The war of words between Professor Joanna Kidman, a director of the Centre of Research Excellence for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism, and Act Party leader David Seymour shows no signs of ending after Seymour labelled her "dull and unpleasant" in comments to ZB Plus this morning. 

The controversy around Kidman began after she said the Government might be a “death cult” that “hates children”, leading to calls from the Act Party for her resignation this week. 

Kidman lashed out at the Government on Tuesday night, responding to its announcement that the first military boot camp for young offenders would be running by mid-year.  

Kidman posted on X (formerly Twitter) that she could “only assume that this Government hates children, most of whom will be poor and brown”. 

“There is so much evidence that military-style youth boot camps don’t work and are expensive,” she wrote. 

Kidman also added that the Government “wants to snatch children’s lunches” in response to Seymour describing free school lunches as “wasteful” public spending and arguing that the Government should cut them. 

“Is this a government or a death cult?” Kidman wrote. 

Kidman was appointed on a three-year term as director in June 2022 by former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern in response to the Royal Commission of Inquiry report into the Christchurch terrorist attack. 

“I believe this centre will help us to be a more resilient, inclusive and safer Aotearoa New Zealand,” Ardern said at the time. 

Seymore told the Herald it was “really strange” for Kidman’s comments to come from an organisation funded to bring people together. 

“If people want to have arguments about the merits of the school lunch programme or the Government’s boot camps for prisoners, there’s lots of arguments they can make if they’d like to without getting into these kinds of personal attacks. Once you start doing that you’re actually promoting division and extremism,” he said. 

Seymour added yesterday: “You would think she’d be smart enough to figure out that what she says in any capacity, if it relates to extreme rhetoric, is going to be a problem”. 

He said he believed in freedom of speech and the Government “should never lock someone up for their opinion”, but if someone entered a private contract, they took on obligations in terms of behaviour. 

He said people who took government funding were allowed to criticise the Government. 

“If she wants to get into a rational debate about what to do with youth offenders, for example, we are very happy to have that debate. That level of name-calling is not actually advancing the debate. It is actually advancing a more divided society which is, ironically, the opposite of what she’s supposed to be about.” 

In a post on X responding to Seymour, Kidman wrote, "Which ever of @davidseymour's staffers are running this account today ('cos it ain't him), tell your boss that I'm personally inviting him to pop across the road and have a coffee and a korero with me at the Lab - I'll even pay.  Would love to have a chat. Is he brave enough?"  

Seymour responded, in a post provided to ZB Plus: "She offers a choice between having a coffee with her or not being brave. Here's another option, I just don't want to have a coffee with her because she sounds dull and unpleasant."