David Seymour’s flagship law, the Regulatory Standards Act, came into force on Tuesday, handing the ACT leader one of the biggest political wins of the coalition’s term and opening a new front in the fight over how New Zealand makes its rules. From 1 July the Act and a new Regulatory Standards Board are live, and the Government is urging the public to start lodging complaints about laws they think are badly written.
The Act sets out a list of principles that the Government says good lawmaking should follow, asks officials to publish statements showing whether new bills line up with those principles, and creates a board that can review existing laws and take complaints from the public. The Ministry for Regulation, the small department Mr Seymour built from scratch, will run the complaints portal and support the board’s work.
In a statement released to mark the day, Mr Seymour did not hold back on the significance he attaches to it. Writing on the Beehive website, he said, “Today is a historic day for Kiwis’ rights, because the Regulatory Standards Act and Board now protects them.” He argued that poorly designed rules carry a real cost, saying “Bad regulations have real consequences for real people,” and he made a direct pitch to the public, adding, “Now the Regulatory Standards Board wants to hear from you.”
The Government frames the law as a transparency tool rather than a power grab. The board will check new bills against good lawmaking principles, accept public complaints about laws that appear inconsistent with them, review older laws either on request or on its own initiative, and publish its assessments so anyone can read them. Ministers point to the sheer size of the rulebook as the reason the work is needed. By the Government’s own count, New Zealand has more than 260 regulators, including 95 in central government, 79 in local government and 57 statutory bodies, committees and tribunals.
Crucially, the board’s findings are advisory. It can shine a light on a law it considers badly made, but it cannot strike that law down or force Parliament to change it. Supporters say that makes the worry about a transfer of power overblown. Critics say it means the real effect of the Act is to slowly reshape the values that sit behind lawmaking, tilting them towards property rights and away from the wider public interest.
That argument has been running hot for more than a year, and the law arrives carrying an unusually heavy weight of public objection. When the bill went through select committee, the Finance and Expenditure Committee received about 159,000 submissions, and on the committee’s own figures 98.7 per cent of them opposed the legislation. Legal academics, the Waitangi Tribunal, unions, health bodies, environmental groups and a long list of MΔori organisations all lined up against it, warning that the principles written into the Act elevate individual property rights while saying nothing about the Treaty of Waitangi, the environment or collective wellbeing.
Labour has promised to undo the whole thing. The party’s justice spokesperson Duncan Webb attacked the law for baking libertarian ideas into the way Parliament writes rules, and Labour has said a future Labour government would repeal it inside its first 100 days in office. Mr Webb went a step further late last year by lodging a member’s bill aimed at wiping the Act off the books, a move designed to keep the issue alive heading into the election.
The Greens have been just as scathing. Green MP Tamatha Paul described the law as an ideological project that New Zealanders had already rejected, and in one of the more memorable lines of the debate she likened it to a cockroach that refused to die. The party argues the Act sidelines the Treaty and puts corporate interests ahead of people and the environment, a charge the Government rejects.
For Mr Seymour, the criticism is part of the point. He has long argued that the volume of red tape in New Zealand quietly raises the cost of housing, energy and everyday business, and that no one has been held accountable for the slow build-up of rules over decades. The Regulatory Standards Board, in his telling, finally gives ordinary people a place to push back. Whether the public takes up that invitation in any real numbers, or whether the complaints portal sits largely unused, will be one of the early tests of whether the Act changes anything in practice.
The deeper question is constitutional, and it will not be settled by 1 July. The Act asks future governments to measure their own laws against a fixed set of principles chosen by this Parliament. A change of government could repeal it, water it down, or rewrite the principles entirely, which means the law’s survival is now itself an election issue. Labour and the Greens have effectively promised voters that a vote for the centre-left is a vote to scrap it, while National and New Zealand First have signed up to keep it as part of the coalition deal.
That makes the Regulatory Standards Act one of the clearer dividing lines heading into this year’s general election. New Zealanders who want to see where each party stands on this and other issues can compare the positions using Newswire’s voting tool before they cast a ballot.
For now, the law is on the books and the board is open for business. After a year of submissions, marches and heated debate in the House, the fight over the Regulatory Standards Act moves out of Parliament and into the slow, quiet work of reviewing the rules New Zealanders already live under.
What do you make of the Regulatory Standards Act taking effect? Is it a win for ordinary people or an ideological overreach? Share your view in the comments 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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