ACT leader David Seymour has used his party’s annual rally in Auckland to fire the starting gun on its election campaign, naming firearms law campaigner Nicole McKee as his new deputy and unveiling a welfare overhaul built around spending cards and compulsory medical checks.
The gathering, billed as Rally ’26, drew ACT members in the party’s trademark loud pink to a hall in Auckland over the weekend, with the November vote now little more than four months away. Seymour framed the campaign around two slogans, “Lock Labour out” and a promise to unlock what he called New Zealand’s wasted potential.
The biggest personnel change was the confirmation of McKee as deputy leader. She replaces Brooke van Velden, the Workplace Relations Minister, who has announced she will leave politics at the election to move into the private sector. McKee entered Parliament in 2020 and now serves as Minister for Courts and an Associate Justice Minister. She first made her name opposing the speed of the firearms law changes that followed the Christchurch mosque attacks, a stance Seymour said she held through “extreme scrutiny and determined campaigns to stop her”.
Seymour described McKee as “straight-talking, principled, and practical” and said she had “proven herself as a minister who fixes what matters”. In her own remarks McKee said she would not lose sight of why she was there. “I’ll never forget that I’m in this role to be their advocate, fix what matters, and deliver better value for the people who pay the bills,” she said.
The policy centrepiece was a reworking of the benefit system that Seymour said was about personal responsibility and the value of work. Under the plan, health and disability benefits would be assessed by an independent pool of doctors approved by the Ministry of Social Development, using set criteria rather than case-by-case discretion. That arrangement is optional now, but ACT would make it compulsory.
The party also wants to bring in electronic money management for jobseeker recipients who stay on a benefit for longer than four months. Their payments would load onto a card that could only be spent on essentials such as groceries, rent, power, transport, health and childcare. Alcohol, gambling, tobacco and cash withdrawals would all be blocked. “Welfare should unlock potential, not trap it,” Seymour told the rally.
Alongside the welfare changes, Seymour set out a plan to shrink the machinery of government. ACT would cut the number of government departments from 43 to 19 and reduce the number of ministers from 28 to 18, with each department answering to a single minister. Ministers would be able to appoint chief executives on fixed terms and remove them for poor performance or for working against government policy, though the operational independence of Police, the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service and the Defence Force would still be protected in law.
Much of the speech was aimed squarely at ACT’s rivals. Seymour took aim at Labour, accusing it of making promises it could not pay for. “Every policy is a feel-good headline about something being ‘free’, with no idea how they’ll pay for it,” he said, putting a figure of “$18 billion of unfunded promises” on the opposition’s plans. He drew a sharp line between his party and the centre-left, telling members “we’re not Labour, we’ve never worked with Labour, we’re not Labour-lite”.
He also turned on rival opposition parties. He mocked Te Pāti Māori’s record in Parliament, saying “three years, six MPs and the best they could do for Māori is a haka on TikTok”, and argued that ACT had done more for Māori children through charter schools. Even his own coalition partner New Zealand First was not spared. Reaching back to an old cartoon about Winston Peters’ unpredictability, Seymour asked the crowd, “would you bet your economic future he won’t run down the blindside again?”
The rally lands at a delicate moment for the governing parties. National, ACT and New Zealand First are seeking a second term together, but recent polling has shown Labour holding a narrow lead, and each coalition party is now working to carve out its own identity rather than campaign as a bloc. ACT’s pitch is to voters who want the current government returned but want it pushed harder on spending, welfare and the size of the state.
The welfare proposals are likely to draw the most debate. Income management cards have been tried in Australia with mixed results, and advocates for beneficiaries have long argued that restricting how people spend their money is both costly to run and demeaning. ACT counters that the cards would only apply after four months on a jobseeker benefit and would protect children by making sure money is spent on essentials.
For now the announcements are campaign promises rather than government policy, and would only take effect if ACT could win the numbers to push them through after the election. Voters wanting to see how ACT’s positions line up against the other parties can compare them using Newswire’s voting tool.
You can read more on the rally from RNZ’s coverage of the speech and its report on Nicole McKee’s appointment as deputy, while ACT’s full remarks are posted on Scoop.
What do you make of ACT’s welfare card plan and its push for a smaller government? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
Leave a Reply