Brooke van Velden: public servant, not power hungry

Saturday, 22 March 2025

Brooke van Velden's quiet rise to power has led to the natural assumption she's the next leader of ACT. Kelly Dennett reports.

“I’ve got to be careful what I say here, so cut me a little bit of slack,” says Scott Milne over the phone.

The Ōrākei Local Board chair pauses for a bit before clarifying, “The residents of Tāmaki are intelligent,” he says. “And quite demanding.”

Ah, there it is.

“They had a politician, a member of Parliament for, I think 12 years, who wasn’t a Cabinet minister, and they just didn’t feel it. They felt they deserved better.”

Milne, former longtime businessman and chair of the local Auckland council board that makes up part of the Tāmaki electorate, is talking about former Tāmaki National MP Simon O’Connor, who lost the electorate he’d held since 2011, when, in 2023, ACT deputy leader Brooke van Velden took a swing at the seat that had been a National stronghold as far back as Robert Muldoon’s days.

Not only did she win, she won convincingly, taking 17,858 votes to O’Connor’s 13,700, having held 130 street corner meetings and hitting the pavement to talk to constituents in the electorate that could be described as a broad church. From the historically significant Bastion Point, it stretches to the wealthy enclaves of Orakei, Mission Bay, Kohimarama and St Heliers, then east to the lower socio-economic suburbs like Glen Innes.

Of course, at the time van Velden won it, neither she nor Tāmaki would know that she would be in government, let alone a minister in Cabinet, in charge of workplace health and safety and internal affairs.

But perhaps in van Velden they sensed a rising star.

Says Milne, “I think the area expects and demands representation at a central government level. I suspect they felt they didn’t get that with Simon. And Brooke is a communicator on a different level. She is very intelligent. She is a very good listener. She works bloody hard. And it’s quite refreshing to have some sensible push-back from time to time.’’

He adds, “I think often central government politicians simply get worn down by the constant attack of the public and social media, and lose their ability to empathise. And that’s not the case with her. She tries really hard to understand the cause and the effect of a problem.”

Rise to power

At 32, van Velden is one of the country’s youngest ever Cabinet ministers, a fact the people around her are at pains to tout.

Auckland born and raised, educated privately, and holding a degree in economics and trade from the University of Auckland, her rise to political power has been well traversed.

She worked briefly for pundit and lobbyist Matthew Hooton, and in her early 20s met David Seymour by coincidence after a Welsh chorus singing event she was part of ended up in a bar. She and Seymour got talking about electricity market competition, as you do. She met other ACT followers and, in her words, thought, “I’d found my people”.

She ran for ACT in the Auckland Central electorate in 2017, but lost to National's Nikki Kaye. After moving to Wellington to continue work for ACT, she became most notable for getting the End of Life Choice Act legislation across the line by personally lobbying MPs and negotiating aspects of Seymour’s bill.

She became deputy leader of ACT in June 2020, months before the results of a referendum cemented the End of Life Choice bill’s success, and entered Parliament as a list MP later that year. She won Tāmaki in 2023.

Now, Milne says he meets with van Velden every two or three months - something he had “tried” to do with O’Connor - and she appears to be well liked in the community. The challenge for her will be ensuring her connection, as she balances the electorate with her ministerial portfolios.

Van Velden offered a right-leaning alternative for voters, says Milne. It helps that she’s powerful, connected, and speaks the language of the private school set, but her generation and empathy clearly means she’s also at home with constituents in less well-heeled suburbs, like Glen Innes.

Van Velden’s discipline, The Post will learn, stretches across the board, from her professional life, to her finances, to what she eats every week. She puts her ambition like this: “I got into [politics] because I care about freedom of speech. I care about ensuring every child has a good education. I want to pay down government debt. I want to ensure that if I have children they will be born into a country that is better than the one I grew up in.”

Her electorate office declined to put anyone forward for interview, but emailed a list of achievements, saying van Velden had helped rehome a disabled Kāinga Ora tenant, had aided a pensioner to receive the correct superannuation payment, and supported a homeless man into a programme that saw him eventually housed.

“If you look at our demographic, we’re strongly skewed to the older white population,” says Milne. Van Velden’s win was down to, “a combination of the electorate wanting representation, wanting change and also, having a right-leaning alternative, [because] they would never have voted in Labour, and would never have voted in the Greens.

