its scale and inhumanity make it the singular act of evil not only in that War but all wars.

Just as the Holocaust brought great clarity of thought in its aftermath, disordered thinking brings great danger that something like it will be repeated.

The misuse of the word genocide, the casual blaming of victims after the October 7th attacks, and the excusal of the true perpetrator, Hamas, are all examples that no doubt weigh heavily on the minds of Auckland’s Jewish community.

These are also part of a wider intellectual trend.

Sir Karl Popper, a Jewish Philosopher who lost 16 members of his own family to the Holocaust and found refuge in New Zealand, was responsible for defining the scientific method.

Through the early and mid-twentieth centuries, Popper won the argument about how science proceeds. His approach, testing falsifiable hypotheses against empirically verifiable facts, is wonderfully equalitarian and democratic.

He showed, like Galileo before him, that no matter who you are, if your idea stacks up, plain for all to see, that you can make a breakthrough. It doesn’t just apply in science. As Popper himself said, all life is problem solving.

In contrast to that liberal vision, we hear that people can have knowledge according to their identity. People say ‘speaking as a…’. There are different kinds of knowledge that always turn on identity. These are dangerous thoughts. They deny the ability of any individual to see truth according to an agreed method. They take you down the path to where might is right.

I had an email from a much brighter and younger person than me over the summer, worried about the fate of liberalism. I said, perhaps we need a new book. His reply was brilliant. He said, perhaps, but first we should all reread Poppers Open Society and its Enemies. I’m taking his advice.

My challenge in a YouTube world is that we should all read more. As the Holocaust’s Horrors slip from living memory, my challenge is to read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and The Open Society, for lessons we must not forget.

Source: ACT Party

Delivered by ACT Leader David Seymour the Akarana Event Centre, Ōrākei.

Introduction

Thank you, Brooke, for your kind introduction. I’m biased, but I think you’re the Government’s most quietly effective Minister. Your labour law reforms are making it easier to employ workers and to be employed. Your minimum wage increases are announced early to give business certainty, and relief. You are taking on two of the hardest chestnuts in the workplace – holiday pay and health and safety – by listening to the people affected. You’ve put together an honest Royal Commission on COVID-19, and got wait times down for new passports and Citizenships. All the while you attract growing respect as a hard-working local MP here in Tamaki.

It’s easy to forget Brooke’s 32. She has the biggest future in New Zealand politics.

The only problem with mentioning one ACT MP is they’re all kicking goals with both feet, so you have to mention the lot. Nicole McKee is speeding up the court system, rewriting the entire Arms Act to make New Zealand safer, and reforming anti-money laundering laws so people can business done.

Andrew Hoggard handles the country’s biosecurity, managing would-be outbreaks with steady hands. He is also dealing to Significant Natural Areas that erode farmers’ property rights and correcting the naïve treatment of methane that punishes the whole country.

He’s able to do that in large part because of the work Mark Cameron did, and continues to do. From 2020 onwards he scared the bejesus out of every other party in rural New Zealand. He shifted the whole political spectrum right on the split gas approach, SNAs, and freshwater laws. Now the Government is changing those policies. As Chair of the Primary Production Committee, Mark stays in the headlines championing rural New Zealand every week. He is the definition of an effective MP.

Karen Chhour is the embodiment of ACT values. Her life gives her more excuses than anyone in Parliament, but she makes none, and she accepts none. She is reforming the government department that let her down when she was small. If every New Zealander had Karen’s attitude and values, we’d be a country with no problems.

Perhaps the biggest single policy problem we face is the Resource Management Act. Somone once said you can fill a town hall to stop anything in this country, but you can’t fill a telephone box to get something started. In steps Simon Court who, with Chris Bishop, is designing new resource management laws based on property rights. That’s an ACT policy designed to unleash the latent wealth our country has by letting people develop and use the property they own.

Our new MPs that you helped elect last year are also making their marks. Todd Stephenson has picked up the End of Life Choice baton, with a bill to extend compassion and choice to those who suffer the most: those with long-term, degenerative illnesses. Parmjeet Parmar is one of the hardest working MPs I have seen, and a great chair of the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee. Cam Luxton and Laura McClure speak to a new generation of young parents who want their children to grow up in a free society.

