Seymour - disrespecting public consultation

Public consultation on legislation is vital for democracy, allowing citizens to participate and reinforcing that politicians serve the public not the other way around.

Recently, ACT leader and Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour dismissed many of the 23,000 submissions on the Regulatory Standards Bill as "fake" and "bot-generated," - listen here at 19 mins.  This is disrespectful to submitters and undermines trust in the public consultation process.

While Seymour may be suggesting that many submissions were orchestrated and followed a similar form, this differs significantly from them being "fake" and "bot-generated."

This highlights a broader concern about the role of truth in democracy. Anne Applebaum's comment in The Atlantic's Autocracy in America podcast resonates here:

Applebaum:  Exactly. Instead, the idea is just to lie constantly, all the time, about almost everything—whether it’s the price of eggs or the price of gas, or what he said to Putin yesterday. Or, you know, whatever it is, he’s lying. And this has another effect. I mean, what it does is: It makes people doubt whether anything is true. I mean, how are you supposed to know what’s true if the president lies all the time? And that is, of course, exactly the same tactic that Putin used in Russia. I mean, if you lie or your propagandists lie nonstop, then the reaction of the public is to say, “Right, you know, politics is a dirty game. I have no idea what’s true or what’s not true. I better just stay home”.