“Brooke gave a lot of traditional blue voters the opportunity to say, ‘I do want energy, I do want smart, I do want representation, give me better value for money’.”

Those who know or have interacted with van Velden describe her as polite, diligent, curious and striving to do a good job. Very much head girl energy, and also very different to ACT leader David Seymour, an at times gregarious and polarising figure.

Seymour took ACT from a one-man band to a party of 11 MPs, some who are now ministers, and visualising a different leader, for some, can be difficult. While Seymour told The Post he intends to see his leadership through to the next election, it’s notable that Seymour, who last year told Newsroom he hated politics and would prefer to be in business, has found the thing he told tabloid magazines he’d give it all up for: a partner and family. Seymour is engaged to be married.

While ACT is not strictly a libertarian party (libertarian commentator Damien Grant jokes there are only three bona fide libertarians in New Zealand, including himself), its policies have a libertarian or classical liberalism bent. It’s a vastly different party to the one originally founded by Roger Douglas and even the one helmed by Rodney Hide or Richard Prebble. In other words, there’s always room to grow.

A van Velden presence could be more palatable for people struggling to look past Seymour as the party’s leader but, as Grant points out, “in New Zealand, we don’t need to like our politicians”.

“I think the proof of the pudding is in Tāmaki, [where] I think people responded to her really well … people like Simon but they respected Brooke.”

While Seymour was entrepreneurial, reviving a moribund party with a “certain mindset that not very many people have”, he’d done such a good job of it that the party, Grant thought, could “absolutely” survive without him.

“The skill set David Seymour needed to bring the party back from the dead comes at a cost. And that cost is that polarisation. A lot of people wanted ACT to die and when it didn’t, it was almost a visceral dislike. And David leans into that a little bit, or a lot.

“Brooke is not going to have that effect. That comment by Te Pati Māori’s [Rawiri Waititi] about whacking David Seymour [over the Treaty Principles Bill], he would not have said that about Brooke van Velden, and not just because she’s a woman. Brooke’s personality and temperament is a lot less confrontational.”

(That may be true, but it’s also worth noting that FIRST Union general secretary Dennis Maga said, in response to van Velden’s repeal of fair pay agreements, “Putting an extreme libertarian ACT minister in charge of workplace relations and safety is like putting a vampire in charge of the country’s emergency blood supply.”)

Grant also thought van Velden’s interests in policy also lay more in economics, than in the culture issues that have been a flashpoint for Seymour’s critics.

Onlookers say that aside from everyman Andrew Hoggard, who might appeal to ACT’s rural base, there were few others in the party who’d make sense as leader.

“But we’re making assumptions,” says Grant. “She’s been kind of anointed, but do we know if she wants it?”

Quiet power

Van Velden, sitting at the conference table in her Beehive sixth floor office, saw the question coming: “I knew you were going to ask that.”

Of course, the general rundown on topics for The Post’s interview, sent by email the day before, has given her chance to prepare a diplomatic answer.

“I have been the deputy leader of the ACT Party for nearly five years now, and I’m very happy being loyal to David Seymour.”

It’s nearly identical to an answer Finance Minister Nicola Willis gave to The Post, about Christopher Luxon, at the end of last year.

On leadership, Van Velden knows she and Seymour are different: from personality, to the ability to just grind out an 18-hour work day, to, more indirectly, the value of quiet power.

She’s introverted, has learned that to be a good leader you don’t have to be the loudest voice, crediting her mother with teaching her you can be “a strong woman without ever raising [your] voice”.

“David clearly has a fantastic personality, right?” van Velden says, appearing genuine. “He’s very out there. He’s very witty, he’s very funny. That’s not me. I’m not really one for cracking jokes. I see myself as more someone who is just stable and always there for people to depend on, but I’m not necessarily, you know, the life of the party or someone who really gets the energy going.”

Van Velden’s work week starts on a Sunday and finishes on a Saturday. On a Sunday she travels from her home in Auckland, back to her Parliament-adjacent flat (she left a flatting situation because it no longer suited to live with others when confidential documents were in the house), and ends the day by doing a grocery shop for the week.

Every meal is largely the same: she buys a banana for breakfast, one for every day of the week; lunch is tuna and rice, and dinner is half a minestrone soup with the other half saved for the next day. She doesn’t drink coffee because she thinks succumbing to that habit will be financially reckless and she’s trying to pay off a mortgage.