If you gave your Party Vote to ACT last year, you can be proud of the New Zealanders you put in Parliament to represent you. I am proud to lead this team of free thinkers in our House of Representatives, and I think we can all be proud of their efforts.

New Zealand’s origin story: a nation of immigrants

The summer is a good time to think about the state of our nation, and I got to thinking about who we are and how we got here. Whatever troubles we may face today, I couldn’t help coming back to something that unites New Zealand.

Our country at its best is a place that welcomes hopeful people from all over the earth. People with different languages, religions and cultures united by one thing. When you look at the map it jumps out at you. We are the most remote country on Earth. If you’ve never stood at Cape Reinga and looked out to see wide open spaces for 10,000 kilometres, you owe it to yourself just once.

It shows that one thing makes us all different from the rest of the world. No matter when or where you came from, you or your ancestors once travelled farther than anyone to give your children and theirs a better tomorrow.

That is the true Kiwi spirit. Taking a leap into the unknown for a chance at better. Compared with what divides us, our spirit as a nation of pioneers unites us ten times over. Migrating from oppression and poverty for freedom and prosperity is what it means to be Kiwi.

If that bright and optimistic side of our psyche, got half as much time as the whinging, we would all be better off. We would see ourselves as people unafraid of challenges, freed from conformity, with the power to decide our best days are always ahead of us.

New Zealand’s inherent tension: two tribes

I got to wondering why that isn’t a more popular story. Why do we cut down tall poppies? Why do we value conformity over truth? Why do people who came here for a better life grow up disappointed and move away again?

I believe our nation is dominated by two invisible tribes. One, I call ‘Change Makers’. People who act out the pioneering spirit that built our country every day. We don’t just believe it is possible to make a difference in our own lives; we believe it’s an obligation.

Change makers load up their mortgage to start a business and give other people jobs. They work the land to feed the world. They save up and buy a home that they maintain for someone else to live in. They study hard to extend themselves. They volunteer and help out where they can. They take each person as they find them. They don’t need to know your ancestry before they know how to treat you.

Too often, they get vilified for all of the above. I know there’s many people like that in this room today. ACT people are Change Makers; we carry the pioneering spirit in our hearts.

Then there’s the other tribe – people building a Majority for Mediocrity. They would love nothing more than to go into lockdown again, make some more sourdough, and worry about the billions in debt another day.

They blame one of the most successful societies in history for every problem they have. They believe that ancestry is destiny. They believe people are responsible for things that happened before they were born, but criminals aren’t responsible for what they did last week.

Far from believing people can make a difference in their own lives, they believe that their troubles are caused by other people’s success. They look for politicians who’ll cut tall poppies down – politicians who say to young New Zealanders ‘if you study hard, get good grades, get a good job, save money, and invest wisely, we’ll tax you harder’.

I wasn’t kidding about the lockdowns; they were a litmus test. In early 2022, after this city had been locked down for months, and the borders had been closed for two years, a pollster asked New Zealanders if they’d like to be locked down again for Omicron.

Now, I know it’s painful to think back, but bear with me. Omicron spread more easily than any earlier variant. It was also less harmful if you caught it. That was especially so because we were then among the most vaccinated nations on earth. The damage to business, education, non-COVID healthcare, and the government’s books was already massive and painful.

And yet, 48 per cent of New Zealanders wanted another lockdown for Omicron. 46 per cent didn’t. That for me put the tribes into sharp relief. If you were a business owner who needed to open, a parent worried about missed education, a migrant missing their family, or just someone who wanted their life back, you wanted to open.

When the Government finally lifted restrictions, many of those people left. Real estate agents report people selling because they’re moving to Australia every day. This is where the balance between these two invisible tribes comes into focus.

Remember the gap in that poll was two per cent. Since the borders opened a net 116,000 citizens have left New Zealand. That’s a touch over two per cent.

A tipping point

The more people with get up and go choose to get up and leave, the less attractive it is for motivated people to stay here.

Muldoon once quipped, ‘New Zealanders who leave for Australia raise the IQ of both countries.’ Actually, New Zealanders who leave for Australia  are tipping us towards a Majority for Mediocrity. Motivated New Zealanders leaving is good news for the shoplifters, conspiracy theorists, and hollow men who make up the political opposition.

