Peter Hemmingson: ACT, Then and Now - Have We Seen This Movie Before?

As a long-time supporter of Richard Prebble’s original vision for ACT, I’m highly uneasy about what appears to be a familiar pattern re-emerging.

When Prebble brought Donna Awatere-Huata into the party, I questioned the decision at the time. Her background in radical Māori separatist group Ngā Tamatoa and openly expressed sympathy for Marxist economic ideas sat uneasily with ACT’s commitment to free markets, individual responsibility, and equal citizenship.

Someone who not too many years earlier had crowed in an interview with feminist rag, Broadsheet, about “those hard, committed years in Nga Tamatoa, thrilling to Marx’s economic policy,” was a leopard never genuinely likely to change its spots.

What followed justified those concerns.

Prebble may have thought he was getting a poster girl to counter the accusation that ACT was ‘racist’ and ‘anti-Māori,’ but embedding of Donna Awatere-Huata in ACT’s Parliamentary Caucus actually represented a significant triumph for the Māori Sovereignty movement.

Awatere-Huata became, in effect, a handbrake in caucus on ACT’s ability to maintain a hard line on Treaty issues. Most notably, she crossed the floor to support racial privilege legislation around the creation and funding of Māori Television —directly at odds with ACT’s stated commitment to colour-blind government.

As an MP elected via the party list, Awatere-Huata was in Parliament to promote the views and values of ACT members and voters, not to ride a racial hobbyhorse based on personal convictions.

Prebble’s response—that ACT did not whip and Donna was thus free to vote her conscience—came across to many as politically weak. A party built on principle cannot afford to treat foundational issues as optional.

Awatere-Huata’s later conviction for misappropriating funds from a Māori trust she was involved with—funds used in part for personal expenses, including cosmetic surgery—only compounded the sense that Prebble had exercised poor judgement in candidate selection.

The episode damaged ACT’s credibility in terms of being the party of one law for all, individual equality in citizenship, and colourblind government. It exposed the risks of bringing in individuals whose underlying ideology is misaligned with the party’s core principles.

That history matters, because the same structural risk appears again.

Following ACT MP for Tamaki, Brooke Van Velden’s announcement that she’d be stepping away from politics at the end of the current Parliamentary term, a former unsuccessful National Party candidate, James Christmas, has joined ACT and thrown his hat into the ring to contest Van Velden’s seat.

Christmas previously worked as an advisor to National’s Treaty Settlements Minister, Chris Finlayson—the architect of a significant expansion in Treaty settlements and the further embedding of co-governance frameworks.

He and Finlayson also co-authored He Kupu Taurangi: Treaty Settlements and the Future of Aotearoa New Zealand, which explicitly supports concepts such as Crown–iwi partnership, expanded redress for fabricated Treaty claims, and the continued evolution of the Treaty as an instrument providing for co-governance.

It also further pushes the Treatyist myth into the public square that New Zealand was originally named ‘Aotearoa.’

These are not marginal ideas. They go directly to the question of whether New Zealand is governed on the basis of equal citizenship or special group rights for brown supremacist part-Māori (with an ever-declining Māori blood quantum).

The concern for ACT supporters is straightforward: if a candidate has been intellectually and professionally involved in advancing co-governance and Treaty partnership models, how does that square with ACT’s long-standing commitment to one law for all?

This is not about personal characteristics, such as Christmas being gay, vegan, and identifying as ‘Māori’ despite being mostly white by blood quantum. Most ACT voters probably only care about the last of these.

It is about ideology and track record.

ACT has built its brand on clarity—individual rights over group rights, equality before the law, and opposition to identity-based policymaking. Yet there are increasing signs of tension.

David Seymour has taken strong positions against co-governance in some contexts, but recently told a disgusted Michael Laws in a Platform interview that he opposed central government restrictions on unelected iwi participation in local decision-making on the grounds this could be “discriminatory.”

That ambiguity is exactly how drift and brand slippage begins. One law for all, individual equality in citizenship, colourblind government, and an end to unearned ethnocentric privilege for brown supremacist part-Māori are non-negotiable core principles.

Supporters are entitled to ask whether ACT is repeating an old mistake: bringing in individuals whose underlying worldview is at odds with the party’s core principles, then managing the consequences after the fact.

Because we have seen what happens when that contradiction is ignored.

Peter Hemmingson is a New Zealander of multiple ethnic origins, who believes in a single standard of citizenship for all.