Dumped Liberal MP Tim Wilson will meet with a New Zealand politician who holds contentious views on climate change, gun laws and Maori policy, as he ramps up his bid to return to federal parliament.

David Seymour, leader of the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers (ACT) New Zealand party and deputy prime minister from May 2025, is in Australia and will meet with Wilson, the former MP for Goldstein in Victoria, and Jonathan Huston, the Liberal candidate for Nedlands in Western Australia.

Both have been preselected ahead of the next federal election.

Seymour told AAP that Wilson was a “hell of a nice guy” who was “voted out at the last election and he’s trying to fix that”.

“(Huston is) attempting to win a seat in Perth for the Liberals,” Seymour said.

“He’s got in touch and I’m happy to go chat to him.”

Seymour has taken personal leave for the trip and he has stated it would be self-funded.

After The New Daily requested an interview with Seymour, his office stated that he “often meets with like-minded politicians when he’s travelling abroad” and that it wasn’t a formal meeting, but “just a friendly catchup”.

The New Daily contacted Wilson and Huston for comment.

Meteoric rise

Seymour has had a meteoric rise in New Zealand politics after being elected in 2014 as the ACT’s sole MP, before bolstering his stocks with a successful push for a referendum to allow euthanasia.

Since then, his party room has increased to 11 MPs, the best result in the party’s history. Seymour will become the deputy prime minister in May 2025, as part of the Coalition arrangement with Christopher Luxon’s National Party government.

Seymour is known for outrageous stunts, including twerking on Dancing with the Stars (New Zealand series) in 2017. Photo: Newshub

He was the only MP to oppose the Ardern government’s legislation to ban semi-automatic weapons in the wake of the Christchurch massacre, and has argued that “law-abiding gun owners are needed as allies in creating a safer country”.

In an opinion piece, Seymour said that Australia’s 1996 ban on semi-automatic weapons, alongside a government buyback, “did not accelerate the decline in Australian gun deaths that began after a peak in 1986”, according to “rigorous analysis”.

This is incorrect; research has found that Australia’s gun reforms “were followed by more than a decade free of fatal mass shootings, and accelerated declines in firearm deaths, particularly suicides”.

In the 18 years before gun reforms, there were 13 mass shootings in Australia and none in the following decade.

Treaty and climate

ACT Party policies at the 2023 election included scrapping the Zero Carbon Act, which requires the government to have an emissions reduction plan in place and ties New Zealand’s emissions cap to its trading partners.

The “like-minded” Wilson was turfed from parliament at the 2022 federal election by Zoe Daniel, who ran on a platform of climate action and integrity in politics.

Seymour has said that he accepts the science of climate change and has disavowed a former ACT Party policy that denied the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change.

Seymour is also known for his vocal opposition to certain Maori institutions, including the Pacific Peoples Ministry, and stirred controversy when he joked about sending “a guy named Guy Fawkes in there and it’d all be over,” referencing the failed 17th century to blow up English parliament.

He is currently championing a bill that will change the Treaty of Waitangi and remove special protections and references to Maori people in law.