Mihi Forbes vs David Seymour over Atlas Network connections
Joshua Drummond ain’t no chump.
He’s the researcher for Mihi Forbes and Mihi Forbes is one of the best political broadcasters in New Zealand.
Their combined focus on ACT and their connections to the Atlas Network is journalism The Daily Blog has followed closely and posted on numerously.
Joshua’s latest blog on David Seymour’s refusal to acknowledge any links with the far right Libertarian Think Tank funded by petrol oligarchs and wealthy far right groups is a must read…
To recap, quickly: The Atlas Network is a “think tank that creates think tanks“; a global network of more than 500 right-wing think tanks and lobby groups. New Zealand members of Atlas include the Taxpayers’ Union and the New Zealand Initiative (formed from a merger of two think tanks, one of which was the infamous Business Roundtable.)
Seymour’s extraordinary denial came during a recording of Mata with Mihingarangi Forbes on RNZ, recorded and released on Waitangi Day, February 6 2024. The relevant parts of the transcript are excerpted below.
Forbes: And those indigenous Australians are now warning Māori that the same groups are behind this referendum. Are they, do you think?
Seymour: Well, if you’re about to go into the new Pizzagate of the left conspiracy theory, then I’ll be real disappointed.
Forbes: What’s that, the Pizzagate?
Seymour: That’s some crazy conspiracy theory that Trump has had in the US.
Forbes: The campaign in Australia had links to the Atlas network.
Seymour: Oh, here we go.
Forbes: A network of think tanks, which promote individual liberty and free enterprise. And it said that the network pushes opinion pieces in favour of free speech. Do the ACT Party have any links or connections to the Atlas group?
Seymour, very quietly: No.
That is a lie. David Seymour and the ACT Party have numerous links to the Atlas Network. Here are some of them.
After a 10 month stint as an electrical engineer – his sole non-political, non-think tank job – David Seymour worked for a Canadian think tank called the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, from 2007 to 2011. From January 2013 to February 2014, he worked for The Manning Foundation (now called the Canada Strong and Free Network). Both these think tanks were members of the Atlas Network at the time. (They possibly still are: the Atlas Network no longer discloses member organisations on its website.) Just in case there’s any doubt, here is David Seymour in the Atlas Year in Review, 2008. He is pictured composing a song about school choice to celebrate Milton Friedman Legacy Day, which is one of those sentences you never expect to find yourself writing.
…Seymour singing a song attacking public education to celebrate Milton Friedman is kinda hilarious…
There are other overt ACT links to Atlas. According to his LinkedIn profile, Louis Houlbrooke is currently “working at Parliament in support of ACT’s vision of an open and benevolent society in which individual New Zealanders are free to achieve their full potential.” Before this, he worked as Campaigns Manager for the Taxpayers’ Union, an Atlas Network member, for four years, eight months. During this time, Houlbrooke attended multiple Atlas Network events, as documented by the Atlas Network.
Hilariously, the most comprehensive debunking of David Seymour’s 2024 Waitangi Day lie about the ACT Party’s connection to the Atlas Network comes from David Seymour’s 2021 Waitangi Day “State of the Nation” speech. Helpfully, you can read Seymour’s reference to “my old friends at the Atlas Network” at the ACT Party’s website, and on a video hosted on the ACT party’s Facebook page.
It’s worth noting that Debbi Gibbs, the Atlas Network chair that Seymour references, is the daughter of Alan Gibbs, who was a long-time member of Atlas Network member organisation, the Business Roundtable (now the New Zealand Initiative). Alan Gibbs is also a founding member of ACT, and he and his wife have often donated large sums of money to the party.
Also, I feel compelled to mention that before her tenure as chair of a multinational neoliberal lobby network, Debbi Gibbs was the manager of New Zealand rock band Straitjacket Fits, because nothing is weirder than reality.
The interview continues:
Forbes: Have you spoken or taken advice from them or any group associated with them about the treaty?
Seymour, even more quietly: No.
This is not true, as Forbes quickly demonstrates. Seymour attended a Taxpayers’ Union (which is part of the Atlas Network) function in Wellington where British politician Lord Daniel Hannan – one of the principal architects of Brexit, and founding president of the Initiative for Free Trade (which is, if you haven’t guessed, part of the Atlas Network) – spoke specifically about the Treaty.
Seymour: I can’t believe you’re doing this. I’ve read about this conspiracy theory and you’re actually running it, but that’s cool.
Forbes: Well, no, I’m just trying to understand it because we went to Australia and we analysed…
Seymour (interrupting): We did the conspiracy theory…
Forbes: We analysed the Yes campaign over there and we spoke with indigenous people about their fears, about what would happen in the referendum. And so when you consider, you know, actually you and I spoke about it. You said that you had met Lord Hannon and then the TPU, the Taxpayer Union, had invited you to come along. And he spoke about this treaty and the possibility of a referendum. So isn’t that in fact, you know, these movements and these groups talking about our referendum?
