David Seymour’s proposed regulation law would briefly shine a light on New Zealand’s cumbersome regulations and lawmaking

Act Party leader David Seymour is so unpopular with some parts of New Zealand that everything he touches immediately combusts into controversy. 

If he has proposed a law, then it must contain a secret backdoor to free-market facism.

This is largely his own fault. The lame duck Treaty Principles Bill stirred up such enormous opposition that activists can now rally an army of protestors at the slightest provocation.

And the Regulatory Standards Bill is no slight provocation. It is a fairly significant reform which would force governments to check their lawmaking against classical liberal values.

But it has been blown a little out of proportion. It is not a Trojan Horse hiding an elite squad of corporate mercenaries ready to perform a coup d'état the day it is passed into law. 

The defining characteristics of the bill are its impotence and transience. It does not create any legal rights or obligations, and would be repealed the day after Act departs the Beehive.

But like the gadfly, which lives as an adult for only a few hours, it has the potential to make some contribution to the ecosystem during its short life. 

Lawmakers have been known to pass unwieldy regulations that create as many costs as benefits. The Regulatory Standards Bill would impose a political price on politicians who put forward these poorly designed laws. 

The bill defines a set of principles for good regulation, requires departments to assess proposed laws against those principles, and establishes an independent Regulatory Standards Board to review and comment on those assessments.

If a proposed law doesn’t match the regulatory principles, the responsible Minister just has to publish a statement explaining why they believe it is justified anyway. That's all.

Any laws or regulations which do not comply with the principles remain legally valid and cannot be challenged in court. The principles are merely guidelines and can be ignored. 

This is already a big compromise for the Act Party. Previous versions of the bill gave the public a right to challenge uncompliant regulations in court.

Today’s version does nothing more than add extra scrutiny and bureaucracy to the process of writing regulatory laws — it ties some red tape around the red tape machine. 

It is true the principles proposed are classical liberalism and will be naturally adversarial to regulation, but this doesn’t strike me as being obviously a bad thing. 

Journalism is also naturally adversarial to governments and I still think it contributes to the standards of democracy (even if David Seymour doesn’t agree).

Plus, New Zealand’s political economy is already shaped by classical liberal ideas. These principles have been the foundation for a lot of modern democratic and economic thought. 

Sure, these ideas have needed much improvement. They’ve been modified, built upon, and developed but they’re still there in the bedrock even if the political centre is a sort of social liberalism these days.

Lawmakers are free to layer additional perspectives on whatever the Regulatory Standards Board comes up with. Other regulatory principles, such as equality, collective wellbeing, and Treaty partnership, might trump individual property rights in some cases. 

Ministers can make that judgement, or even write those other principles into the law.

A glaring problem with the bill is that it lacks any cross-party support. Not even National and New Zealand First truly support it, let alone the opposition parties. 

The Deputy Clerk of the House, who oversees parliamentary procedure, even made a rare submission on the bill. She argued the principles needed to be developed to secure broader support across Parliament, among other technical changes. 

Just adding recognition of the Treaty of Waitangi and Māori collective ownership to the text would help soften some of the opposition, if the Act Party cared at all… 

It does make me wonder, what is the game plan here? This law will only ever apply to the National–Act coalition as the opposition parties will repeal it at the first chance they get.

Does David Seymour not trust himself to make good regulations? Is the bill aimed at restraining his colleagues in the National Party? Does he think Labour will continue to pay $20 million a year to receive lectures on classical liberalism once back in government?

A lot of time and energy has been spent on this gadfly.