A few more good people leaving is all they need for their Majority of Mediocrity. The more that aspirational, hardworking people get up and leave New Zealand, the more likely it is we’ll get left-wing governments in the future.

That’s why I say we’re at a tipping point. 

There’s another reason why the mediocrity majority is growing, young people feel betrayed and disillusioned.

A new generation looks at the housing market and sees little hope. Imagine you’re someone who’s done it all right, you listened to your teacher and did your homework. You studied for a tertiary education like everyone told you. Now you have $34,000 in debt, you start on $60,000, and you see the average house is 900,000 or fifteen times your (before tax) income.

Nobody can blame a young person for wondering if they aren’t better off overseas. Many decide they are. Those who stay are infected  by universities  with the woke mind viruses of identity politics, Marxism, and post-modernism.

Feeling like you’ll never own your own capital asset at the same time as some professor left over from the Cold War tells you about Marx is a dangerous combination.

This is the other political tipping point that risks manufacturing a majority for mediocrity. A bad housing market and a woke education system combined are a production line for left-wing voters.

The hard left prey on young New Zealanders. They tell them that their problems are caused by others’ success. That they are held back by their identity, but if they embrace identity politics, they can take back what’s theirs. Their mechanism is a new tax on wealth.

These are the opposite of the spirit brings New Zealanders to our shores in the first place. The state of our nation is that we’re at a tipping point , and what we do in the next few years will decide which way we go.

The short-term outlook is sunny, but only because Labour was so bad.

We can afford to hope that this year will be better than 2024. By that standard, 2025 will be a success. Interest rates will be lower. The Government will have stopped wasting borrowed money, banning things, punishing employers, landlords, farmers, and anyone else trying to make a difference, with another layer of red tape.

In fact, we have a Government that’s saving money, cutting red tape, and paring back identity politics. With those changes we will see more hope than we’ve seen in years, and hopefully a slowdown in citizens leaving. That is good, it’s welcome, and ACT is proud to be part of the coalition Government that’s doing it.

ACT is needed to be brave, articulate, and patriotic

The truth is, though, it’s easy to do a better job of Labour over 12 months. It’s much harder to muster the courage to keep making difficult decisions over several years, even if they’re not immediately popular. Our nation is in a century of decline. Just stopping one Government’s stupid stuff and waiting for a cyclical recovery won’t change the long-term trend. We need to be honest about the challenges we face and the changes needed to overcome them.

We need to act like a country at risk of reaching a tipping point and losing its first world status. We are facing some tough times, and tough times require tough choices to be made.

ACT’s goal is to keep the Government, and make it better. We may have gone into Government, but we never went into groupthink. It’s the role of ACT to be the squeaky wheel, pointing out where the Government needs to do better.

The Government cannot measure itself by just being better than Labour. Instead, we need to ask ourselves, is this policy good enough to make New Zealand a first world country that people want to stay in?

It’s easy to have big plans, we are the world, but charity begins at home. We need to focus only on what the government does, and ensure it does it well.

We need to think carefully about three areas of government activity: spending, owning, and regulating. There is nothing the government does that doesn’t come down to one of those three things.

Why government spends a dollar it has taxed or borrowed, and whether the benefits of that outweigh the costs.

Why government owns an asset, and whether the benefits to citizens outweigh the costs to taxpayers of owning it.

Why a restriction is placed on the use and exchange of private property, and whether the benefits of that regulation outweigh the costs on the property owner.

When it comes to spending, we have a burning platform.

Last year the economy shrunk by one per cent, even as the population grew slightly thanks to births and inbound migration. This year the Government is planning to borrow $17 billion, about $10 billion is for interest on debt, and we’ll have to pay interest on that debt the following year. Next year, government debt will exceed $200 billion.

There lots of reasons why this situation will get harder.

We’ve claimed an exclusive economic zone of four million square kilometres by drawing a circle around every offshore island we could name. We spend less than one per cent of GDP defending it, while our only ally, across the ditch, spends twice that.

Put another way, we’re a country whose government gives out $45 billion in payments each year but spends only $3.2 billion defending the place. Does that sound prudent to you? Doubling defense would cost another $3.2 billion per year, effectively paying more for what we already have. We may face pressure to do just that thanks to US foreign policy.