Seymour: Well, going along to meet someone who’s a famous figure, in world politics.
Forbes: What did he come to New Zealand for?
Seymour: I have no idea, but I was really pleased to…
(Seymour can find out what Hannan came to New Zealand for by either a.) consulting his memory of the speech he attended, b.) re-watching the speech Hannan gave on YouTube, or c.) by reading the video’s title, which is “Lord Hannan, Daniel speaks about equality, the Treaty and the Taxpayers’ Union in Wellington.” The video is helpfully subtitled throughout.)
Forbes: Well, you were there.
Seymour: I was really pleased to have dinner with the guy. I mean, he’s, you know, he’s world famous as a politician. You get to meet him, hear what he has to say.
Forbes: But you went along to that function to listen to him where he talked about the Magna Carta and the treaties and…
Seymour: Oh my God, the Magna Carta.
Forbes: He did. And then…
Seymour: Scandalous.
Forbes: Well, I’m not saying that that’s scandalous. I’m just saying this is what he talked about. I listened to it online because it was posted by the TPU. And so he talked about that and he talked about the danger of the misinterpretation of treaties and what they meant. And he’s, you know, and he also says, what you say is that the judiciary is getting too involved or they’re making the interpretation of it as too wide.
Seymour: You do know that people have had concerns about judicial activism all over the world for all sorts of reasons for hundreds of years, right?
Forbes: No, I don’t…
Seymour (laughing): And you’re trying to say that this is somehow some crazy conspiracy theory. I mean, come on.
Forbes: No, no, I’m just asking the question. I’m asking whether you know if there’s any kind of connection. So you’re answering there is no connection?
Seymour: I’ve told you that there is no connection.
Forbes: Ka pai.
Seymour: I’m just disappointed in you for picking up a known conspiracy theory that several people have sent to me and I never thought I’d get asked about it by you, but hey, you go.
To be very clear: there is a connection, and it’s a comprehensive one. Seymour’s lie is beyond the pale, even for a public habituated to lying politicians. He must know that he worked for Atlas Network think tanks for years, and that he was a guest at Atlas Network events. He must also know ACT party staff members worked for Atlas Network think tanks for years and attended Atlas Network events. I’ll happily grant that a global network of think tanks dedicated to spreading far-right thought around the world sounds like a conspiracy theory, but that’s not journalists’ fault; that’s the fault of the Atlas Network for giving itself a name that would make a Bond supervillain blush, seeding and partnering with over 500 think tanks worldwide, and making grandiose statements like this on its own website:
Joshua’s research is flawless and is based on open source media, but these far right think tanks don’t sit around plotting co-ordinated attacks on democracy, that is too cartoonish a villain, the Atlas Network is far more insidious than that and far more dangerous.
Sociopaths singing songs to far right market lunatics doesn’t a plot make, and David’s denial is that there was no clear order from the Atlas Network to implement the policy platforms he has, and in this he is of course 100% right.
Because there is such order, that would be stupid. The way this cancer grows and metastasizes is via osmosis.
Atlas (shrugged) Network is funded by petrol oligarchs and climate change polluters who find the social media pressure points the way the old Cambridge Analytics did. They can micro target and mine resentment better than anyone else in the game, and they pass those findings along allowing for local think tanks to plot legislative change welded to the culture war pressure points and allow hate algorithms to do the rest.
Joshua’s research follows the column George Monbiot first published in January linking the Atlas Network’s influence in British politics.
Look at this agenda:
A crash programme of massive cuts;
demolishing public services;
privatising public assets;
centralising political power;
sacking civil servants;
sweeping away constraints on corporations and oligarchs;
destroying regulations that protect workers, vulnerable people and the living world;
supporting landlords against tenants;
criminalising peaceful protest;
restricting the right to strike.
…this is the Atlas Agenda and this is the exact same bloody agenda being proposed here, in fact I can find an example of every single one of those implemented since this new hard right racist climate denying Government came in!
Why does all of this matter so much? Well look at who is funding the Atlas Network! It’s all the worst industries with the worst records and with the money to ensure laws are written for them and not against them, that’s extraordinarily dangerous!
Monbiot makes this point…
And who, in turn, are the junktanks? Many refuse to divulge who funds them, but as information has trickled out we have discovered that the Atlas Network itself and many of its members have taken money from funding networks set up by the Koch brothers and other rightwing billionaires, and from oil, coal and tobacco companies and other life-defying interests. The junktanks are merely the intermediaries. They go into battle on behalf of their donors, in the class war waged by the rich against the poor. When a government responds to the demands of the network, it responds, in reality, to the money that funds it.
