The ACT Party's Daddy Issues

David Seymour, the Absent Mother, and the Surveillance State

For some time now I have been wrestling with a puzzle: A political party founded on the principle that individuals “are the owners of their own lives and must be free to act according to their own judgments” is now prosecuting parents whose children miss school. That party’s intrepid leader has personally cheerled a daily national surveillance dashboard which tracks the school attendance of every child in the country. It has established an attendance prosecution unit within the Ministry of Education, proposed an infringement notice regime that would fine parents on the spot, and directed multi-agency information sharing agreements between the Ministry of Education, Police, Oranga Tamariki, the Ministry of Social Development, Kāinga Ora, and Te Puni Kōkiri, six arms of the state, coordinated around the body of a supposed absent child…

This is the same dude that tirelessly advocated for and eventually passed the End of Life Choice Act, the most intimate assertion of individual autonomy New Zealand has ever legislated. Seymour and his party opposed the firearms ban after the Christchurch massacre, defending an individual’s right to bear arms against the collective demand for safety, against the backdrop of deep national trauma. The same party that claims, on its website, to believe that “the proper purpose of government is to protect such freedoms and not to assume such responsibilities.”

The standard and simple explanation for this is hypocrisy. Power corrupts principle. The ‘libertarian’ gets into government and discovers the joys of coercion, enjoys it a little too much. A fair accusation of course. But to me hypocrisy describes Seymour’s behaviour, it doesn’t explain it. It tells me that the contradiction exists but not why it takes the specific form it does, why the coercion flows downward toward disadvantaged parents and children rather than upward toward corporations for example, or why a party that opposes regulatory burden on business simultaneously builds a burdensome surveillance architecture for schools, and why the lofty language of freedom is deployed to justify the gritty machinery of discipline.

For that, we need a different kind of explanation. We need to understand what happens when a society loses the figure that holds its meaning together, and who gets to suture the wound.

From point de capiton to point de capitaine

In psychoanalytic theory, there is a figure called the mOther. The capitalisation matters here: this is not just a mother, a parent, but a structural function in the system of signifiers that together assembles the Symbolic. The mOther is the figure who quilts signifiers into stable meaning. She takes the raw, unorganised experience of the subject, the noise, the need, the confusion, and translates it into a symbolic order where things make some sense. You’re cold. You’re hungry. You belong here. The mOther is anchoring. Words then come to mean things. Relationships make sense, you know where you belong. The world is legible.

In many previous posts I have referred to these anchoring moments as points de capiton, quilting points, like the buttons that hold the stuffing of an upholstered chair in place. Without them the structure loses its shape. With them, everything is held coherent. For me the mOther is usefully understood as a point de capitaine, one who commands the quilting itself, who captains the anchoring of meaning if you will.

The French terms ‘capiton’ and ‘capitaine’ share a Latin root ‘caput’, meaning ‘the head’. And this is how I see the mOther function in society: it is the institutional and relational infrastructure that tells citizens who they are, what they owe each other, and what the rules mean. How you should act in my house. Schools. Health systems. Welfare. The daily rituals of collective life. The whakapapa of a society, the inherited web of obligations and meanings that precedes any individual and holds them in place. You are born into a world that already means something. The mOther function steers the good ship Meaning.

When the mOther function fails (through loss, institutional collapse, catastrophe) the quilting points give way. Signifiers come unmoored. There is a period of radical plasticity: neurologically, sociologically, politically. The brain’s predictive models are violated at scale and it enters a state of heightened receptivity to new patterning. The literature on predictive processing and allostatic load is increasingly clear about this: when the generative model that the brain uses to predict its social environment is massively disrupted, when the world stops being predictable at the most basic level, neural plasticity increases. The system becomes more susceptible to restructuring. Not just open to new ideas, but physiologically primed to install new patterns.

What gets installed depends on what’s available.

The pandemic as maternal failure

In March 2020, the institutional infrastructure that had quietly held New Zealand’s social meaning in place was suspended. Children stopped going to school and their worker parents pretended to work from home (well I actually worked from home - but that was normal for me). The health system was reorganised around a single pathogen. The big Other, that (mostly) silent guarantor of social predictability, was revealed as inconsistent, almost wilfully so. The rules changed weekly. Expertise was simultaneously demanded and contested, often by the same people. The government’s response was too authoritarian for some (lockdowns, mandates, MIQ) and not authoritarian enough for others (the virus kept coming back). Everyone was right and betrayed. I lost my job, through the act of protecting my disabled kid.

The social bond was not just strained but physically severed. Isolation was mandated by law, people couldn’t visit their dying relatives or hold their brand new grandchildren. Most people couldn’t send their kids to school or go to work or sit in a café or attend a funeral. The mOther, the relational infrastructure that says you belong, you are held, this will make sense, withdrew. The “team of five million” was the government’s attempt to maintain the consistency of the mOther. For many New Zealanders it didn’t work, they felt abandoned by the mOther, she walked out the front door in March 2020 to get milk, and she never convincingly returned.