There’s a tail wind on balancing the books, and it’s affecting every developed country, our population is ageing faster than it’s growing.

Every year around 60,000 people turn sixty-five and become eligible for a pension. To the taxpayer, superannuation expenses increase by $1.4 billion each year.

Healthcare spending has gone from $20 billion to $30 billion in five years, but people are so dissatisfied that healthcare is now the third biggest political issue. Put it another way, we are now spending nearly $6,000 per citizen on healthcare.

How many people here would give up their right to the public healthcare system if they got $6,000 for their own private insurance? Should we allow people to opt out of the public healthcare system, and take their portion of funding with them so they can go private?

Education is similar. We spend $20 billion of taxpayer money every year, and every year 60,000 children are born. By my count that’s $333,000 of lifetime education spending for each citizen.

How many people would take their $333,000 and pay for their own education? How many young New Zealanders would be better off if they did it that way?

Instead of spending next year because we did it this year, we need to ask ourselves, if we want to remain a first world country, then do New Zealanders get a return on this spending that justifies taking the money off taxpayers in the first place? If spending doesn’t stack up, it should stop so we can repay debt or spend the money on something that does.

Then there’s the $570 billion, over half a trillion dollars of assets, the government owns. The one thing we know from state houses, hospital projects, and farms with high levels of animal death, is that the government is hopeless at owning things.

But did you know you own Quotable Value, a property valuation company chaired by a former race relations conciliator that contracts to the government of New South Wales?

What about 60,000 homes? The government doesn’t need to own a home to house someone. We know this because it also spends billions subsidising people to live in homes it doesn’t own. On the other hand, the taxpayer is paying $10 billion a year servicing debt, and the KiwiBuild and Kainga Ora debacles show the government should do as little in housing as possible.

There are greater needs for government capital. We haven’t built a harbour crossing for nearly seven decades. Four hundred people die every year on a substandard road network. Beaches around here get closed thanks to sewerage overflow, but we need more core infrastructure. Sections of this city are being red zoned from having more homes built because the council cannot afford the pipes and pumping stations.

We need to get past squeamishness about privatisation and ask a simple question: if we want to be a first world country, then are we making the best use of the government’s half a trillion dollars’ plus worth of assets? If something isn’t getting a return, the government should sell it so we can afford to buy something that does.

Finally, there’s regulation. That is placing restrictions on the use and exchange of property that the government doesn’t own or hasn’t taxed off the people who earned it already. That is, your property. Bad regulation is killing our prosperity in three ways.

It adds costs to the things we do. It’s the delays, the paperwork, and the fees that make too many activities cost more than they ought to. It’s the builder saying it takes longer to get the consent than it took to build the thing. It’s the anti-money laundering palaver that ties people in knots doing basic things but somehow doesn’t stop criminals bringing in half a billion dollars of P each year. It’s the daycare centre that took four years to open because different departments couldn’t agree about the road noise outside. I could go on all afternoon.

Then there’s the things that just don’t happen because people decide the costs don’t add up once the red tape is factored in.

Then there’s the big one that goes to the heart of our identity and culture. It’s all the kids who grow up in a country where people gave up or weren’t allowed to try. It’s the climbing wall at Sir Edmund Hillary’s old school with signs saying don’t climb. It’s the lack of nightlife because it’s too hard to get a license. It’s the fear that comes from worrying WorkSafe or some other regulator will come and shut you down. You can’t measure it, but we all know it’s there.

The Kiwi spirit we are so proud of is being chipped away and killing our vibe. Nobody migrated here to be compliant, but compliance is infantilising our culture, and I haven’t even mentioned orange cones yet.

If we want to remain first world, we need to change how we regulate. No law should be passed without showing what problem is being solved, whether the benefits outweigh the costs, and who pays the costs and gets the benefits. These are the basic principles of the Regulatory Standards Bill that the Government will pass this year.

Conclusion

Of course, the Government IS doing many things that will change how it operates. There is a drive to reduce waste. There is a drive to get more money from overseas investment. The Regulatory Standards Bill will change how we regulate. The Resource Management Act is being replaced. Anti-money laundering laws are being simplified. Charter schools are opening, more roads are being built. These are all good things.

