ACT New Zealand is a free market political party in New Zealand. Until the New Zealand general election, 2011 it was led by former National Party leader and Reserve Bank Governor Don Brash. The party's current leader is John Banks.
ACT now has one member of the Parliament of New Zealand, which is John Banks, a former two-term Auckland mayor and Police and Tourism ministers in the New Zealand National Party Bolger administrations of the nineties.
According to former party leader Rodney Hide, the party stands for "individual freedom, personal responsibility, doing the best for our natural environment and for smaller, smarter government in its goals of a prosperous economy, a strong society, and a quality of life that is the envy of the world".
The name comes from the initials of the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers, founded in 1993 by Roger Douglas and Derek Quigley, from which the party grew in 1994. The party is commonly known by the acronym "ACT" and pronounced as a word rather than as initials.
Read more about ACT New Zealand: Philosophy, Electoral Results
Famous quotes containing the words act and/or zealand:
“Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Teasing is universal. Anthropologists have found the same fundamental patterns of teasing among New Zealand aborigine children and inner-city kids on the playgrounds of Philadelphia.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)