What would a set of ACT ministers in Cabinet look like?
ACT at 15% of the vote, with about 15 MPs, and wild policies, makes for a set of strong reasons to get out and vote against ACT and National this election.
Making an assumption only ACT and National are required to form a government in October, this is what ACT taking Ministerial positions could look like for New Zealand.
At 15% of the vote there’s a reasonable case for David Seymour as Deputy Prime Minister. Every time the Prime Minister is overseas, David Seymour is going to be running Cabinet and running the country. Think about that.
But for now let’s assume he reaches for a star and falls on a cloud.
Let’s assume some of the existing Cabinet Ministerial position groupings remain.
Let’s also assume for this exercise that a Prime Minister Luxon gives some credence to qualifications and experience for ministers. So here we go:
1. David Seymour: Minister of Regulatory Reform, Workplace Relations, Minister of State Services
This is the set of positions Seymour will need to really cut through the public service and to disestablish the agencies he wants gone. He will count it a success when the ‘population-based’ entities like Ethnic Affairs, Women’s Affairs, Pacific Affairs, Maori Development, Maori Language Commission, anything specific to protecting a sector of the population such as Disabilities or the Human Rights Commission is eradicated. A further target will be the Treaty of Waitangi itself and whether he gets his referendum on a new statutory meaning about the effects of the Treaty via Jeremy Bentham.
I would expect he will have a strong hand in appointing the new State Services Commissioner or indeed whether State Services survives at all.
I would expect a hard line target in the 2024 Budget for decreased public servant head count.
It is also the position to gut the many worker protections that Labour have built in over 6 years. A real question will be whether things like Matariki survive, or paid parental leave extensions, or sick leave and meal breaks, or maximum hours her day worked, or other multiple basic rights are kept.
2. Brooke van Velden: Leader of the House, Minister of Housing
Brooke has no Housing background, but plenty of chops in the machinery of Parliament both as lobbyist and as legislator. She is due to take on a serious portfolio. If Brooke got Housing we should expect to see a rapid gutting of Kainga Ora staff and organisation, stopping any remaining masterplanned developments to replace it with pure market delivery, a rapid selloff of current state housing, and gutting the Building Act and the Building and Natural Resources Act to be replaced with much more limited contractual forms of property management.
We don’t have to guess what this will do for vulnerable families, vulnerable elderly couples, and vulnerable young people trying to find a safe place to live.
As Leader of the House she becomes the bulldog that pushes ACT’s aggressive legislative agenda.
3. Todd Stephenson. Minister of Energy and Resources, Associate Finance
Todd is the truest expression of high corporate values, now inserted into Queenstown which is now New Zealand’s primary Top 500 gateway for your billionaire class. Strait outa Lumsden, this is the guy you turn to if you want your deals done in government and you want to get rich without dying.
If he gets hold of a section of MBIE such as Energy, expect to see oil rigs and wind farms on our 12 mile limit, fewer constraints to land wind farms, an Infrastructure Commission populated by infrastructure mezzanine finance people that will make it near indistinct from Infratil, and a new focus on intellectual property protection. We have been accustomed over 25 years to having some democratic say in where things go.
We should stop expecting that under ACT energy policy.
4. Simon Court, Attorney General
This is the guy who will push the legislation to gut anything to do with standards such as building standards, water standards, air standards, anything to do with the old RMA. Hand in glove with Andrew Hoggard he will be ripping through environmental constraints we have. Three Waters governance instruments will be revisited, so presumably that means revisiting the other co-governance instruments like all our national parks, Maori MP seats, and Maori local council seats.
The effects of this kind of guy in housing would be similar to Maurice Williamson in leaky housing and Winston Peters in Maori and ethnic relations.
5. Parmeet Parmjar, Minister of Broadcasting, Minister of Research and Science, Minister for Crown Research Entities
With a PHD in biological sciences and food manufacturing, and also some background in a variety of smaller state regulatory functions like Families Commissioner, she has a range of governance and operational experience that will give her free rein to insert ACT sensibility into TVNZ and RNZ, as well as into the research entities and their spinoffs.
6. Andrew Hoggard: Minister of Agriculture, Biosecurity, Land Information, and Export Growth
Hoggard is heavyweight local and international dairy industry leadership, both as Vice President and President of Federated Farmers and elected to the Board of the International Dairy Federation since 2020.
So with a Minister Hoggard we can expect every single one of the Howl of a Protest demands to be met including rolling back protection of remaining wetlands, reintroduction of live animal exports, killing off constraints about fecal coliforms and phosphates into streams, unfettered water take for dairy, removing price setting governance controls over Fonterra, and heading straight back into the New Zealand pattern of volume of milk solids produced rather than value and lower mass.
A Minister Hoggard will target repealing the Natural and Built Environment Act that was passed last month and replaced most of the RMA.
7. Nicole McKee: Minister of Police
A Minister of Police cannot direct the Commissioner of Police and the current Commissioner is not likely to be replaced for some time. The policy contest is in whether McKee as Minister would be faced with the day to day operational threat to Police and to citizens of the firearms New Zealand gangs are using in our towns and cities right now.
A Minister McKee will carry out ACT policy of repealing Labour’s gun laws.
She will also have a lot to do with implementing ACT’s many and exceedingly punitive law and order policies.
New Zealand has only to go back to the Shipley and Ruth Richardson to remember what scale of violence a true ideologically-driven set of ministers can do. It takes decades to repair, and it’s never ever a restoration.
ACT is the strong form of a Shipley-Richardson combination. That’s what to vote against in October.
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