Jason Walls: Political Editor on David Seymour's time as Deputy Prime Minister

David Seymour will tomorrow become New Zealand’s deputy Prime Minister, taking over from Winston Peters’ as part of the coalition agreement.

But how much will change with him as second in command?

Newstalk ZB Political Editor Jason Walls talks to Heather du Plessis-Allan about the appointment, and the ACT MP calling on other politicians to support her bill.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Jason Wol's our political editors with us.

Speaker 2 (00:01):
Hey, Jason, good afternoon. Has So it's the big switch.

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Over this weekend from Winston Peters to David Seymour and this.
But a lot has been made about where the things
are going to change. But I don't think much is
going to change to.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
You, most people that are not. In fact, everybody living
outside of the Beltway won't. It'll be exactly the same,
and maybe a few people inside the Beltway will be
able to detect some small little differences. But I mean, listen,
Winston Peters has been the Deputy Prime Minister for eighteen
months and the world hasn't fallen to pieces. Everything has
been relatively fine. He's done exactly what he said he's

(00:32):
going to do as the deputy Prime Minister. And I
think one part of this is that Winston sticks so
religiously to that coalition agreement that I know there was
some scuttle bug about him wanting to maybe potentially look
at another election or a snap election. All nonsense. Winston
is he sticks to that coalition agreement and he sticks
to it like it is the legal document that it is.

(00:52):
It's interesting, though, because Seymour has taken some heat from
the likes of Chris Hipkins saying how he's going to
take the country backwards, et cetera, et cetera. Fill in
the blank here. But speaking to Chelsea Daniels on the
Front Page podcast, Seymour returned fire in quite an interesting
way that only I think David Seymour could.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
Would you roll out working with Hipkins? Well, the difference is,
I don't need to say it. Look, I mean, this
is a guy who was the police minister when the
crime got out of control. He was in charge of
the COVID response, which speaks for itself. He was the
Minister of Education when kids stopped going to school on

(01:29):
mess and he was the Minister of Health when the
health budget went up sixty percent and the outcomes got worse. So,
you know, this guy has got the opposite of the
Midas touch. I think they call him a Pooh Midas
and he's suddenly done some damage.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
It's just it's such a silly little comment that it's
just it's David Seymour to a t. You know. So, no,
the world is not gonna set on fire on Saturday
tomorrow when Seymour takes over. In fact, you probably won't
notice a difference. Hey, what is this bill?

Speaker 1 (01:57):
It just explained to me what this bill around the
deep fake aar eye content is going to do.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
It's an interesting one. So it's Laura McClure, so you
might not have heard of her before. She's a relatively
new act MP, and she's got this member's bill in
the ballot, so it doesn't really have at the moment
much of a chance of being pulled. The bill is
to expand existing laws around revenge porn and intimate recordings
to ensure that those who produce or share deep fakes
without the consent of the person involve face criminal accountability.

(02:25):
And it would also ensure that the victims of this
have a clear pathway to seek redress and the removal
of said harmful content. Now, Laura spoke about this a
few weeks ago in the house and she did something
rather unusual when she was speaking, Have a listen.

Speaker 4 (02:39):
This image is a naked image of me, but it
is not real. This image is what we call a
deep faith. It took me less than five minutes to
make a series of deep fakes of myself, so.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
It was quite the scene in the house. As she
stood up with an A three photo and held up
this naked photo of herself. It was blurred so you
couldn't see anything. So it was and it was, and listen,
you might be asking why haven't I heard about this before?
It came like a couple of hours after Brook van
Velden dropped the sea bomb in the house, so it
was kind of swept under the rug. But I thought
it was quite a good speech and quite good to
shine light on something like this, because it was quite

(03:16):
a moment in terms of she just said, you know,
I made this in a couple of minutes, and then
she kind of talked about how she'd been contract contacted
by numerous families and young people who have been victim
of these sorts of deep facts. Have a listen for
the victims.

Speaker 4 (03:30):
It is degrading and devastating. It even gives me that
it having to stand here in Parliament and hold up
a photo of myself knowing that it's not me, but
that it looks exactly like me.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
So her struggle now is it's in the member's ballot,
which is the biscuit ten where somebody draws it out
at random, so it could sit there for years. But
she's she's going behind the scenes asking a number of
members from other political parties to support it, and she
only needs sixty one non executive MPs, that is, non
member m non minister rather members of Parliament to support

(04:03):
her to actually get it onto the debate and bypass
the biscuit tent altogether, or it could be picked up
as a government bill. However, the Justice Minister said that
this is not their intention at this time. So I
think it's a great initiative, and as she says, it
only it only takes a couple of lines being added
into the Crimes Act to actually stop this from happening.

(04:23):
And I think as we see the rise of these
deep fakes and these AI videos, I think it's something
that we really seriously need to be looking at.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
What's the coalition's reluctance to back it. I mean, it
seems to me it could potentially be the bandwidth that
it takes to do this when they already have a
very very high workload. It could be the police resources
that would be tied up.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
Do you know, I don't. All I got from the
Minister's office is it's not our intention at this time,
and I'm hoping we've got with talking about it like this,
we put it a little bit more pressure on the
government to actually give a good answer and actually saying,
you know, I think this is a good use of
the government's time in parliament's time.

Speaker 1 (04:58):
All right, Jason, thanks very much, appreciate your time. The
political week that was later on in the show That's
Jason Wools our political Ederstaire. For more from Hither Duplessy
Allen Drive, listen live to news Talks it'd be from
four pm weekdays, or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.