David Seymour explains how ACT Party runs on rugby coaching principles: pooling MP resources into a shared support centre, open-plan offices to force communication, and flat hierarchy. He argues governments should use private-sector innovation during crises instead of centralized control.
Seven seasons.
Andrew Cattels.
Six years.
I want to talk a little bit about culture, obviously, running a country, understanding culture and high performance culture, what that looks like is important, but also right down to your culture here at the party. So you do things a bit differently here. Just. Would you mind sharing? We obviously chatted off air beforehand, but you've got a really cool, unique model and I think it really devolves the power and empowers others.
Yeah, of course. I mean, for me it goes back to. I don't know why, but when I was in my late teens, I wanted to try and coach a rugby team. So I coached for seven seasons in total. And what I discovered pretty quickly is that while the players I had, no offence, if any of them are watching, were probably never going to be all blacks, the years that I managed to create a good culture and was happy to come along, show up to training, you know, supported each other, oftentimes these players who may be at the peak of their career already, would do astonishing things on the field because they felt empowered. And we've tried to create that basic insight or use that basic insight here at act. If you look at the way that most parliamentary officers are organised, it's one mp, one EA off down a corridor with these two adjoining offices I call pregnant offices. There's a big office for the MP and a sort of bump on the side for the ea. And of course we're. What you've got is a whole lot of employment relationships in a high stress environment, often with an inexperienced employer and one person that's asked to provide a whole lot of different services that may not be possible. So having had six years as a sole MP to think about these things, when I got a big caucus coming in and a lot more funding, I said to my MPs, look, you can do that if you want. You take your funding, sort it out, see how you go, or we can do something different. And what we did was we all pledged on the first day to pool our resources and then the MPs effectively became shareholders in the caucus support center. So then our chief of staff, Andrew Cattels, is an extraordinary guy. He has gone and built this caucus support centre and there's a research unit. So, you know, if you're an ACT mp, instead of having one person with five jobs, you can go and get really good research done by people that specialize in that. There's a comms unit. So if you want to put out a press release or you get a request from the media, we've got a couple of top comms people and then another person on digital that can do that for you. If you want to get out around the country, the outreach unit will do coherent tours and engagement. So you get out and talk to a lot of people instead of sort of wandering around in the middle of nowhere. Who sent me here? And don't you know that? No, there's no. It turns out that there's two Havelocks. I'm in the wrong one, so that's really important. And the other one is the admin team, who quickly renamed themselves the A team. I love it. So they make sure that everyone's in the right place at the wrong time and the correspondence is sorted and so on. But the other thing it did, so act mps get these specialized services, much higher level of support than if they just hired an EA in their own right. But they also are in this open plan environment. I don't have an office. What it means is that our team, instead of being off down a hall with relationship breakdowns and personal grievances and all the stuff that happens all through Parliament, our folks are out in the open in a really positive environment. And I think you've started to see that, that ex MPs people say, oh, I don't hear enough from your MPs. Well, actually, if you think about it, must be at least 30 or 40 MPs came in in the 2020 intake. You don't hear from any of them. You hear from ours more than most. And I think that reflects the fact that we created that good culture.
See, that's, to me, a difference that can make a difference for culture. And often with corporate CEOs, I hear the saying, hey, James, it's really lonely at the top. I said, okay, tell me about your office set up. Oh, you know, I've got this beautiful corner office. And I was like, okay, door closed. Yeah, yeah, I'm so busy. It's like, that's why it's lonely. So I love that you're, like, getting out amongst your people, rubbing shoulders, hearing conversations. That's modern leadership.
Well, it is. And it's also, you know, it saves time if you catch things early. So it's, you know, while it's tempting to close everyone off, chances are that you'll have to circle back and fix stuff that you weren't aware of. So I'd like to think, and, you know, of course you never really know, but I'd like to think that I'm more in touch with what's going on because it's a real danger, is that you know, people stop telling you stuff, they think, oh, I shouldn't bother David about that. And you know, I take all our folks aside when they start and I just say, look, we've got a policy. I'm like a parent of teenagers. You know, if you're in trouble you can call me anytime. And you know, not many of them have but I think it's useful to at least send that message from the output that, you know, I can't help you till I know everything 100% and.
In terms of dealing with pressure. So I think of we've always got an ambush. We don't know when ambushes will come, but we've always got an ambush just around the corner. It could come in the form of a pandemic, an earthquake, earquake, a disaster, economic stress. How do you respond? Have you got a way that you respond so that you're clear, you're concise.
And you're calm.
So you're talking about, you know, natural or other man made disasters that might confront New Zealand? Yeah, yeah. I mean I think what's really important for ACT and it's a strength of our party is that we do come from a clear sense of mission and that is that we want to cut back the amount of government activity in favour of civil society and business or private enterprise activity. So we want to shift from one bucket to the other two because we think they're more efficient and we think government has a way of being self fulfilling so it often grows and eclipses other areas of activity in the society. So then when something like Covid happens, you know, having a principled conception of the role of government is really helpful. So what should government do? Well, I think the government was probably right to buy time but once it had done that initial seven week lockdown, it had become clear that the infection fatality rate was much lower than previously thought. It had become clear that it was going to be really challenging for the economy to survive if it was locked down for a long period. Of course if you borrow 100 billion bucks and pump that in, that can work, but you get inflation. And so we were saying things straight away like the government needs to make clear rules of the game. Those rules need to be proportionate to risk. So if it's safe to go to your supermarket butcher, it's probably safe to go to your local butcher, in fact safer. I would argue, you know, the government should use the best possible technology and allow innovation from the private sector. If people can bring in a better test, why shouldn't they? Be allowed to. Unfortunately, in many, many areas the government didn't have a clear conception of its own role. It was my way or the highway that confiscated people's tests, having previously banned them completely. They didn't involve the GP network or pharmacies or private business and the vaccine rollout anywhere near early enough or IWI for that matter. And as a result, things weren't anywhere near as effective or efficient as they could have been and we paid a much higher price to save the lives that we did than we otherwise needed to. So I think having a clear philosophical mission and in this case an understanding of the role of government and where civil society and the private sector can be more helpful, that allowed us to position, you know, I think in quite sophisticated ways. We put out four different policy papers throughout the COVID pandemic and I look at those papers now and I still stand by them. I think they were right.
