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Politics | ACT Party

ACT launches campaign, announces new policy, targets co-governance, te reo, treaty

By Bridie Witton and Shilpy Arora, Stuff

ACT Party leader David Seymour has painted his party as the one to unite the nation under equal opportunities in a speech which hit out against Wellington bureaucrats, red tape, and accused the government of accelerating the “drift towards separatism”.

Seymour announced a policy to create a new minister and Ministry of Regulation to police red tape, and create a new law which would make sure regulation is underpinned by lawmaking principles, during a rally in Auckland.

Support for the libertarian has been growing, and his party has been gaining a firmer footing as the main contender for a coalition deal with the National Party after October’s election.

Seymour foreshadowed his party could double its share of the vote in the next election during the sold-out campaign launch at the 700-seat SkyCity theatre.

The party has jumped in the polls, sitting at 12.7% in the latest political poll. It got 7.6% of the vote in the 2020 election, a significant boost from the 2017 election where it only got 0.5%.

His speech amplified his deputy leader, Brooke van Velden, and other MPs by emphasising their life outside politics, before launching into a critique of the high costs for food and fuel, crime, and co-governance - which he said was “dividing Kiwis in everyday life”.

“On councils there are seats reserved. Even real estate agents apparently need to be re-educated in te ao Māori.”

He said Māori language had been “weaponised as a tool the minority forces on the majority in every forum, no matter how impractical, just to prove their political point”.

“They never asked. Nobody would agree if they did. It won’t take us anywhere good, and it must end now.”

He touched on the pressure the health system is under, and said truancy was the “biggest long-term danger” to the country.

“Those kids are enroled, but they aren’t regularly attending. A much worse problem is this: [the] nearly 10,000 school-aged kids who are not even enroled at a school. If the schools don’t enrol them, I will you one thing for sure – the gangs will.”

He blamed both the Labour Government and previous National government for the nation’s economic fortunes, and said his party would seriously cut any wasteful spending by assessing each year which policies and departments were performing well.

“Every year [the] Government should ask if this activity or department didn’t exist today, could we justify starting it up? If not, it should stop.”

He promised to overhaul the Resource Management Act, based on property rights, and rehashed policies to increase prison capacity, transfer youth justice from Oranga Tamariki to Corrections, and take any reference to the Treaty of Waitangi from all legislation before again accusing Labour of dividing New Zealand.

“People are asked to pick a side between tangata whenua and tangata tiriti, without any middle ground,” he said.

“Labour have accelerated the drift towards separatism with their constant insertion of race-based policy into everything from Three Waters’ governance to resource management.”

Seymour then outlined his party’s stance on healthcare, and slammed the abolishment of district health boards and centralisation of the health system.

”Labour’s insane idea to blow up the health system in the middle of a pandemic hasn’t helped anybody,” he said.

His party would make Pharmac, the medicine buying agency, look at the risk of not funding a drug, he said.

It would also shift the mental health budget to the Mental Health Commission, and set up Mental Health and Addictions New Zealand, one agency which would would have the sole job of evaluating what works, he said.

He promised to use more private surgeries, better funding for GPs, and using public-private partnerships to build more health facilities.

On education, he claimed charter schools were the answer to improving outcomes, with more trust placed onto educators.

“In every area that troubles New Zealand, the pattern is the same. The problem is decades in the making. Labour is promising to make it worse faster. National are promising not to rock the boat or scare the horses. Only ACT is promising real change and real solutions.”

The party has already laid out a policy to increase the superannuation age to 67 by 2035, by raising it by two months each year, as well as plans to cut taxes by $34 billion over four years.

It would also set up only two tax rates – with those earning up to $70,000 paying 17.5% income tax and those earning anything above paying 28% income tax.