My sister Anita is hard to fool. Mind you, we did our best, my brother and I, before she was old enough to figure out what was really going on.
Anita was four years younger than me, and three years younger than my bother Geoff. By our reckoning, projects worked better without a toddler on the team, so we hit on the idea of giving her a Very Important Job. Usually this meant being ‘The Judge’. The Judge’s role was to judge (ie, watch), while Geoffrey and I climbed the tree, ran the race, or did whatever else was worth doing unencumbered by a cute but not particularly maneuverable tot.
This worked for a few months, before Anita began to smell a rat. I like to think that her adult gimlet-eyed lack of gullibility is thanks to early exposure to our self-serving spin.
This coming Monday 23 June, at 1pm, submissions will close for a bill with a name which sounds dull but worthy: the Regulatory Standards Bill (RSB).
My sister used to think she was involved in our game. In fact, we sidelined her without her realising it. The RSB is more complicated than childish games, but it is just as stealthy in its attempt to diminish our rights and interests.
Dame Anne Salmond calls it an undemocratic power grab, an attempt to gain ideological oversight over the legislative and regulatory activities of all other ministers and government agencies. “The RSB is a dangerous piece of legislation,” she writes, “inspired by libertarian ideas that seek to free the flow of capital from democratic constraints.”
The bill has been rejected by parliament three times in the last 20 years, including by National. Everyone in New Zealand needs to ask themselves why.
It is sweeping and ambitious: this legislation is to be applied retrospectively to all existing laws as well as new laws and regulations.
The people afraid of the bill include the legal eagles and researchers who wrote the briefing Regulatory Standards Bill threatens the public interest, public health and Māori rights. The authors are Jonathan Boston, Michael Baker (yes, that Michael Baker), Andrew Geddis, Carwyn Jones and Geoffrey Palmer (yes, that Geoffrey Palmer). “In essence,” they say, “[the bill] seeks to impose a quasi-libertarian conception of ‘good legislation’ and a ‘good society’, one demonstrably antithetical to many core values underpinning modern welfare states.”
The bill would establish a Regulatory Standards Board to ‘consider the consistency of legislation with [certain] principles’. The members of the board would be appointed by the Minister for Regulation. The current Minister for Regulation is David Seymour, the bill’s sponsor.
Seymour and Act are energised by idealistic libertarian philosophies, and the RSB is their dream bill.
That should alarm us.
Seymour famously prefers policy which produces benefits that exceed the cost of implementation. Which might sound okay until it plays out in real life. Some benefits, it turns out, don’t show up on a balance sheet which only measures short-term gain. Some losses don’t either.
What is the long-term cost to society of a hungry child? When Seymour gutted our national school lunch scheme to save money, it became so broken that it left children hungry. Did he stop to measure what this did to their ability to learn, within the education system we all pay for? Did he measure the costs – financial, social, moral – of their misery? Did he care? The debacle showed what happens when policy is stripped of expertise, of sense, of any consideration other than the bottom line. My grandmother would have called Seymour ‘penny-wise and pound-foolish’.
The majority of New Zealanders do not want policies like this. At the last general election, Act were trounced after campaigning on a callous agenda. Despite receiving 8.6 percent of the vote, they are now, thanks to National, in a position to inflict the equivalent of the school lunch fiasco on our legal system.
Economist Geoff Bertram has made a powerful submission against the bill, arguing that it gives absolute priority to private property rights, with no meaningful concept of public good or collective interests. “The bill’s alleged ‘principles’ for regulatory takings are extreme in their absolute prioritisation of private property over the public good, and directly subversive of democratic policymaking.”
It would even enable monopolists, he says, to claim compensation from the government if it attempts to regulate prices.
Unless you have been living under a rock on Oneroa Beach, you will also know that Act brushes off our obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi. In the twilight world of the Regulatory Standards Bill, there is no treaty.
This bill, in other words, seeks what legal scholar Paul Rishworth calls a ‘second Bill of Rights’, one ideologically skewed towards libertarianism, one which erases Māori interests and rights and seeks to undo the modern welfare state.
Don’t fall for the spin. Oppose this bill. Because this time, you really are the judge.
• Jenny Nicholls
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2025
