Analysis: Throughout this parliamentary term, ACT has maintained a sense of discipline and seriousness, which belied many pundits’ expectations.
They won more support in the 2020 election than any other in the party’s history, and David Seymour brought nine additional MPs to Wellington in ACT’s largest-ever caucus.
For the most part, ACT’s MPs have earned a reputation as being diligent and hard-working. Despite their relative inexperience, the caucus has avoided major scandals and public fallings-out. They’ve been united and organised, and Seymour has continued to steadily build support beyond the party’s traditional base. Every 1News Verian poll this year has recorded support for ACT in the double digits. This week’s poll put ACT’s party vote at 13%.
As the polling trend has solidified, ACT’s electoral strategy has expanded beyond that of recent elections. As well as Epsom, which David Seymour will expect to win by a comfortable margin, deputy leader Brooke van Velden is running a prominent campaign in the neighbouring Tāmaki electorate. Facing a socially conservative incumbent MP in National’s Simon O’Connor, van Velden’s campaign seeks to distinguish itself with a young, relatable, socially liberal woman.
That increased sense of relatability is perhaps one of the under-acknowledged dynamics contributing to ACT’s steady growth. Not only have the party’s MPs behaved themselves, but in the eyes of many voters, the party today has greater mainstream credibility than iterations in the past.
Compare the ACT Party of today with that of 15 years ago.
In 2010, ACT MP David Garrett, who fronted the party’s tough-on-crime agenda, left parliament after it was revealed he’d fraudulently obtained a dead child’s identity. ACT leader Rodney Hide distinguished himself as a full-blown climate change denialist.
These kinds of scandals and blatant climate change denialism would not fly today for any party registering at 13% in the polls.
But this week’s revelations about two of ACT’s candidates have blown that a little off course.
Reporting from 1News found ACT candidate Elaine Naidu-Franz has publicly compared vaccine mandates to Nazi concentration camps. A second candidate linked a spate of summer drownings to Covid-19 jabs.
These could be described generously as being fringe views, at best. They’re the kinds of publicly-held opinions that might have resonated with some ACT supporters in 2008, but they’re not wholly representative of the 13% of voters supporting ACT today.
That these views should be undiscovered by the party as part of basic background checks is uncharacteristic of David Seymour and the modern ACT party. If the party didn’t have the resources to properly vet its candidates, it should have limited rankings and candidacies to those who could be properly checked. From an organisational and risk-management perspective, it was unusually sloppy.
There is a significant difference between a party that is dependent on an electorate seat in order to enter parliament and a party recording hundreds of thousands of votes.
In 2017, just 13,000 voters cast a party vote for ACT. If the polling trend continues, as many as 400,000 New Zealanders may choose to support ACT come October 14th.
But further revelations like those this week could impact support among voters who see Covid-19 vaccine conspiracies as crackpottery and hardly representative of a party ready to play a major role in government.
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