Minor parties, major influence: Do ACT and NZ First have the mandate for their moves?

Friday, 18 July 2025

The prime minister was on holiday and there was no Cabinet meeting to hold post-Cabinet conference after. And yet, last Monday afternoon there was David Seymour, recently minted as the second most powerful man in the country, at the podium holding a press conference.

It was the opportunity for some more oxygen and Seymour never shies away from taking a deep breath. He announced changes to anti-money laundering policy with one of his senior MPs at his side.

“Well, welcome to another week,” the deputy prime minister said, opening the conference.

Another week of the three-headed coalition which is driving a hard-right agenda heavily influenced by the minnow partners.

In political theory, National should be wearing the pants. It won the most votes, its leader is prime minister and it has the most MPs.

But the most controversial reforms have taken the most attention and are the work of ACT, which won 8.64%, and NZ First, with its 6.08%.

Seymour’s line is that ACT has had a “disproportionate” influence on the Government because “more than half” of the action items on the prime minister’s quarterly action plans were items either done by ACT ministers or were in its coalition agreement.

That’s despite ACT making up just under one sixth of the Government’s 68 MPs.

“I'm an electrical engineer,” said Seymour, “I think in numbers. That, to me, is disproportionate.”

Luxon disagrees. When asked for comment, his office pointed to a previous RNZ interview where he said: “No, I think it's got a fair influence, and I think we've navigated it very well.'

ACT provided The Post with a non-exhaustive list of all 89 actions taken by the Government that was either based on the party’s policy or carried out by one of its ministers.

Included were actions clearly in ACT’s wheelhouse, like transferring the Firearms Safety Authority away from the police and putting it into an independent agency, and establishing a red tape tip line so Kiwis can report the “most pressing regulatory issues to be fixed”.

Also included are a number of policies all three governing parties would likely take credit for: repealing the “ute tax”, cut wasteful spending and abolishing the Māori Health Authority.

After 40 days and 40 nights of negotiations spread across two cities, the coalition emerged with more than 120 promises spread across two deals between three parties.

In part, the talks were lengthy so the commitments were thrashed out before taking office to avoid the mid-term handbrakes and U-turns which plagued Labour’s first term with NZ First and the Greens.

The minor parties managed to secure commitments which have spurred historic opposition and protest.

National needed ACT and NZ First to agree to its tax plan, which both parties had their doubts about. But National had campaigned hard on the tax-cut promise.Nicola Willis staked her job on getting it through. It gave the minor parties something to work with.

“Obviously, if you play poker with cards on the table, you have fewer options,” said Seymour.

One of the - if not the - most contentious commitments ACT secured was the promise of support by the coalition partners for its Treaty Principles Bill through to second reading. The bill sought to re-write the understanding of the Treaty of Waitangi and caused widespread unrest, division and an historic hīkoi to Parliament.

In Luxon’s telling of negotiations, the bill was a bottom-line for ACT. Seymour disagrees.

“I always say to people, the art of good negotiation is to make your opponents think it's the bottom line.”

With the Treaty Principles Bill now dead and buried until the next campaign trail, ACT’s policy currently causing the most consternation is the Regulatory Standards Bill. But this time the commitment is to take the bill through the full parliamentary process and into law.

And it appears the sticking point in National and ACT’s more than 4000 word agreement could come down to one word: “the”.

The deal, as it’s written, secures support for “the” bill not “a” Regulatory Standards Bill - meaning there’s little room for amendments, which NZ First is open to. ACT has been trying to pass the bill for 20 years; National voted for the bill in the last term. Parties’ eyes were wide open about what it was agreeing to, believes Seymour.

Asked if he’d force an early election if “a” version of the bill was passed rather than “the” version of the bill, Seymour said:

“Well, I wouldn't be forcing it. It would be the people who didn't meet their coalition commitments.”

However, he was confident the coalition would make it until the election next year.

“Ultimately, we are all capable politicians who recognise that at heart, our job is to hear people's concerns and hopes.”