But make no mistake, our country has always been the site of a battle between two tribes. The effect of emigration, and the world faced by young New Zealanders risks creating a permanent majority for mediocrity. Our country is at a tipping point.

We need honest conversations about why government spends, owns, and regulates, and whether those policies are good enough to secure our future as a first world nation.

You may have seen the ACT Party has been involved in a battle to define the principles of the Treaty democratically. It’s caused quite a stir. If you missed it, please check out treaty.nz where we outline what it’s about. It may still succeed this time, or it may be one of those bills that simply breaks the ground so something like it can proceed in the future.

Either way, the tribe of change makers has a voice. People who want equal rights for all New Zealanders to be treated with respect and dignity because they’re citizens have a position that others need to refute. Good luck to them arguing against equal rights.

It also shows something else, that ACT is the party prepared to stand up when it’s not easy and it’s not popular. That’s exactly the type of party our country needs in our Government.

To all the Change Makers who proudly put us there, thank you, and no matter how daunting this tipping point may feel, together we can ensure our best days are still ahead of us.

Source: ACT Party

ACT is welcoming a renewed economic focus for the science and innovation sector, including the abolition of Callaghan Innovation.

“ACT has long advocated for abolishing Callaghan Innovation, which effectively gambled with taxpayer money and was responsible for a litany of failed investments in ventures that delivered little more a than a few photo-ops for politicians,” says ACT Science and Innovation spokesperson Dr Parmjeet Parmar.

Functions of Callaghan Innovation will now be either disestablished or folded into other parts of the government, with ‘an increased focus on economic outcomes’.

“ACT expects that any ongoing innovation grants will be closely monitored for performance,” says Dr Parmar. “In fact, we say that if a scientific venture has an obvious commercial application, it should not be supported by the taxpayer and instead seek investment from the private sector.

“ACT also welcomes moves to bolster intellectual property so scientists reap more of the proceeds of their own research. A property rights framework is the best way to celebrate our brightest scientists while incentivising them to pursue high-value research that grows the economy.

“The merger of underperforming Crown Research Institutes is a good move, as in some cases there was wasteful duplication of activity. Having taxpayers own both Metservice and NIWA, which competed against each other, was absurd.

“A more complex challenge will be to ensure the new Public Research Organisations collaborate with the private sector. Private businesses should feel free to approach these organisations for assistance with innovation, without having to fear their ideas will be taken by what is in some ways a taxpayer-funded competitor.”

Source: ACT Party

Responding to new data confirming inflation is sitting at 2.2 per cent, within the official target range, ACT Leader David Seymour says:

“At the height of Labour’s lock-down and spend-up reign, inflation hit 7.2 per cent. When our Government was elected it was still 5.6 per cent. Getting spending under control is a long hard slog, and we still have work to do.

“Non-tradeable inflation was 4.5 per cent for the year, the lowest since 2021. Encouragingly, non-tradeable inflation was only 0.7 per cent for the quarter, suggesting it is slowing down fast.

“Continued discipline by Government and Councils will be essential to get local inflation under control, we cannot rely on low oil prices to control inflation in our troubled world.

“ACT remains ever vigilant of the inflation monster. The Government needs to forge ahead in its work to cancel spending programmes that are not making New Zealand richer.

“As mortgages come up for renewal, households will see real relief, and savings will be passed on to local businesses who can in turn invest and employ. That’s how we return to real prosperity and real hope.

“Perhaps the most important thing we can do to win the war on inflation is to grow the economy. I’ll be addressing this challenge in my State of the Nation speech on Friday.

“We also need an upgrade in how we get inflation data. The Stats NZ figure of 2.2 is for the months of October-December last year, implying a midpoint of November. Real time figures from GDP Live’s inflation tracker, based on continuous data from business, suggest the figure is now 2.06 per cent.

“It is time to make better use of this world-leading data source, inflation is likely even more under control than official figures suggest.”

Source: ACT Party

The Haps

Sold out. Normally we’d be spruiking tickets for ACT’s State of the Nation event this Friday, but it sold out last week. Free Press will be reporting on the event next Monday.

