On Tuesday David Seymour kicked the year off for the ACT party. They were kind enough to email a copy of his speech to me in the weekly Free Press and it is breathtaking in its disconnect. Much of the speech is the usual fare – Labour is bad, National hasn’t repealed any Labour stuff (except the super scheme in 1975) in five governments; vote ACT. Mr Seymour then launches into a series of analogies seemingly unaware of his own hypocrisy and cowardice in doing so.
Analogy number one is “….Galileo looked through his telescope and saw Jupiter’s moons. The Church could threaten him all they liked, they might have thought he was an arrogant prick, but their word of God collided with reality...”. OK, fair enough, that is similar to The BFD and various conservative media outlets in America pointing out that a certain vaccine has problems.
So is Mr Seymour really going to stand up in Parliament next week, denounce Pfizer and its vaccine, and quote the tape from Project Veritas?
Is he going to do what Galileo actually did and stand up to the all powerful vested interests? Will he say something along the lines of “call me as many names as you like, comrades, but your word of God collides with reality”? Of course not. He is too weak, too cowardly and too part of the establishment. I won’t flog a dead horse; suffice it to say Ditto his Einstein and Martin Luther King Jr references.
In his speech, he also spoke about ‘reason’ and the Enlightenment which is all good stuff except when someone like Mr Seymour says it.
Will he stand up in Parliament next week and denounce the witchdoctor Maori Science stuff? Did he say at Waitangi the other day, “You people need to abandon this supernatural primitive stuff and get with reason and enlightenment like intelligent folks?” No, of course not. Far better to talk about matters from several hundred years ago and show off his knowledge of history, rather than deal with things that are happening literally today.
I think you get a general idea, dear reader that this chap is fully on board – until he has to be fully on board with something happening now.
He has two answers for everything. One of them is to talk a lot of twaddle about “it will happen if there’s sufficient political will”.
The second thing he does is to say, “Oh, I don’t mind if people call the country Aotearoa,” despite it being offensive to the vast majority. He also once said he didn’t care if people called the country Timbuctoo. He seems to think that it’s okay to offend the 85% majority.
See how this works dear reader? Be under no illusion.
