I get the feeling that David Seymour has decided to model himself on Winston Peters.
Peters has made a career of saying really outlandish news worthy quotes and getting publicity for them. It appears that Seymour is attempting to do the same.
It is one of the features of MMP and the way that some minor parties behave that they can say something that 90% of the population disagrees with and only 10% agree with but this is a win. 10% of the votes in an MMP election gets you a lot of seats in Parliament.
And Seymour and Act have been cultivating the red neck racist vote with a passion recently.
Yesterday he hit a new low, when he hinted at the Ministry of Pacific Peoples should be blown up.
in my fantasy we’d send a guy called Guy Fawkes in [to the ministry] and it’d be all over”.
This is terrifingly Trumpian. The Orange buffoon often says the most outlandish things and the problem is that some of his goons will then go out and try and do what he has hinted at.
National Leader Christopher Luxon has attempted to distance himself from Seymour’s outburst. Sort of.
“I don’t agree with that, right?” said Luxon when the comments were raised by an audience member at [a recent] meeting. “The point is I’m not the leader of the Act Party, I’m the leader of the National Party … Don’t imbue me with comments from him.”
He may be the leader of a different party but those parties are joined at the hip. National has had Act on life support for a long period of time just so it could maximise the right’s representation in Parliament.
And they have the same donors. My standards are very low when it comes to Luxon but I expected him to say something stronger than what he did say.
Carmel Sepuloni and Golriz Ghahraman have responded in a more direct manner than Luxon was able to. From Newshub:
Deputy Prime Minister Carmel Sepuloni said the comments were unnecessary.
“This is so typical of David Seymour, particularly with Pasifika and Māori, just constantly race baiting and causing division where it doesn’t need to happen,” she said.
Government agencies representing certain groups in society are there because “clearly inequities still exist”.
Sepuloni argued representative agencies are “really important.”
Green Party MP Golriz Ghahraman also took a swipe at Seymour.
“Just a man who received donations from known white supremacists making a ‘joke’ about his fantasy to bomb brown people institutions,” she tweeted.
I am confident that this will blow up in Seymour’s face. This sort of violent base rhetoric should cost.
I can sense the good people of South and West Auckland and Porirua of Pacific background stirring and getting ready to vote. In seeking to court the racist vote this time Seymour has overstepped the mark.
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