Rather than what it’s done, NZ First’s biggest influence is perhaps what it stopped. Winston Peters campaigned on being a handbrake and he achieved it before the Government had even been sworn in.

National campaigned on letting foreigners buy homes valued over $2m and taxing them 15% which it hoped would have raised $740m a year to help pay for their promised tax cuts.

NZ First kiboshed that. It also axed National’s plan to increase the pension age to 67.

The smoking gun for stubbing out Labour’s radical Smokefree changes have been claimed by both minnows. It was a line item in ACT’s Alternative Budget and added to NZ First’s policy manifesto less than two weeks before the election.

NZ First also secured a $1.2b regional infrastructure fund, the commitment to train no fewer than 500 new police officers, coward’s punch legislation and the contentious work to remove references to gender, sexuality and 'relationship-based education guidelines' from curriculums.

It’s also, happily, taken the lead on the goal of doubling mineral exports revenue to $3b by 2035.

Resources Minister Shane Jones has taken it upon himself to be agitator-in-chief; wearing his “drill baby drill” hat to select committee meetings and clashing with protesters in the street and telling them they’re being hysterical.

Luxon, said Jones, was very keen for Peters and himself to take the mining portfolio which has become the proxy for many other debates swirling around development and what Jones called the culture wars over protecting the environment.

“And if we got it wrong, well then, we absorbed the downside. But if we got it right, they come in behind and claim quite a bit of the credit. You can say that's magpie politics, or you can say it's quite shrewd on the part of Chris Luxon and to date, he hasn't chided me that I got it wrong.”

When asked whether he too thought his minor party’s agenda outweighed its size of the vote, Jones said what they were doing were policies they campaigned on and then scored concessions from National on.

“And let's face it, most of the things that I'm doing are their economic policies and they’re economic policies that National, I think, would be content for us to have the running on because the upside is shared by all of the pro-development parties.”

He wouldn’t say, explicitly, that he thought NZ First’s influence was disproportionate.

“In certain areas it is apparent that our modest numerical strength is kind of inversely related to the systemic impact of the fast track [legislation].

“So rather than kind of be triumphal about it, I'd say that all I’ve been doing is delivering what Winston negotiated.”

Peters was able to get such runs on the board because of his lengthy experience with so many different forms of power, said Jones.

Experience is what Luxon lacked when he went into those coalition negotiations, said Massey University politics professor, Richard Shaw. And it saw him give concessions others wouldn’t have.

It was apparent that there was “a pretty clear public sense that there is too much influence being exercised”, he said.

However, it is impossible to establish how much influence would be appropriate.

“It's the big question for this government because there is a very clear sense that the tails are wagging the dog, and there are two tails and not one, which is what we've been used to.

“That's a political rather than a scientific determination.”

It came down to power and the minor parties had done a pretty impressive job of taking attention and the Government’s agenda by playing their cards hard during negotiations. The fact that there were three rather than two also made matters more complicated for National, he said.

“If you have a clearly dominant player and a subordinate player, that relationship is pretty straightforward. Everybody knows the rules of that game and how that's played, but we don't really know how the rules work within a three-party formal coalition government.”

Hard swings to the left and right were meant to be tempered by the switch to the MMP system and proportional representation. But the major parties’ declining support - the collapse of the centre - means the parties to either side wield more power and influence.

“What we really wanted was for the minor parties to constrain the conduct and behaviour and policy radicalism of the National and Labour parties and weirdly that's now being inverted.”

Luxon’s line is that New Zealanders are seeing a “mature MMP environment”.

The Post asked the prime minister’s office for an explanation of what this phrase meant and were provided with quotes from previous reporting: “We have six parties in this Parliament that have very different positions and it requires compromise.”

And: “As I have said to you before, if you look at western Europe, you have parties that come together in four-party coalitions with lots of different views, and they have to accommodate those agendas. That's what the New Zealand people expect us to do in our democracy.

“That is the electoral system they have selected.”