ANALYSIS: Today, as Winston Peters hands the Deputy Prime Minister baton to David Seymour, John Campbell questions the two complex political survivors about their motives and goals.
Watch John Campbell’s interviews with David Seymour and Winston Peters, both on TVNZ+.
Today a small but unprecedented ceremony is occurring at Government House, Auckland which is (aptly) in Epsom.
A day that began with Winston Peters as Deputy Prime Minister will end with David Seymour leaving that stately home in possession of the same title.
This has never happened before. A mid-term switch between the leaders of the two smaller coalition partners, in our first ever, formal, three-party coalition government.
Winston Peters says going first as Deputy PM before David Seymour now lets him work towards the next election. (Source: TVNZ)
In the words of the beloved A.A. Milne poem, recited to me so often during my childhood:
They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace
Christopher Luxon went down with Alice.
Or something like that.
It was all so prosaic when it was announced. National’s coalition agreement with New Zealand First simply specifies, “Rt Hon Winston Peters as Deputy Prime Minister until 31 May 2025.” And National’s coalition agreement with Act asserts: “David Seymour as Deputy Prime Minister from 31 May 2025.”
“Until” and “from”. Goodness. For a glorious few hours, we may have had two deputy PMs.
But the deputy-to-deputy conjuring trick contains meaning beyond precedent.
Firstly, it lengthens the leash on Winston Peters – and the longer the leash the happier the Winston.
Secondly, it attaches to David Seymour historical (perhaps now anachronistic?) conventions about the way deputy prime ministers are supposed (or expected) to behave.
For the former, this is an unshackling. For the latter, what?
How will David Seymour resond to being deputy PM? How will Winston Peters respond to not being Deputy PM?
I asked each of them that question, or variations of it, during the buildup to their positional change.
I spoke to Winston Peters on the May 19 and David Seymour the next day. One in the old Parliament buildings. One in the Beehive.
We wanted to hear from them both, outgoing and incoming, so we recorded interviews with each of them, which you can now watch on TVNZ+.
Later in this piece, I’ll write about those interviews and what they reveal about political journalism in a world in which the Act Party has its own YouTube series entitled “David vs The Media”.
The remarkably reliable return of Winston Peters
But first, Winston Peters, whose third time as Deputy Prime Minister has now come to an end.
Peters is arguably (surely?) the most successful anti-establishment politician this country has ever seen. So successful, in fact, that he’s regularly rewarded for it by being elected to precisely the establishment his supporters love him to oppose. And then, because anti is anti and “in” is not, he’s seemingly punished for having been there.
It’s happened again and again: In 1999, after being Deputy Prime Minister under Jim Bolger then Jenny Shipley, New Zealand First were only returned to Parliament courtesy of Winston Peters somehow retaining the Tauranga electorate by just 63 votes. (To put this in context, the party had received 276,000 party votes in 1996 and 88,000 in 1999. That’s a drop of two-thirds, in a single term.)
Again, in 2008, after a supply and confidence deal with Helen Clark and Labour, Winston Peters and New Zealand First were voted out of Parliament.
In 2020, after being Deputy PM under Jacinda Ardern, Winston Peters and New Zealand First were voted out of Parliament once more.
Time and time again, “see ya, see ya later”, as Susie used to sing.
But then, remarkably, “later” has always arrived for Peters.
Every time he and New Zealand First have been voted down or out, they’ve been returned the following election. It’s an extraordinary record. (Although, he’d probably like to avoid the three-year stand down period?)
Here’s what Winston Peters has surely learned from all of that: it’s hard to persuasively campaign against the policies of a government in which you’ve been Deputy Prime Minister.
And now he’s not.
Does that explain why Winston Peters was Deputy PM first in this coalition? Did he negotiate to go first?
“I think so,” he tells me. “Yeah.”
Of course he did. This, as he kept telling us during the election campaign, is not his first rodeo.
‘I’m free to not have to cover off the Prime Minister every Thursday’
The timing gives Peters 18 months to campaign for the next election without being Deputy Prime Minister. Eighteen months, I asked him, to go into campaign mode?
“I’m free”, he told me. “I’m free to get out and campaign hard. I’m free to not have to cover off the Prime Minister every Thursday, and sometimes the rest of the time. I’m free to begin the campaign I want.”
He congratulates me on working it out. And then he roars with laughter.
Peters: ‘I had no expectation I’d be in politics in 2025.’
I’ve been interviewing Winston Peters, off and on, for more than three decades.
I was at the launch of New Zealand First in 1993. A young political reporter for 3 News. There’s a photo of us there. Me watching him. Neither of us knowing the absurdity the future held. He is smiling, as if at something fleeting. Thirty-two years later, he is still the party’s leader. The only one it’s ever had.