This was a rupture in the symbolic order. The signifiers that had previously been quilted into stable meaning (think community, care, responsibility, freedom, safety) came loose from their moorings. Freedom had meant the right to go about your business. Now it meant the (refused) right to refuse a vaccine. Responsibility had meant looking after your neighbours. Now it meant either staying home or refusing to. Safety had meant the absence of threat. Now it meant the presence of the state in your living room, checking your bubble.

And in the wreckage, with the quilting points scattered, there was a window of extraordinary plasticity in which a traumatised society was primed to accept whoever arrived first with a new set of anchors.

The paternal suture

Into this gap stepped ACT and New Zealand First. Their 2023 vote surge, ACT from an appropriate 1% to 8.6%, New Zealand First from parliamentary oblivion back to coalition government, drew substantially from voters for whom the mOther’s failure during COVID was experienced not as tragedy but as betrayal. Anti-mandate voters. Small business owners who lost everything in lockdown. Parents who watched their children’s education dissolve in a Zoom. People who felt that the institutional infrastructure had turned against them.

Except. Except ACT did not offer to restore the mOther, there was no promise to rebuild the relational infrastructure, the care, the collective holding, the web of social obligation that had been torn apart. What ACT offered was something else entirely.

It offered the Father’s law. The paternal function.

In psychoanalytic terms, the paternal function is the structural counterpart to the maternal. Where the mOther holds and translates, the Father prohibits and measures. Where the mOther says you belong, the Father says you must earn your place. The paternal function is not inherently destructive, it is necessary. It introduces the concept of order, limits, the reality principle. But when it arrives in the place of the mOther rather than subservient to her, when law replaces care rather than supplementing it, shit gets sour. The subject is disciplined but not held. Measured but not known. Governed but not cared for.

For me this is now the fundamental structure of ACT’s ideology, and it explains both the party’s founding compromise and its current trajectory. Bryce Edwards from The Democracy Project has a fascinating examination of the “The Act Party’s journey from market freedom to corporate capture”, including it’s impressive achievement of alienating even Roger Douglas, whose text-turd Unfinished Business was the ACT party’s founding document! Douglas acknowledged from the start that “in order for these policies to work there will have to be an element of compulsion.” Freedom and responsibility, always a couplet, never freedom alone. The responsible individual earns freedom. The irresponsible individual forfeits it. The state’s role is not to nurture but to sort: to distinguish the deserving from the undeserving, the “can’t” from the “won’t,” and to discipline the latter.

This logic was always latent in the party’s DNA. What COVID did was create the conditions under which it could be installed at scale, backed by corporate funding. The mOther failed. The plasticity opened. The Father arrived with his measuring instruments, dashboards, thresholds, prosecution units, and his wallet crammed with corporate donations.

STAR: The wound closed, not healed

The Stepped Attendance Response framework, STAR, is the clearest expression of this logic applied to education, and it reveals what happens when a battlefield suture is mistaken for healing.

Before COVID, school attendance in New Zealand was managed, however imperfectly, through a broadly relational framework. Schools knew their communities and families. The system was underfunded, inadequate, and frequently failed the most marginalised children. But its grammar was, in the sense I have been describing, maternal: engagement, support, understanding barriers, wraparound services. Its failures were the failures of a care system that lacked resources.

STAR may seem sensible, but it replaces this grammar entirely. It is a system of thresholds, escalation, measurement, and consequence. Five days absent: the school notices. Ten days: a formal meeting with parents to “address barriers”, but the barriers are pre-categorised and the obligation falls on the family. Fifteen days: the Ministry is notified. Beyond that: prosecution. An attendance prosecution unit has been established within the Ministry of Education. An infringement notice regime has been proposed. Daily digital reporting from every school in the country feeds a national dashboard. Information sharing agreements link the Ministry to Police, Oranga Tamariki, MSD, Kāinga Ora, Te Puni Kōkiri, six state agencies, coordinated around the absent child and their delinquent parent.

Don’t make the mistake of seeing this as relational framework with enforcement at its margins. It is an enforcement framework with a relational sheen. The school is reconstituted as a node in a data network. The child is a unit to be counted. The parent is a potential defendant. And the actual barriers to attendance, which I have written about extensively (illness, disability, poverty, housing instability, the lingering immunological and psychological wreckage of the pandemic itself) are acknowledged only insofar as they can be sorted into the binary that organises the entire system.

“If you’re a ‘won’t’ rather than a ‘can’t’,” the Associate Minister of Education has said, “then we are going to throw the book at you.”

