David Seymour’s Ministry of Regulation released its first stocktake of every regulator in New Zealand today, and the count came in at 267. The 63-page report, delivered alongside a speech from the Regulation Minister at a Wellington business audience, sets out how many separate bodies have the power to make rules, issue licences, levy fees or enforce compliance across the country, and it is the first time central government has tried to put that number on a single page.
The breakdown looks like this. Central government accounts for 96 regulators, made up of 50 departments, 36 Crown entities, three departmental agencies, two non-Public Service departments, one statutory corporation and three others. Local government supplies a further 79, covering 61 territorial councils, 11 regional councils, five unitary councils and a handful of smaller island authorities. Statutory bodies, committees and tribunals add another 60, of which 56 are statutory bodies and four are independent tribunals. The remaining 32 are charities, incorporated societies and companies that carry regulatory functions, plus two state-owned enterprises and one statutory monopoly. The figures are drawn from the report published on the Beehive website and detailed in RNZ’s coverage of the launch.
Seymour did not pull his punches in describing what he had counted. He told the audience the system was “a twisted spaghetti of regulators who don’t just cost money to fund, but suck up people’s time and force others to give up completely”. He also argued that New Zealand’s regulatory settings now sit below the OECD average, citing Reserve Bank economist Paul Conway, and said there had “essentially been no meaningful regulatory reform” for more than two decades. His preferred end state, he told the audience, is that “any New Zealander wanting to undertake an activity should only ever have to knock on one regulator’s door”.
The funding mix in the report is its own surprise. Forty-three percent of the 267 regulators receive no government funding at all, 33 percent are mostly government funded, and 19 percent run mainly off fees and registrations paid by the people they regulate. In the 2024/25 financial year those fees and charges added up to about 320 million dollars flowing from regulated businesses and individuals into the bodies that supervise them, a number the Minister used to argue that compliance is not just a paperwork problem but a real cost on the productive economy.
Health does most of the heavy lifting in the statistics. Health Minister Simeon Brown is responsible for 32 of the 267 regulators, and 28 of those are health-specific bodies, ranging from professional registration councils through to advisory committees and oversight panels. That concentration is one reason Seymour’s Ministry has flagged the health portfolio as an early candidate for closer review, although the report itself does not name any agency it wants merged or abolished.
The example Seymour chose to illustrate the wider problem was dog control. He told the audience that five separate regulatory agencies, eleven Acts of Parliament and more than twelve different groups currently handle dog-related rules and enforcement in New Zealand. The result, he argued, is that responsibility for the same animal can pass through council officers, the Ministry for Primary Industries, the police and a string of subordinate bodies before anyone takes a decision. The point of the example was not to single out dog control but to show how a single everyday activity can sit inside a thicket of overlapping mandates.
The report itself is more cautious than the speech. It explicitly notes that “no single right model” of regulation exists, that consolidation can create new internal complexity inside merged agencies, and that other OECD countries face similar fragmentation problems. It does not recommend abolishing any agency. Instead it commits the Ministry of Regulation to maintain and update the mapping, to use AI-assisted analysis to identify overlap and duplication, and to run cost-benefit reviews on regulations that have not been examined in years. Departments will then be expected to review their stock of rules under the new Regulatory Standards Act 2025, which is now the legislative spine for the work.
What the report does not yet do is the politically harder part. It does not say which 50 departments, 36 Crown entities or 60 statutory committees should disappear, be merged or have their fee-setting powers clipped. That sequencing is deliberate. Finance Minister Nicola Willis has already signalled that her own work to cut government departments from 42 to about 12 by 2029 will draw on the Ministry of Regulation’s data, and Seymour’s framing makes it clear the mapping is intended to give that exercise some intellectual scaffolding. The Public Service Commission has been brought in as part of that conversation.
The opposition response to the release was muted at the time of publication, with no formal statement from Labour or the Greens picked up by RNZ or the NZ Herald by mid-afternoon. Critics of earlier Seymour work, including the Regulatory Standards Bill that passed its second reading earlier in the term, have tended to argue that simply counting regulators tells you nothing about whether their rules are useful and that the political risk is cutting the bodies that protect consumers, workers and the environment while leaving the ones that protect incumbent businesses untouched.
For voters trying to make sense of all this before the general election later this year, the regulatory map will sit alongside the public service headcount, the rates cap fight and the Budget as one of the clearest tests of whether the coalition’s promise to shrink the state is matched by what it actually does. If you want to see how each party lines up on questions of regulation, government size and the role of the public service, the Newswire voting tool compares their published positions side by side.
What do you think? Is 267 regulators too many, about right, or just a number that sounds bigger than it really is once you account for councils and tribunals? Drop a comment below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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