…Oil, coal, tobacco, right wing billionaires, the fucking Koch brothers, dark money influencing our political system so much so that we see the exact same agenda being rolled out here!
The sleepy hobbits of muddle NuZilind believe we are safe in the Shire, when the reality is that Mordor is already upon us.
That so few NZ Journalists have picked up Mihi’s journalism and Joshua’s research should surprise no one, the Political Editor at Stuff is Luke Malpass who was a policy wonk for the NZ Initiative, one of the connected free market think tanks Atlas Network feeds.
As the push for more privatisation, steeper austerity and race baiting policy collides with extreme weather events, destabilising geopolitics and increasingly desperate first time home buyers bled out from rising mortgage rates and beneficiaries and state tenants kicked off welfare and out of homes, the only winner will be private prisons and the bloody Atlas Network!
Shouldn’t we be talking a lot more about the Atlas Network and their libertarian extremist pro climate change polluting sociopaths?
We can’t beat this hard right racist climate denying Government if we don’t know where their agenda is coming from!
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Yeah all the evidence is there to prove that the capitalist ruling class uses the state to organise its own class interests.
International capital is facing its terminal zero sum crash, warring over nature’s plundered resources especially land and precious metals but in the process destroying and humanity.
There is no conspiracy just ignorance of reality. Think tanks like Atlas operate transparently, just like all the pension funds and private equity monopolies like Black Rock.
The lesson to draw from this is that the state is the organising committee of the ruling class, including the charade of parliamentary democracy.
That is why Marx, when the Paris Commune was destroyed by the French and Prussian armies way back in 1871, realised that the survival of humanity as the working class demanded an armed insurrection to smash the state.
She was decidedly out of her league and depth in that interview
And Seymour is a complete bullshit artist.
Act are increasing their support with the voters after their great showing at Waitangi.
I was never a fan but he stood up to the noisy rabble and girl his message out and that deserves respect
And that sums it up. He is nothing but a shit stirrer, but because he got heckled you have respect for him. It wasn’t a great showing at all.
I don’t think that he deserves respect…
There is nothing to respect about a puffed up narcissist with deluded fantasies, spouting illogical analogies and falsehoods, strutting around like a peacock!
He demonstrates all the signs of a sociopath. He is a dangerous goofball, egomaniac, loner, suffering from small man’s syndrome, who craves attention through power.
Big, big, money people, who are quite often high on the psychopath scale, spots these desperate personality types a mile away, groom them, and then use them as a conduit to enact and complete their ultimate goals.
As history has demonstrated many times before, these personality types are completely unhinged, causing catastrophic harm in a short space of time.
In the end though, they fail, but not without scaring the landscape.
It’s almost like they are from another planet….and in many ways …they are!
Watch out!!
Good analysis Grant.
If you like robots pretending to be people.
They don’t choose to look after other people just because they are people though.
As he says, he doesn’t want love.
You have every reason to be just as scared of him as the rest of us Trevor, unless you are a millionaire. Are you?
He seems a cold person, lacking in humour or empathy.
Unfortunately I am not a millionaire but I do support parties that encourage people to stand on their own feet and be responsible for their actions.
The State is there as support when thinks go wrong but not as a life style support
Most of those people have had something go wrong. Do you think if they really had a choice, they would choose the lifestyle of being poor and vilified by the wealthy who have no idea of how they live? It’s only when something goes wrong that we realize how little help there is.
I stand on my own two feet too and believe I should. I do not expect the state to help me, nor do I try to squeeze anything out of the state in terms of tax rebates or anything else. I don’t ‘have an accountant’.
I’ve been fairly lucky in life but can accept that not everybody has had it so good.
Right wing MPs have had state help in their lives and when they got to the point where they were responsible for divvying out that help, they withdrew the benefits they’d had, from others. Why were others less deserving than them.
The media reports the extreme cases of abuse of state help Trevor and you lot lap it up because it fits your opinions. For every case of abuse of state help, there are thousands that work properly and people get back to standing on their own two feet. They are just like you at that point except with a better understanding of how life can be for some unlucky individuals.
By all means vote for parties that expect people to stand on their own two feet. But make sure those parties aren’t telling NZders to be more independent while making it easy for foreign and millionaire investors here, to ransack our little patch and make everything theirs instead of ours.
While they are telling us to look after ourselves, they are telling their mates they’ll make sure they get various laws changed so that their access to our belongings will be easier.
Why should we have to pay foreigners for the pleasure of using our own water and power etc.
Why should we pay them to destroy our environment to make profits which go off-shore. The big banks are a perfect example already.
