From the Archives: Libertarian youth leader from New Zealand discusses his party’s politics

Libertarian youth leader from New Zealand discusses his party’s politics
May 22, 2012 12:25 PM MST

Libertarians are not active in politics solely in the United States. There are libertarian movements and political parties scattered through the Western democracies.

In New Zealand, for instance, there is the ACT Party. That name may seem funny, at first, until one understands that it began as an acronym.

Peter McCaffrey was a parliamentary candidate for the ACT Party in 2008 and 2011, when he was just 21 and 24 years old, respectively. He recently sat down for an interview with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner during a Republican Liberty Caucus social event.

At the time, McCaffrey was traveling through the United States on his way to take a job with a free-market think-tank in Regina, Saskatchewan.

About that acronym

The letters A-C-T, he explained, “used to stand for the ‘Association of Consumers and Taxpayers.’ That was when ACT was set up as a think-tank” almost 20 years ago.

“New Zealand adopted the mixed-member proportional electoral system” in 1994, he continued, with plans to hold the first election under that system in 1996. At that time, “the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers decided that with the implementation of a proportional electoral system, actually it would be better to be set up as a party rather than a think tank and so it became the ACT Party.”

The initials do not “stand for anything now but that’s the origin of the name,” McCaffrey said.

‘Classical liberal’

He describes the party as “a classical liberal party but there’s a bit of a fusion there.”

Older members, he explained, tend to be “more conservative-leaning” or split among liberals and conservatives, while “the younger membership tends to be much more liberal, even leaning towards libertarian.”

During the most recent parliamentary elections in November 2011, McCaffrey explained, the party’s “main focus was on the economy, getting tax rates down, [and] cutting regulation,” as well as advocating for school choice.

“We’ve been doing a big push for charter schools,” he said.

“In New Zealand, we have some private schools that are generally privately funded and we have state schools that are state-funded and state-run but there’s not a lot of choice in between those, so we ran a big push for more choice in education,” he said.

During the election campaign, he noted, the ACT Party made a coalition agreement with the National Party, a conservative party in New Zealand, and the two partners “pushed for an implementation of some trials of charter schools in New Zealand.” As a result, he said, “we’ll be setting up a couple of charter schools, one in South Auckland and one in Christ Church and hopefully more over the next three years as part of that deal.”

Under the new charter school law, he explained, the schools may “be run by any number of different non-profit organizations. Whether that’s Iwi, which are local Maori groups (Maori are the indigenous people in New Zealand) or charities, church groups, anything like that will be able to set up a school and run it.”

The new rules allow “more flexibility in the arrangements of the school so that there’s more choice for people in which schools they send their children to,” he said.

Liberalized drug laws

Generally, McCaffrey said, the ACT Party does not “get too involved in social issues. We try to focus on economics but that doesn’t always happen. Our leader last year” -- Donald Brash, a former New Zealand reserve bank governor – “surprised a lot of the journalists when he came out in support of liberalization of marijuana laws,” including decriminalization or legalization. That position came after heavy lobbying on the part of “some of the younger members of the party.”

That position, he pointed out, “startled a lot of people and maybe scared off some of our older members and supporters but it really got the media talking about the issue. It surprised a lot of people who saw us as sort of an old white conservative party, which, I think, was good for the image of the party long run.”

McCaffrey’s own involvement in ACT is relatively recent but it has spanned his whole adult life, so far.

Learning in high school

“I turned 18 in 2005,” he said, which is the voting age in New Zealand, as it is in the United States.

While he was still in high school, he said, “I just read the web sites of all the main parties that were in the parliament and had a bit of a think. ACT seemed to make the most sense, and so I voted for ACT in 2005,” the first year he was eligible to cast a ballot.

Then, he said, “having voted for ACT, when I got to university, there was a table at the orientation week for ACT on Campus, which is the youth wing of the ACT Party. I signed up to ACT on Campus and then over the next couple of years I got more and more involved in the ACT on Campus group and also in the party itself.”

McCaffrey explained that the “party is very open to young people, volunteers coming in, even coming into the parliamentary offices, helping out, volunteering, doing research -- all that sort of stuff -- so just sort of slowly I got more and more involved.”

Eventually, he “ended up being the ACT on Campus president, leading the youth wing of the party” and later he was selected to serve on “the board for the Wellington region” (equivalent to the unit committee of an American political party) “and stood as a candidate for the party for parliament in 2008 and 2011 in my local district,” Otaki.

He was not elected, however, noting modestly that “to be honest, my district isn’t a very good area for ACT, so I was kind of the only one who was willing to do it in my area.”

That turn of events, of course, is what brought McCaffrey to North America, where he continues to work on the sorts of issues that brought him into politics in his native New Zealand.


Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on May 22, 2012. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.