OPINION
Phil Green
Today (Monday 2nd) I listened to David Seymour on the NewstalkZB segment with Jamie MacKay, where Jamie does a brilliant bi-partisan job each week giving time for politicians to say their piece. He gives airtime to Chris Hipkins, Damien O’Connor, Chris Luxon, Seymour, Winston Peters and Shane Jones, and last but not least, James Shaw, co-leader of the Green party. (Hands up anyone who knows who James Shaw is).
Needless to say, James Shaw’s been missing in action for the past few weeks, whereas earlier he did front up and despite his questionable qualifications, he always did an equitable job explaining his death by a thousand cuts to farmers, with – it can only be imagined from an audio – a straight face. His farmer listeners, not so much.
Anyhow, today’s highlight was the first interview at 12:15pm with David Seymour, who, despite my best efforts, I always picture wearing shorts. He talked the talk as we know he can, and spoke intelligently about a variety of topics until we got to the needless elephant in the room. Can he bury the hatchet with Winston Peters, other than between his shoulder blades?
This of course is just a dreamed-up straw man by the leftist media, and while Seymour has gone out of his way to downplay (should I say, demonise?) working with Winston (which may be grist for the mill with many BFD ex-NZ Firsters), Seymour, after all the hype, is a pragmatist. I believe him when he says he’s not interested in the baubles of power, but I sense that even David knows this election is a seminal moment in our history, and he’s smart enough not to want to be remembered for throwing his toys out of the cot as New Zealand burned.
The media are salivating about telling their slender few recipients that David can’t work with Winston, and that’s good enough reason to vote for Marama and the only slightly crazier Rawiri because those two at least won’t argue about what New Zealand will look like after they’ve forced all the colonialists to leave.
Back to David Seymour. I know he’s not Hitler, he’s not within the square yards of sounding like Hitler (just don’t mention the euthanasia and pro-abortion), but he’s smack on the money for repeating ad nauseam like Hitler, that if you tell a lie often enough it will be believed. I’m paraphrasing, but it got me wondering why he keeps going on about, “To know someone’s future, just look at their past actions.”
Seymour repeated this mantra repeatedly to Jamie MacKay whenever he had the chance: to judge Winston by his past. That’s fair enough, and I expect a deluge of comments enforcing that. But, as Winston would tell you himself, he held very reliable coalitions together with Helen Clark and Jim Bolger, and dare I say it, with Jacinda Adern until 2020, which was an amicable parting of ways.
Winston is the only person in New Zealand politics to have successfully used MMP in our country’s history to garner support from those otherwise feeling disenfranchised by the larger parties.
As a smaller player, a minority party in a bigger system, this is no mean feat.
David Seymour will learn what it’s like to eat an elephant in the room, one piece at a time.