Greg Dixon’s Another kind of politics: If David Seymour were truly a reasonable man, he would kill the bill

Greg Dixon’s Another Kind of Politics is a weekly column that appears on listener.co.nz on Friday mornings. If you enjoy a “serious laugh” - and complaining about politics and politicians - you’ll enjoy reading Greg’s latest grievances.

What do you reckon Act leader David Seymour spent the most time doing on Tuesday? Making his blink-and-you-missed-it visit to the ebullient, thousands-strong hīkoi against his unprincipled Treaty Principles Bill? Or, say, making a cuppa, and admiring himself in a mirror?

We will never know. And really, we don’t want to know. But this we can say: The person ultimately most responsible for bringing all those people to the steps of Parliament this week, spent as little as five minutes in the company of the biggest hīkoi in at least a generation, all the while surrounded by a phalanx of cops.

In a stroke of luck, five minutes proved just enough time for Seymour to record a social media video to prove to his supporters what a brave soldier he was facing down the hordes. Then he and his creepy caucus retreated indoors again.

The caption of this video is “Facing the hīkoi.” This was observably true. He was undeniably facing towards the hīkoi, though symbolically and politically he was looking the other way.

His caption didn’t tell the whole story, either. What it should have said was “Very briefly facing the hīkoi before demonstrating my hilariously appalling pronunciation of te reo, even though I claim to ‘whakapapa Māori’, while also having myself filmed for my socials while pretending I’m not at all intimidated by what I have wrought”. That’d have been more accurate, if rather less pithy.

Actually, the real highlight of the clip, at least for keen observers of body language, was his strange little wave to the crowd. He looked, for all the world, like some 19th-century missionary, unsure if he had just arrived at a village full of cannibals.

Still, on a day of grand and historic political theatre, with Te Pāti Māori, Labour and the Greens milking the show of dissent for all it was worth, Seymour had to show up, even if it was only for five minutes. Being little David appearing to stand up to the baying crowd’s Goliath was all part of his plan.

During these past months, Seymour, a cunning provocateur and very experienced political operator, has been meticulously constructing a false narrative whereby he is the lone “reasonable man” in the increasing fractious argument that he himself has generated about the Treaty of Waitangi.