That binary, can’t versus won’t, is the paternal function par excellence, It has no capacity for ambiguity or tolerance for the child whose situation is both and neither. There’s no framework for the family whose barriers shift week to week, illness to poverty to exhaustion to a housing situation that makes regular attendance functionally impossible without a car and/or fuel they can’t afford. The binary closes down the very complexity that a relational system would hold open, that a mOther would embrace. It attempts to suture the wound while refusing to look at what’s underneath.

Battle surgery

Here is the metaphor that reveals what Seymour’s STAR actually is.

When a soldier is wounded in combat, the field medic does not perform reconstructive surgery. There is no time, or sterile theatre, let alone diagnostic imaging. The medic stops the bleeding, closes the wound, and uses whatever is to hand: a tourniquet, a staple gun, a pressure bandage. The work is fast, brutal, and necessary. Hopefully it saves the life. But no one confuses it with healing.

The battlefield suture closes the wound. It does not repair the tissue. Beneath the staples, the damage persists: compressed fascia, severed nerves, misaligned muscle. If the suture is left in place permanently and the patient survives the body adapts around the injury rather than recovering from it. Scar tissue forms, the range of motion narrows and chronic pain sets in. The longer the battlefield suture remains, the harder the reconstructive surgery becomes.

COVID was the wound. The pandemic tore through the quiet taken-for-granted social fabric of New Zealand, through schools, families, and the relational infrastructure that had held attendance, engagement, and collective wellbeing roughly in place. When it receded from it’s acute phase, it left behind a generation of children whose connection to school had been compromised, some worse than others. IN the wake of the pandemic families had to rethink routines and in some communities institutional trust had been broken.

But STAR is (at best) a battlefield suture.

The tissue beneath is misaligned. Children with chronic illness or disability, many of whom are managing conditions exacerbated or revealed by COVID itself, are caught in a binary that has no place for them. Families in genuine hardship face the spectre of prosecution for circumstances they cannot change. Schools have been given a data-reporting function in a national surveillance system, which has increased their regulatory burden. The relational infrastructure that might actually address why children aren’t attending (poverty, housing instability, post-COVID health burdens, the collapse of mental health services, the quiet despair of communities that feel abandoned) remains completely unaddressed.

The mOther has not been restored. The Father’s staples hold the skin together while the wound suppurates beneath.

And meanwhile, the party that championed this oppressive apparatus and seems to enjoy the act of prosecuting parents for their children’s absence, has opposed legislation requiring corporations with revenues over $100 million to report on modern slavery in their supply chains. Too much regulatory burden, they said, seemingly without the shame that comes with such a position. National and Labour ended up bypassing ACT entirely to get the Modern Slavery Bill to its first reading. The asymmetry is precise: the state should have the power to prosecute a parent, electronically tag an eleven-year-old, and share a child’s personal data across six government agencies, but it should not require a multinational to disclose whether its products are made by slaves.

This is not hypocrisy. It is the paternal function operating exactly as designed: discipline for persons, freedom for capital. Surveillance for the vulnerable, deregulation for the powerful. The mOther’s care withdrawn from both, but only one subjected to the Father’s law.

What actual repair looks like

Just as a soldier deserves better than the battlefield suture. So do New Zealand’s children and families.

In policy terms, this means doing what ACT has refused to do: rebuilding the relational infrastructure that an international pandemic undermined.

In terms of school attendance, this would be properly funded community based attendance services staffed by people who actually know the families and understand the barriers, these people can hold the complexity that the can’t-versus-won’t binary forecloses. It terms of health services it involves managing the long-COVID burden of respiratory illness, immunological disruption, and mental health that is keeping children home, services that treat absence as a symptom rather than a crime. It means housing stability, because you cannot get a child to school at 8:45 every morning from a motel room in a town with no public transport. It means specialist support for children with disabilities whose attendance barriers are permanent and will never be resolved by any form of escalation. It means an education system whose grammar is care first and measurement second, I’m actually completely for measurement but measurement without care is surveillance, and surveillance without care is cruelty.

None of this is in any way utopian. It’s practical and sensible.

Removing the suture

STAR is not just bad policy. It is a dangerous misalignment: a paternal suture installed where maternal repair is needed. Producing compliance data while the underlying injury deepens. Every term it remains in place, more damage is done. The schools become more habituated to surveillance than to care. The families most in need become more distrustful of a system that treats them as suspects. The children at the margins (the chronically ill, disabled, poor, traumatised) learn that the institution that was supposed to hold them sees them instead as a problem.

New Zealand does not need a political party that disciplines its most vulnerable citizens while liberating its most powerful institutions from accountability. It does not need the Father’s law installed where the mOther’s care is needed.

It needs the mOther back. Not as nostalgia for a pre-COVID world that had its own deep failures, but as a commitment to the kind of social repair that takes time, resources, and a fundamentally different understanding of what the state is for.

That is the case for voting ACT out in November.