David Seymour drank The Devil's Milkshake

La la, la la, la, warm it up

Writer and podcaster Tarence Ray coined the term, ‘The Devil’s Milkshake’ to describe the enduring genre of political theatre in which a politician consumes a supposedly tainted substance in order to allay the concerns of their constituents:

You’ve seen it before. An industrial disaster poisons a town’s food or water supply. Residents get angry. Public officials try to dispel that anger through a public act of self-sacrifice, of reassurance. They convene a press conference, whereupon some hapless courtier brings forth a chalice of the supposedly poisoned material. And then, in front of God and the television cameras, the public official imbibes.

The New Zealand right likes its politics much like its school lunches, imported and reheated.

David Seymour is the latest example in a long tradition of politicians poisoning themselves to prove a point.

At the launch of his Healthy School Lunches scheme back in November, David Seymour proudly inhaled the slop he intended to feed kids to show it was edible. In doing so, he was standing on the shoulders of giants like Shinzo Abe who bravely ate Fukushima rice balls without immediately dropping dead¹. For Abe, like Barack Obama (who drank filtered water from Flint’s contaminated supply) and John Hickenlooper (who can’t get enough of fracking fluid), the Devil’s Milkshake is primarily a way to shut down criticism and avoid addressing a problem (pre-emptively in Seymour’s case). After all, what’s good for the goose to eat in front of the media should be good for the gander to subsist on for eternity.

David Seymour eating shit on camera upheld the agreed-upon lie that it’s OK to feed children that same shit. In his case, however, one should remember that Seymour is a notoriously picky-eater whose aversion to ‘woke foods’ stems from the fact that he is known to avoid vegetables at all costs and has a panic attack when in the same room as anything spicier than salt and vinegar chippies. A man who has spent his career battling early-onset scurvy should not have never been allowed anywhere near school lunches and kids are already paying the price.

Mount Cook residents practising their right to free speech

This gets to one of the main tensions in the ideology touted by the ACT Party: libertarians are at once extremely childish in their worldview and should be allowed nowhere near children. For Seymour the idea that the government can tell anyone that they should eat “five plus a day” is a gross overreach. It is his right as a sovereign individual to be a gross little piggy who subsists on chicken nuggies.

In practice though, while Seymour has the liberty to be as childish as possible, actual children are increasingly being refused any rights at all. I have no ideological issue with Seymour eating coco pops for dinner or whatever, but don’t kids have the right to eat vegetables? Surely Muslim kids have the right to halal food??? Well no, because if there’s one consistency in the conspicuously inconsistent worldview of libertarians, it’s their bone-deep hatred for children.

Now that we’re allowed to talk openly about what Tim Jago did, it’s clear that his actions were not a deal breaker for the ACT Party until the law got involved. Seymour didn’t take action when he became aware of Jago’s offending because he doesn’t fundamentally have a problem with harming children. This is a man who refused to stop Snapchatting underage girls after all. ACT Party policy from feeding kids slop to locking them up to calling for the massacre of children in Palestine is nothing if not disdainful towards children. This is the party of Andrew Falloon and David Garrett.

Some street art near the Wellington waterfront

For Ray, “the Devil’s Milkshake is ultimately an insult to your intelligence,” which makes it the perfect type of political theatre for New Zealand’s braindead media class. Whether Seymour is modelling his love for beige food on camera or denying his complicity in Jago’s offending, our reporters will happily report every word he says verbatim. But don’t be fooled, this is a man whose pallid visage is just a cover for an even more disgusting reality: his bone-deep hatred of children.

1. his heart did explode a few years later but this was likely due to being shot by the porridge gun from Wallace & Gromit rather than anything to do with the atomic rice balls.