I asked him if he could possibly have had any expectation that he’d be Deputy Prime Minister in 2025?
“No. I had no expectation I’d be in politics in 2025.”
His interview technique, not always but often, is to respond with high dudgeon to even the most reasonable of questions, cast the interviewer as rabid, unreliable, woke, PC, or in cahoots with a cartel, the establishment, or “them”, and deliver a monologue that completely ignores the question and seethes straight over the questioner’s head to supporters in TV land.
He once even explained this to me, during an ad break after a live interview on 3 News in which he’d taken offence from the very moment I’d said, “good evening”. (“I don’t know what’s good about it, Mr Campbell, but that’s typical of you and the mainstream media”, etc.)
Sometimes, it’s like watching a car be repeatedly reversed into the same lamppost. (Driver, car, lamppost, I’ve felt like all three.)
Sometimes, when he couldn’t stop himself from laughing at the theatre of it all, it’s been ridiculously funny. It shouldn’t have been. The subject matter often wasn’t. But longevity aside, one of the key reasons that even people who don’t like him, and who would never vote for him, call him “Winston”, is that the man can laugh at himself. And at people like me. And we both deserve it.
He was in this mood when I spoke to him. Almost exuberant.
Maybe it was the weight of the job being lifted. He’s really not a “deputy” kind of guy. Maybe it was the fact that the job he’s keeping, Foreign Affairs Minister, he loves, and is widely regarded, even by his opponents, as effective at. Maybe it was the 18 months ahead, the old dog campaigner sniffing the air before returning to the happy anti of the campaign trail. Maybe it was the gleeful thought of what hill he’d die on to relaunch New Zealand First as the party that keeps “them” honest. (If I was the Regulatory Standards Bill, I’d try to look as much like flat land as possible. Little House on the Prairie.)
Whatever, it felt like so many of the interviews I (and many others, although he won’t talk to my colleague, Jack Tame, which is a pity) have done with him over decades now. Business as relatively usual, when relatively usual is varying degrees of mad.
Seymour: From one-man band to Deputy PM
Unlike Winston Peters, David Seymour, the guy who got to do the second shift as Deputy PM (the shift that leads into the next election), has never been voted out of Parliament (although he’s been in the place for decades less than Winston Peters).
But for two whole terms David Seymour was Act’s only MP. Yes, six years as Parliament’s equivalent of Macaulay Culkin playing Kevin McCallister in Home Alone.
Initially, anyway, he may have been a beneficiary (not a word I suspect he’d use) of the Epsom electorate’s commitment to MMP, cups of tea, and doing whatever it was John Key instructed them to do by winking down Newmarket’s Broadway.
So strikingly was David Seymour a product of the particularities of the Epsom electorate, that in 2017, Act received just 13,075 party votes, nationwide. That’s about the population of Waikanae.
By 2020, just three years later, it was 219,000.
By 2023, he was in a coalition government, on an 18-month standby to replace Winston Peters as Deputy PM.
Whatever you think of both men, and in 2023, 85% of votes cast weren’t for Act or New Zealand First, they share an extraordinary capacity to breathe life into the skeletal frames of their parties.
Life, but perhaps not as much flesh as David Seymour might have liked?
In the 2023 election, Act received 8.64% of the party vote. The latest 1News-Verian poll (from April) had Act at 9%. An increase, if the poll is exactly correct, of just 0.36%.
That’s still at historic highs for Act, but in the intervening 18 months, the Prime Minister aside, has there been a politician who’s received more media coverage, more precious soundbites, more often and in a more sustained way, than David Seymour?
Has there? If so, who?
In short, has Seymour’s extraordinary elevation of Act, the solitary visitor from Epsom who somehow brought in 10 MP mates and became Deputy PM in a coalition government, somewhat stalled?
What does familiarity with Deputy David lead to? Will it be winning, or not?
And did he expect better from the Treaty Principles Bill? As “divisive” (Christopher Luxon’s word, Christoper Finlayson’s word) and publicity achieving as it was?
Compare Seymour in 2025 to Don Brash in 2004, when Brash, then National Party leader, made his famous/infamous (take your pick) Ōrewa speech about the Treaty of Waitangi.
Then, the Nats ascended from a relatively lowly 28% in the polls a month before Brash’s speech, to 45% two weeks after it. That’s an increase of more than 50%. Shots fired. Shots worked.
Twenty years on, Seymour’s deployment of strikingly similar themes, using strikingly similar language (Brash even talked of Treaty “principles”, for example, 11 times), got the same kind of attention, yes, but not nearly the same popularity reward.
Shots fired. Shots, um?
