ACT leader David Seymour says the Minister for the South Island role should go as part of a major reduction in the number of government ministries.

Speaking to chrislynchmedia.com, Seymour said New Zealand should move towards around 15 to 20 ministries, similar to Norway and Ireland. Japan operates with about 15 despite a far larger population.

“At the moment, we have a Minister for the South Island. Why? There’s no South Island department. There’s no South Island budget,” Seymour said.

“It’s just a way of showing a million people we love you, but actually we’re not going to do anything about it.”

He said each minister should also be accountable for the performance of their department’s chief executive.

“We need to get to the stage where a minister is responsible for getting results from a budget from one department.”

“If we made that transformation, then I think we would suddenly find ourselves with all sorts of cost savings and efficiencies that no one had ever looked at before.”

Seymour said ACT had been pushing for greater consolidation for about two years, and expected further restructuring if the coalition was returned to office.

Agencies focused on particular population groups would be among those targeted, he said. ACT campaigned at the last election on abolishing the Human Rights Commission, the Ministry for Pacific Peoples, the Ministry of Māori Development, the Ministry for Ethnic Communities and the Ministry for Women.

Education could also face significant consolidation.

“You’ve got ERO, you’ve got the charter school agency, you’ve got the Ministry of Education. I’d say there really just needs to be one organisation.”

“You might even put them in with immigration and say the underlying purpose of this ministry is all about skills in the population, educating people who are already here, and saying if people are going to come here, they should be people bringing the relevant skills.”

Seymour said his view of government structure had changed during his time in office, after years in which ACT concentrated on lower taxes, less regulation and equal treatment before the law.

“When I got in, I said it doesn’t really matter about the departments and so on. What really matters is the policies that we put in place.”

The interview also covered veteran real estate agent Janet Dickson, who faces losing her licence after refusing to complete a compulsory 90 minute Māori culture and Treaty history course.

Seymour said what happened to Dickson was “wrong in the moral sense”.

He said Associate Justice Minister Nicole McKee had since changed the law so the Real Estate Authority could no longer impose five year stand downs, and the course itself had been removed.

“You can change what the law will be in the future, but you can’t change what the law was in the past. That’s a very important principle.”

Seymour said appeal options remained available to Dickson, and that McKee had avoided commenting extensively because she did not want to prejudice any further proceedings.

The Māori Party has proposed a Treaty commission with greater powers and making Waitangi Tribunal recommendations binding. Asked about those proposals, Seymour turned to the state of the party itself.

“Those guys can’t even organise themselves. I said that they were divisive, and they’ve now divided themselves in half.”

Seymour contrasted the current party with earlier Māori Party figures Marama Fox and Te Ururoa Flavell, who backed charter schools during his first period in Parliament.

“They always voted on the side of educational choice because they knew that’s the number one thing that’s going to move the dial and change outcomes for their supporters.”

“Today, who knows what these guys’ education policy even is?”