The Regulatory Standards Bill

Over the summer the left have have got themselves into a lather about the Regulatory Standards Bill. As hard left Auckland Law Professor Jane Kelsey helpfully explained, the Bill is “basically about the protection of private property and wealth” (she meant this as a criticism).

The Herald helpfully ran an excellent column about the Bill by David Seymour on Friday. We thought it was worth reprinting here.

In a nutshell: If red tape is holding us back, because politicians find regulating politically rewarding, then we need to make regulating less rewarding for politicians with more sunlight on their activities. That is how the Regulatory Standards Bill will help New Zealand get its mojo back.

Sometimes New Zealand is all milk and honey. Other times you can sense widespread frustration that things could be better.

Our country is in one of those times where we need to choose how we proceed.

We cannot change our size, or the impact of the world’s largest economies. We can’t change our underlying history or culture, and we cannot quickly change our levels of education. What we can change is our policies.

As 1970s Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk is often quoted, people everywhere need “someone to love, somewhere to live, somewhere to work, and something to hope for”. It is still good advice for the success of any country.

I believe people are leaving because they feel let down. They’ve done their homework, got the grades, worked hard and saved money. And yet, life remains harder here than other places they could be.

Bad regulation is at the heart of this. Make no mistake, in a country where you’re free to do as you please unless there’s a law against it, every extra law is a restriction on your basic freedoms, and I hear about it in nearly every field.

There are builders who’ll tell you it takes longer to get permission than to build something. One person recently wrote to me saying, “The thing that I have learned is that everything that we want to do is not trusted by the council, yet everything that the council does we are supposed to trust”. No wonder we are short of affordable housing.

New Zealand has lost a fortune to earthquake regulations in the past decade, because politicians thought, or should I say felt, more restrictions were the right thing to do after the Canterbury quakes.

And yet, fewer than 500 people have died from earthquakes in the history of our country. That’s about as many as die from cancer every three weeks, but we can’t afford all the drugs they need. Hmmm.

It will help us get our mojo back as a country, because we’ll be able to spend more time doing useful work, and less time complying with the powers that be for little reason.

It goes on, people in finance face endless red tape thought to prevent them from giving out loans to people who cannot repay them. Somewhere the regulators missed that the whole point of the finance industry is not to lose money by giving loans people cannot repay.

Educators say they only want to help children grow to their potential but spend far too much time on bureaucracy. Generations of politicians and bureaucrats with little understanding of their work felt making another rule was the right thing to do, and workers face the accumulation of their efforts.

Bad regulation doesn’t just add cost to the things we do, it stops us doing things we’d otherwise do.

Whole projects don’t happen because they’re just too hard. Property developers have told me they turn down proposals to build more homes after adding up the regulatory costs, and a shortage of housing is one of our biggest national problems.

It’s not just the workplace and the housing market that are affected by overregulation, it’s our culture.

At the school where Sir Edmund Hillary learned to climb, the climbing walls have health and safety notices saying “do not climb”. Much loved community events such as parades cannot go ahead thanks to the absurd cost of planning something that never caused a problem before.

Into all this comes the Regulatory Standards Bill.

It requires politicians and officials to ask and answer certain questions before they place restrictions on citizens’ freedoms. What problem are we trying to solve? What are the costs and benefits? Who pays the costs and gets the benefits? What restrictions are being placed on the use and exchange of private property?

The law doesn’t stop politicians or their officials making bad laws. They can still make rules that don’t solve any obvious problem, whose costs exceed their benefits, whose costs fall unfairly on some at the expense of others, and that destroy people’s right to property.

They can do all of that, but the Regulatory Standards Bill makes it transparent that they’re doing it. It makes it easier for voters to identify those responsible for making bad rules. Over time, it will improve the quality of rules we all have to live under by changing how politicians behave.

It does that by requiring a rigorous statement setting out how a rule will meet the standards, or why it is being passed despite not meeting them.

People affected by bad laws will be able to appeal to a Regulatory Standards Board, made up of people who understand regulatory economics. That board will be able to make non-binding declarations on whether the law was made well, further turning up the heat on bad lawmaking.

It will help us get our mojo back as a country, because we’ll be able to spend more time doing useful work, and less time complying with the powers that be for little reason.

We’ll see more homes, more jobs, more community, and more hope – Kirk’s prescription for a better country.