While we are told to look after ourselves the big donors and friends of NACT are being told don’t worry guys, we’ll look after you.
Despite the hit job the msm and the opposition are doing on the proposed bill a majority of Kiwis agree with Seymour.
Ok, what kiwis would they be Jack? Clearly the majority were not around at the last election
Latest Curia poll?
Read em and weep.
I have read them Jack. Maybe you use different definitions but 13.7% doesn’t represent the majority of kiwis
If Incel Dave ever had a “root” he did not pay for it would be a surprise to many.
He has been caught out with Atlas Network, simple as that. Sprung on various pages of the 2008 Atlas Review. The leaders are filthy millionaires mentoring people to go and cause havoc for working class people in their home territories.
Mr Seymour needs to be confronted with all of this till he admits it. He is traitor to this country on behalf of international capital.
Bomber:
> …that’s the fault of the Atlas Network for giving itself a name that would make a Bond supervillain blush…
I presume it’s named for the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged. If so, that tells you everything you need to know about their ideology.
> the Political Editor at Stuff is Luke Malpass who was a policy wonk for the NZ Initiative, one of the connected free market think tanks Atlas Network feeds
When the state-corporate news media take great offence at the notion they’re biased, and can’t understand why less than 50% of people now trust them, maybe they need to consider facts like the above. As Cory Doctorow put it, in some cases, the swivel-eyed loons have a point;
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/03/paranoid-style/
I read Monbiot’s article outing Atlas a few weeks ago, when he first published it.
I noted that the tactic of employing junk tanks to poison public discourse using fake intellectual and academic gravitas isn’t a new practise for the right wing, it’s been around for many decades.
In NZ the old Business Roundtable was always commissioning smokescreen studies and expert conferences etc, they even coerced the gubmint into doing the work for them (or footing the costs) by getting their stooges (and hard right fanatics such as Roger Dean) to analyse the public sector, identifying so-called shortcomings and cooking excuses for their predetermined policy recommendations.
Internationally, genesis of such neoliberal networks have been clearly traced back to the 1940s when F Hayek’s ideas began to take traction in economic schools of thought.
So, Atlas isn’t a new or a surprise revelation, but it certainly is handy to have a concrete name with which to confront these right wing stooges. They prefer their nebulous web of connections to be kept very opaque.
Saw this comment on FB, seems to align with Mihis contention.
Guess what. Atlas Network chairperson is NZer Debbi Gibbs. Daughter of Alan & Dame Jenny Gibbs. The late Alan Gibbs helped establish the ACT party in 1994. Jenny Gibbs donated $50,000 last Sept to ACT. David Seymour denies he has any links to Atlas Network and says it all just a left wing conspiracy.
There is that so true quote of: Oh what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive…”
The same can well apply to ACT and the Atlas Network and probably the WEF and in particular Luxon and National. What other links does NZ First have with the Tobacco Industry, The Oil and Gas Industry, the Atlas Network and the WEF????!! Only time will tell.
Be assured there will hardly be a peep out of the mainstream NZ media for what is happening by this government towards this country and its population.
Has anyone ever noticed when it comes to so-called politicians like Peters, Seymour and Luxon that when caught in a corner of THEIR OWN making due to their use of bullshit and lies they must try to deflect and make instead innuendoes galore? They also resort to the Blame-Game Mantra i.e blaming the previous government for ALL the WOES in the World.
It is like when they cannot really answer a question in a genuine or honest manner they resort to avoidance deflection kind of answers and then try to give the impression they are answering the question(which isn’t CLEAR(a Luxon Pet Word)but also come across as dismissive and attacking verbally of the person interviewing them.
It really isn’t an adult approach to answering questions. It’s something ONLY schoolyard bullies would resort to.
But then have any of those in politics truly grown up from the school days when beating others with bedlegs seemed acceptable and to this day has been kept under wraps????!!!
This Coalition of Corruption(as I call it)must surely come across as a Living in Denial type of Organisation and one that thinks they KNOW EVERYTHING. HAVE AN ANSWER FOR EVERYTHING AND ARE EXPERTS ON EVERYTHING. And when caught in the corner will of course Blame Someone Else.
The truly frightening thing is if there was this style of government when COVID hit our shores how many multiple fatalities would there have been whilst Seymour resorts to pathetic little childish exclamations and pure stupidity? And how many NZers would have been expected to pay for the vaccines out of their low income Bottom Feeder wages???!!!
I do hope most NZers are far better than the bickering and blaming gaming bunch that this lot of politicians in the COC are. At least NZers know what is happening in the world. The politicians like Seymour, Peters and Luxon may as well reside on Toilet Free Planet Key.
Well stated Grant.
Thanks for the brilliant analysis on Seymour.