Instead she drinks tea. A box of teabags will last ages. She doesn’t cook, doesn’t really enjoy it, but has found herself dreaming of fresh ingredients. When she can finally cook at weekends, she says it’s home-made pizza, but admits she buys the bases.

If her plane is delayed on a Sunday that throws her planned grocery shop into chaos. She puts heavy travel demands and the sheer amount of time she spends in airports as the hardest part of her current gig.

To cope, she plans a week’s break every quarter. At night she walks on the Parliament treadmill to blow off steam.

When you’re 32 and working seven days a week, it’s anyone’s surprise that van Velden is in a relationship. Her partner is someone she’s known a long time, someone she describes as also busy, and who wants to maintain a private life.

She’s able to keep a distance from her work as she says she doesn’t discuss it with her longtime high school friends, as that would be “boring”. But she does take advice from her mum, who recently retired after running a successful car-yard business.

And David Seymour? “I don’t talk to David about breaks,” she laughs.

“He has a crazy level of energy. I can’t sustain what he tries to do. And I have tried to push myself to that same level of workload, and I don’t think I physically am capable of it.”

In the Government’s first 100 days, van Velden was among the first to push through legislation, including repealing fair pay agreements, and reinstating 90-day trials. She’s reviewing workplace health and safety legislation. While unions have criticised her, businesses have largely patted her on the back.

Her portfolios were not ones she’d asked for, nor had she discussed their possibility with Seymour during coalition negotiations. Seymour said they were meaty portfolios that van Velden could easily deliver on, and he doesn’t recall dissent with coalition partners on whether she should have them.

Van Velden, for her part, recalls Seymour ringing, asking if she’d take them on, “And I did pause for a moment, and think, do I really have a choice here, in terms of anything else. I thought, ‘Nah, I’ll take up the opportunity’, and I’ve loved it.

“I was just happy to go where the party and the leader thought I would best serve,” she says. “Because I see myself more as a public servant than someone who really cares about power. I want to ensure that I’m doing a good job and governing for the country, so no matter which portfolio I got, I would do it to the best of my ability, so when I did get the call, it was, ‘OK, I will do my best. Thanks very much’.”

Asked to divulge something about van Velden that few might know, Seymour opts to share a story about how she’d saved the taxpayer $1000 when the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment nearly flew a cultural adviser to the Bay of Plenty, when it became clear a local business wanted to greet her with a powhiri.

Instead, Seymour says, van Velden called up Tama Potaka and was quickly linked up with a local contact who could help her. That no-fuss pragmatism summed up who she was, Seymour said, quoting a commentator who described her “quiet determination”.

Name recognition

Van Velden and Seymour have dinner together every Monday, to discuss everything from Government business, to party business, to electorate work. Seymour, who has previously half-jokingly described van Velden as his greatest achievement, appears to encourage her having a greater profile.

“She’s my main confidante and sounding board and hopefully she would say the same about me,” he says. “We have a tight working relationship and yes we certainly talk about how the party is positioning and how we are serving our supporters and growing.”

Seymour says he has every intention of leading the party into the 2026 election, provided the party wants him to. “I’m not seeing any signs they don’t. Let’s see what 2026 delivers.”

Pressed on leadership ambitions, van Velden resists suggestions she could have broader appeal to potential voters as a young liberal woman.

“I’ve never been of the view that I have been elected because I am young or because I am female,” she says. “I think I just hold this particular point in time, I’m sure there are people who look at my characteristics and probably think, ‘Why? Why is she there? Why is she doing it? What motivates her?

“That’s because I don’t try and make anything big of it. I have read articles throughout the last few years about, this person is the youngest, or this person is female, or this person has a particular identity feature, and that’s why they’re in Parliament, and that’s not my story. You know?

“I got into it because I care about freedom of speech. I care about ensuring every child has a good education. I want to pay down government debt. I want to ensure that if I have children they will be born into a country that is better than the one I grew up in.”

It’s strange, says Scott Milne of the Ōrākei Local Board, because while Seymour deservedly has name recognition, he thinks many more would take to van Velden, if only they knew more about her and the caucus in general: “I’d be most surprised if my electorate could name three ACT MPs.”

If the topic of name recognition was raised with van Velden, it’s likely she’d say she’d prefer her work to speak for itself, rather than populism.

Damien Grant, though, has another idea.

“Maybe she could do Dancing with the Stars?”