2026-10-22

Anna @ AMassive

The Rubbish Reckons of David Seymour

One honking train. One millionaire threatening to leave. One beneficiary stoned in bed. How David Seymour turns a single story into a reason to tear up the rules, and what the numbers say instead 

Originally posted for feedback on r/NZPolitics October 14 2026

Last night

I have spent more hours thinking about David Seymour in the last 18 hours than a woman should. I am not well.

The multi-party debate did it. Tova O’Brien in the chair. Five leaders all arriving in character, Seymour jokey, blokey, plain-spoken. A voice pitched so carefully low and so carefully loose you can hear the mirror it was rehearsed in.

Then he stiltedly quoted Kate Sheppard.

My fifteen-year-old, from the couch: “Oh, he’s a feminist now.”

So proud.

(He’s done this before. In 2023 he told a business audience Sheppard would probably have voted ACT. Nelson Mandela too, apparently. The dead make excellent constituents. They never correct you.)

Then Tova asked whether he’d accept a knighthood. He stalled. The audience laughed. Then: “I’ve never thought about it, to be honest.”

Never. Not once. To be honest.

Hold that thought.

A bloke in Levin

Every politician tells stories. The pensioner who can’t pay the power bill. The tradie buried in paperwork. The nurse on her third double. Every party does it, in speeches, in press releases, in the news soundbite.

It works because we are built for story over statistics. One face beats a thousand data points. Specificity makes a claim feel true: a name, a town, a detail.

It works even better here. New Zealand’s size makes the story plausible. MPs really do turn up everywhere: the school gala, the New World carpark, the RSA. Everyone has met one. Our culture is surface-level egalitarian, leaning anti-intellectual and anti-bureaucrat. We are suspicious of anyone who sounds like they’ve read the report. And we want to believe our MPs are out there, talking to real people.

So when a politician says “a bloke in Levin told me”, we nod. Of course he did.

Nobody goes viral reading a RIS

Coupla problems with that…

The first is what the story is for. An anecdote can be a shield: a human face held up in front of a policy built on evidence, so you can see who it’s for. The left tends to use it that way. Or it can be a hammer. The story doesn’t illustrate the evidence. It replaces it. Swung hard enough, it knocks down the advice, the data and the rule. That’s how the right tends to use it.

Government is meant to change things on the basis of need, priority and fact. Someone in a department goes and finds out what is happening, how often, to whom, and what it costs. That work produces departmental advice, empirical data and Regulatory Impact Statements. None of it is sexy. None of it fits in a soundbite. Nobody has ever gone viral reading out a RIS.

A good anecdote doesn’t have to beat that evidence. It just has to make it look like it was written by people who’ve never been outside.

The second problem is that the stories aren’t always found. They’re usually curated. Focus groups test individual names, professions and scenarios to see which character best weaponises an argument. The solo mum. The small business owner. The farmer at the gate. Notice how often the person in the story is exactly the person the policy needs.

Ka kite

Seymour’s favourite story is the one where somebody walks out the door.

Taking a crack at the Greens’ economic plan, he told of a successful business owner who employs hundreds and had asked him to pass on a message. The man couldn’t afford half a million dollars more tax under Green policies, and he’d leave if they got in. Seymour says he put it to Marama Davidson, and she beamed: “ka kite”.

Look at how the story is built. Three beats.

A man who creates jobs. That’s the anchor: he’s one of the good guys.

Who can’t afford $500,000 more tax. That’s the wound: it sounds like a crushing bill.

So he’ll leave, and take the jobs with him. That’s the threat.

It’s a hostage note. Tax him and the workers get it.

Now run the numbers the story leaves out. Under the Greens’ 2026 plan, company tax rises from 28% to 33%, but only for businesses turning over more than $30 million a year. That’s about 0.7% of firms. To owe an extra $500,000 at five extra points, the company needs about $10 million in profit. Not turnover. Profit, after every wage and every bill is paid. (And strictly, it’s the company that pays company tax, not him.)

Or try the wealth tax: 2.5% a year on net assets above $10 million, family home excluded. To owe $500,000, he’d need $20 million above the threshold. Call it $30 million in net worth.

