The ACT Party is doing some… interesting things.
Recently ACT announced deputy leader Brooke van Velden is standing against Simon O’Connor in the Tamaki seat. Why do that? That’s a safe seat for National and some are concerned if right voters are splintered, that it raises the possibility of the left getting in. It would have made more sense for ACT to put van Velden into a constituency currently held by the left.
People on all sides of the political aisle were left scratching their heads in disbelief as to why a political party supposedly committed to changing the government at the next election would be trying to oust a fellow opposition MP.
It didn’t take long for the answer to present itself, when Seymour made it clear to the media that O’Connor’s pro-life views on abortion and euthanasia were the reasons he was being targeted for ousting by the ACT party.
It is highly unlikely that ACT can win the Tamaki seat, but that either doesn’t seem to have registered with Seymour, or he is so obsessed with punishing O’Connor for his pro-life views that he’s willing to play egomaniacal games targeting already safe opposition seats.
Daily Examiner
So it seems Seymour isn’t as pro-speech as he proclaims.
And this past weekend:
“If someone can’t be bothered to spend 10 minutes online completing the Census, they shouldn’t be eligible to receive Government benefits. I predict this move will get Census completion rates near 100 per cent overnight,” Seymour said in a statement on Saturday.
Newshub
He went on to criticise the bribe of offering Warriors tickets to people to get them to complete the census, and that’s a perfectly valid complaint – this government seems keen to hand out incentives to coerce people. However, Seymour’s statement that the people who haven’t completed the census are beneficiaries is an assumption, and, I think, an unfair one and unsupported. Many people have chosen not to fill out the census for privacy concerns, for dislike of the gender questions and a general distrust of data manipulation and the government – and those people aren’t on benefits.
Discuss it on The BFD.