So, David Seymour remains, and Winston Peters knows the rewards, the weight, the risks, and the vulnerability of this, leader of a party that gets noticed, gets talked about, but hasn’t yet ascended to levels the Green Party, for example, regularly achieves.
That’s not to say to say that David Seymour’s coalition negotiations didn’t see Act punch way above its electoral weight. They did.
Seymour told me that he “power read a book on negotiations” prior to the coalition maneuvering. It was called, Never Split the Difference, by Chris Voss, a former FBI lead hostage negotiator.
What was its best advice?
“If you’re negotiating for four hostages, you can’t let the terrorists keep two. And that was very useful.”
The “terrorists”. (Lol.)
I asked him what he would have done had Christopher Luxon completely ruled out the Treaty Principles Bill during coalition negotiations?
“Well, I think we probably would have decided that overall, our priorities around the economy were more important. But the secret of good negotiation is not to give the other person an ultimatum. It’s to leave the other person thinking you’ve given them an ultimatum, and in that we’ve succeeded.”
Yes, indeed. Spectacularly. But also, arguably, not? In the end, Seymour’s “divisive” (“unconscionable”, Jenny Shipley called it) Bill was voted down 112 – 11.
The Justice select committee received approximately 300,000 submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill, with 90% of written submissions opposed to it. That opposition percentage is fascinatingly similar to the number of voters who ticked someone other than Act.
‘David vs The Media’
Is Seymour’s reach blunted by something he’s missing? An ability to strongly connect with people who don’t see the world in the same way?
And can you see this in his dealings with journalists? “David vs The Media”, the title under which the Party’s YouTube clips are congregated.
“Versus.”
A kind of pugilism.
It’s fascinating to behold those clips. Typically, they’re standups in the corridors of Parliament. He sweeps over what’s called “the bridge”, connecting the lovely old Parliament building (with its debating chamber and caucus rooms) to the Beehive. Press Gallery journalists are awaiting him. His social media team’s camera is tracking behind him. Urgently. He’s in the foreground of shot and therefore looms larger. He moves fast. The stationary journalists, reduced in size and power by their distance from the lens, are almost cast as beholden, supplicant, or as adversaries. They’re not, they’re just doing their jobs. But the vibe, to quote Dennis Denuto in The Castle. It’s the vibe.
And then Seymour holds forth. He’s often, I’m told, among the first senior politicians to arrive. More time to talk.
And it’s recorded. By the journalists, yes. Who may (or may not) use excerpts in news stories, etc.
But also by Act, who then post it online, with titles like, and these are all verbatim, “Thank you for your questions, including the racist ones”, “We’ve dealt with a few muppets in our day”, “Taxpayer-funded CRACKPOT badgers David with conspiracy theories”, “lunch-obsessed journos get schooled”, “Guy Williams get wrecked”, and so on. Like the graffiti a Year 10 student might write on the pencil case of a fellow student they didn’t like.
And invariably, inevitably, successfully, the comments beneath these clips contain attack after attack on the media.
And then David Seymour rails against mistrust in the media. And his supporters agree. And on we go. Circling. The circles getting smaller.
I’ve always quite enjoyed interviewing David Seymour.
Our interviews do brisk trade on “David vs The Media”, he tells me.
That’s good, I reply.
That’s bad, he tells me. Seemingly delighted.
The day I interview him, he arrives with his social media camera trailing him, as always, rolling. Fast. Urgent. On.
Before we’re even seated, he launches into a kind of serve, based on my informal and off-the-record phone conversation with his press secretary, in which, as I often do when I’m trying to book interviews with politicians during these strange, brittle times, I’d taken the piss out of myself.
This feels a little performative. Like gamesmanship. For his camera and his mic – both of them very much on.
Both the incoming and outgoing deputies came prepared for lively debate with Campbell. (Source: 1News)
Seymour claims that, when arranging the interview, I’d used an expletive that’s recently featured in Parliament for the first time. I have no recollection of what I actually said to his press secretary in that conversation, other than we were good natured with each other.
Seymour sits down and our cameraman, Rewi Heke, puts our microphone on him.
And off we go. Me and David Seymour. It looks exactly like these interviews have always looked, but the look is now only part of the story. This is, also, the venue for another game, posted to YouTube, largely for tribal fans. David vs The Media.
He is Deputy Prime Minister. What an achievement that is.
But also, what a challenge for a politician who’s arguably at his most effective when challenging the status quo. And who’s lately seemed more often to do so in terms that galvanise core support, yes, but risk distancing him from those who aren’t quite so ideologically predisposed.
Perhaps Winston Peters, so happily “free” from that position now, can tell him how difficult that balancing act is. And the potential cost of getting it wrong.
Watch John Campbell’s interviews with David Seymour and Winston Peters, both on TVNZ+.