Either way, this isn’t a man struggling to keep the lights on. It’s a man being asked to pay a little more on a very big number.

That’s the trick. Give the bill, hide the base. Half a million sounds like a catastrophe. Five cents in the dollar on ten million sounds like a tax.

The train horn

David Seymour loves an anecdote. Everyone uses them. He uses them differently. Not to make you feel something. To make a rule look stupid, so he can get rid of it.

As Minister for Regulation he runs a ministry built for hunting red tape, complete with a tip line. The method rarely changes. Find one absurd-sounding rule. Tell it well. Let it stand in for the whole system.

The most famous example is the train.

In 2024, announcing his new ministry’s first sector review, early childhood education, Seymour said centres were writing reports and plans about absurd things. Apples falling from a tree in the playground. A first aid certificate hung on the wrong side of the doorframe. And a train driver who honks at the children every morning as he passes, to their delight and to the dismay of the “noise pollution police”.

It’s a lovely story. You can hear the horn. You can see the kids at the fence.

Here’s what the story leaves out. A centre beside a live rail line has to check two things: that the noise keeps sleep rooms within decibel limits, and that the fence keeps toddlers off the tracks. That isn’t the noise pollution police. That’s naptime and a fence.

And no centre has ever been closed because a driver tooted at the kids. Sector analysts went looking.

Like a train horn, an anecdote is short, sharp and impossible to ignore. It gets the airtime.

Which way the scale tips

This is where style becomes method.

When a story helps him, one story is evidence. When the evidence doesn’t, it’s process: bureaucrats, paperwork, people who’ve never run a business. His libertarian programme arrives dressed as ordinary Kiwi nous.

Watch the scale. One honking train proves the system is broken. Tens of thousands of submissions against his Regulatory Standards Bill were “bots”. His own ministry called the Treaty Principles Bill consultation insufficient; he called it adequate. Academics who criticised the bill became anecdotes themselves: “Victim of the Day” on Facebook, name and photo.

The rule isn’t trust the people. It’s trust the people who agree with me.

And it’s not just him… It’s the house style. ACT’s Karen Chhour repealed section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act, the duty to reduce disparities for tamariki Māori in care, on the strength of a case she cited. Her own department found no evidence 7AA had driven those decisions, and said repeal wouldn’t fix the problem. At the Waitangi Tribunal, Crown witnesses confirmed there was no empirical case. It passed anyway, in April 2025.

ACT pre-Seymour (2014) used to talk about Māori. Now it talks about the Treaty. Only the vocabulary has moved.

Still punching down.

Get stoned, stay in bed

Last night came with a live demonstration. National has promised random drug tests for people on Jobseeker. Asked which leaders backed it, Seymour was the only one who put his hand up.

Odd, for a libertarian. The man who wants the state out of your business, your paperwork and your playground apple tree wants it watching you pee in a cup.

His reason wasn’t a principle. It was a character. He said he had to stand up for the hardworking taxpayers who get up, pass their drug tests, and end up paying for the ones who stay in bed getting stoned.

You can picture him. That’s the point. You’re meant to.

Here’s the number he didn’t bring. In the year to June 2018, when jobseekers were referred to jobs that required a drug test, 170 out of 47,115 failed. That count includes the no-shows.

One in about 277.

And the workers he invokes, the ones who do get tested? Forestry. Construction. Trucking. The mill. They are not, by and large, the people who send him back to Epsom. He borrows their grievance and aims it one rung down. It’s an old trick. It works because the story is vivid and the statistic is dull.

A few choice anecdotes

His tool of choice is the rubbish reckon. Delivered with a grin, in a blokey voice, cut to thirty seconds, in a country small enough to believe it.

So here are a few choice anecdotes for you too, David.

A train horn that turned out to be naptime and a fence.

A half-million-dollar tax bill on ten million in profit.

A drug test that 170 people out of 47,115 failed.

Has he thought about any of it? The evidence. The people at the far end of the hammer.

Never, to be honest.

Sources

r/nzpolitics - The Rubbish Reckons of David Seymour

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