DAVID SEYMOUR
In search of It . . . Act New Zealand leader David Seymour speaks during the Budget debate in Parliament on Thursday.
said, ‘‘People at the moment, as the cost of living is rising, are very wary of any squandering of money, especially for political purposes.’’
Luxon said, ‘‘It just doesn’t feel
right that you should have a sitting MP the focus of a major documentary.’’
Yadda yadda.
The whole thing doesn’t add up to a hill of beans but that’s not the point. The point is that the story has surely restored at least a measure of that beautiful and necessary commodity to Act: It.
I said to the Act MPs over morning tea, ‘‘We need more of It.’’
They looked at me with blank faces. ‘‘You can never have enough of It,’’ I said.
They reached for another biscuit. I said, ‘‘Do any of you even know what It is?’’
Someone mentioned tomorrow was Budget day.
‘‘Yeah,’’ I sighed. ‘‘Yeah. Can’t hurt.’’
My outrage over the spending of $5.9 billion of government money on public services has got a lot of oxygen.
I called it, ‘‘The brain drain Budget.’’
Snappy, easy to digest.
I said, ‘‘Ambitious New Zealanders, tired of being milked, will weigh up leaving for greener pastures.’’
‘‘Milked’’ and ‘‘greener pastures’’ work well in the same sentence.
Well, not a bad week. Chloe. ‘‘Gross misuse.’’ The Budget. ‘‘Brain drain.’’ You have to try everything.
You have to keep searching.
You have to play the long game. Piece by piece, bit by bit, as the price of living goes up and support for the Government goes down, with any amount of lowhanging fruit and dogwhistles, Act will once take possession of that mysterious, lost, lifeaffirming It: relevance.