Right hand man: David Seymour on Te Tiriti, being Deputy PM & Act’s next move

‘Wanker!” The woman has bobbed silver hair and wears designer yoga gear. She has lowered her passenger window and leaned across the seat of her gleaming new Porsche Cayenne hybrid to shout insults at David Seymour, who stands on the side of Parnell Rd speaking to a crowd of his constituents. “Good morning, madam,” Seymour replies brightly, turning to walk towards her, and then, “Perhaps not,” as she raises the window again and glides silently, carbon-lightly, away.

It is just before noon on a glorious mid-autumn Sunday in the Auckland electorate of Epsom, where Seymour has been the local MP for 10 years: he’s on the third of seven street-corner meetings to engage with his constituents. There are a handful of hecklers – it’s only three days since the Treaty Principles Bill was voted down before second reading – but the general mood is one of warm approval. For every insult or blared car horn there are a dozen people yelling, “Good on you, David!” when they spot the Act leader in his natural habitat: the calm, spacious streets of the nation’s wealthiest electorate.

If there’s any unhappiness among the crowds that gather about him – most of whom look like models in an ad for exclusive retirement villages or luxury cruises (white-haired, gleaming teeth, elegant linen shirts), their groomed toy dogs panting gently in the midday warmth – it’s that he hasn’t done enough. There are still too many bureaucrats in Wellington, too many ridiculous zero-carbon laws making life tough for our hard-working farmers, still too many te reo names in government departments.

Seymour pushes back against this last point. He’s learnt some te reo, enough to deliver an address at Waitangi in 2023. “We shouldn’t be afraid of the language,” he gently chides the good people of Epsom, some of whom shuffle back and stare at their feet while others murmur and nod approvingly. A Ferrari glides up to the lights behind him, its engine a deep subsonic rumble, felt rather than heard. Seymour is an admirer of fine automobiles – he sometimes urges audiences, “Vote Act if you love cars” – and he briefly closes his eyes in appreciation then tells his audience, “I’d rather listen to that than to me.”

In the first 18 months of the government he co-leads alongside Christopher Luxon and Winston Peters, Seymour has been one of the most pivotal ministers in a sweeping, fast-moving government. He’s established his Ministry for Regulation and a charter schools agency. He fought a losing battle over his Treaty Principles Bill but looks set to pass his Regulatory Standards Bill, currently the subject of an emergency Waitangi Tribunal hearing; he’s driven reform in Pharmac, the state’s drug-buying agency, undertaken a savings exercise in his capacity as Associate Finance Minister, and tried to roll back school absenteeism and deliver cheaper school lunches.

The latter project has not been a triumph – schools and parents outraged over late or inedible meals, a major provider placed into liquidation, the Auditor-General announcing an inquiry. Seymour insists history will judge it well. “Half the price and the delivery will be slightly better than we had before.” He wants to reform both the structure of cabinet and the public sector, describing the crown’s ministerial portfolios as bloated, filled with meaningless titles. And on June 1, he’ll replace Winston Peters as Deputy Prime Minister.

The Listener asked Seymour in his Beehive office: does the title of Deputy Prime Minister actually mean anything? Or is it just a legacy of an era when the head of government would spend three months overseas travelling to London and back, and the deputy ran the country?

“It means everything and it means nothing,” he replies. “Everything in the sense that it shows in this country you can be a bit quirky, but if you have a good heart and you put in the work – which are three claims I would make for myself – that you can actually succeed in what you do, and I think it is a success to hold that position.

“It’s also, in many ways, nothing, because functionally, I remain one of 20 people around the cabinet table, and my efforts are still on regulation, education, finance and health. My portfolios don’t change.” Will the position mean a strategic shift? A more statesman-like Seymour? There will be “a continuation of a shift that’s been happening for a long time. If you look at the kind of politician I was at 31, first elected to Epsom, versus at 41, becoming the Deputy PM, I take stuff a lot more seriously than I would have 10 years ago, and that change continues.”