Regulatory Standards Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Regulatory Standards Bill.

That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on Parliament’s website.

Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: I move, That the Regulatory Standards Bill be now read a third time.

The Regulatory Standards Bill is a good idea that has been a long time coming. I would like to acknowledge the many staff; MPs, including the Hon Rodney Hide; the Regulatory Responsibility Taskforce, and particularly Bryce Wilkinson; the Ministry for Regulation, and particularly Gráinne and Andrew; the Finance and Expenditure Committee, led by Cameron Brewer; and my colleagues in the ACT Party and across the Government, who have all at different times worked to make this possible.

I’d like to start with a thought about Acemoglu and Robinson, two guys that just got the Nobel Prize for their work on institutions and how they contribute to people’s prosperity. Their basic idea is that we benefit from a long tradition that established this Parliament, the courts, and the executive; a strong State capable of stopping anarchy that is none the less restrained by the tension between that Government and the rest of the community. That is the balance required so that people can live free and prosperous lives. In recent decades, our society has continued to build the tension between our civil society and our State so that we can be free and prosperous.

We have, for example, put in place the Public Finance Act 1989 so that New Zealanders can see when politicians are racking up debt on their account or wasting their money. We’ve put in place the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act so that New Zealanders can see if politicians are inflating away the value of their savings, and we put in place the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 so the people can see if politicians are making laws that violate their basic personal freedoms.

These institutions are critical. They don’t restrain Parliament. They don’t stop politicians from making laws. But they do create that critical tension between a civil society that’s informed and can see what politicians are up to and can critique it on the one hand, and a strong State that can prevent anarchy and protect us from violence on the other. But sadly, so far we have not put in place a law that exposes the impacts of politicians putting restrictions on the use and exchange of property. The Regulatory Standards Bill changes that. If you want to pursue some cause, then you need to be open about whether it is going to impact people’s value that they get from their property and the value that they get from their time.

This Government follows too many who failed to do that adequately. The cost of the restrictions are immense and they are felt throughout our society. It is the teachers who say, “All I wanted to do was help young New Zealanders reach their potential and all I actually do is fill out forms and comply with bureaucracy.” It’s the builders who complain that it takes longer to get permission to build something than actually build it, or the financial service workers who say they can’t give financial advice to the people who really need it because, under the rules, they can’t afford it. It’s a generation marching because fundamentally they don’t believe that they will have their own property in one of the most sparsely populated countries on earth because we’ve made it too hard to build the homes and the infrastructure that connects them together.

Sometimes these stories of politicians making laws and regulations are deeply personal. I’d like to tell the story of one such woman I call Robin. She worked for 45 years in the public sector and charity in this country. She said, “I believed in this country until it was all taken away.” What happened is that she had built up a pretty good nest egg. She was looking forward to her retirement and being able to spoil her grandchildren. She owned her apartment where the body corporate decided to knock off some routine maintenance, but unfortunately they ran into the earthquake-strengthening laws and $1 million later, she has no savings and she has to sell her apartment.

Remember she said, “I believed in this country.” She came to my electorate office and she insisted on reading out her story, through tears. People should just think about these human faces sometimes. What happens when people make a law for some worthy purpose but don’t actually ask what the impacts on individuals will be? Robin’s true bitterness and sadness came from the fact that this Parliament has now realised those laws actually never stacked up. We will get rid of them. If only—and here is the really sad thing—the advice at the time had been given more prominence and taken more seriously.

That is what the Regulatory Standards Bill will do. It will ensure that new laws are accompanied by a consistency accountability statement that will largely replace the current but sadly ignored regulatory impact statements. These consistency accountability statements will be based on the principles provided for in this bill, for the first time actually put in legislation, but they will say that we have to identify the cost of people’s liberty being restricted, their property rights being impaired, or fees and levies that are unreasonable, among other principles. We will identify the impacts, and the regulatory standards board will act as a watchdog, seeing to it that the consistency accountability statements are fully accurate and open to the people. The Act will also provide for reviewing already existing laws against those principles. It will empower the Ministry for Regulation to request information from other departments when going about those duties.

Now, I want to say a little bit to the critics who have been many but, in my view, poorly informed. People say that this bill should have, amongst its principles, things such as equity or upholding Te Tiriti or public health or environmental custodianship. The misunderstanding is that any Government can still pursue those collective goals through collective action. The point of the Regulatory Standards Bill and its principles is to identify the costs of those laws and those collective projects on individuals. If you want to identify a significant natural area on someone’s farm, you can, but if the rest of the community really believes it’s that valuable, perhaps they should be prepared to compensate that farmer rather than make them bear all the cost for a collective goal and do so without even acknowledging the cost being put on them.

Where this bill leads us is a more respectful and more civilised society, one where if you want to benefit, if you want to pursue an objective that you think is worthy, and if you want to impose costs on other people using and exchanging their property or you want to take up their time to achieve your goal, then as a start, you have to at least be open and honest about the fact that you’re doing it. Parliament can pass the law if it really wants to, anyway. But just like we have kept in that narrow corridor between a strong civil society and a strong State when it comes to spending people’s taxes, printing more money to devalue their savings, or passing laws that violate their basic personal freedoms with the Public Finance Act and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act and the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, the Regulatory Standards Bill means that politicians need to at least be open and honest about the impacts that they have on individuals when they pursue their goals.

That is what we need to be doing in this Parliament. It is a movement towards a more civilised society where adults treat each other respectfully. That is something that I look forward to implementing over the next six months as this bill comes into force. I am very proud to stand behind it. I’m very grateful to all those I named at the beginning who have helped make this dream a reality so far and I commend this bill to the House. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Kia ora e te Mana Whakawā. I want to explain why, within the first 100 days of the next Labour-led Government, we will repeal this bill.

The first reason is this: there has been no piece of legislation that has come before this House that is less wanted. The Minister said the critics were many; the critics were overwhelming. In the select committee process, less than 1 percent of the submitters supported this bill. Not only that, it was across the board. All of the civil society organisations—the Law Society, the New Zealand Human Rights Commission, the Children’s Commissioner, the Commissioner for the Environment, the Legislation Design and Advisory Committee—the list goes on and on and on. They all made thoughtful submissions explaining why this bill was unworkable and did not truly reflect what good regulatory practice was.

What it amounts to is baking in a libertarian set of values into our lawmaking process, skewing the lawmaking process in a particular libertarian, philosophical way. At root—and their words were used by the Minister in his speech today—it’s about the protection of property rights, the protection of absolutely free use and exchange of property, in his words. The rest of the bill is cover, is camouflage, for the genuine libertarian ideal of the promotion of the freedom of property rights above all else.

The second reason we’ll get rid of this bill is because it’s simply wasteful. The number of submitters who understand the legislative and policy development process said that the problem has been mischaracterised. We do not need a new piece of legislation and a new regulatory standards board to undertake this. We have a series of procedures in place, from good policy development and problem identification through to the Legislation Design and Advisory Committee and the Regulations Review Authority, the Regulations Review Committee, the select committee process—and again, the list goes on.

Yes, we can do it better. We can do better regulatory impact statements. We can do better departmental disclosure statements. But what we don’t need is another piece of paper—a consistency accountability statement—that public servants have to go and undertake. We found out that the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment projects it will cost them $60 million a year and 25 percent of their policy capacity to comply with this. What did they say? That this risks making their regulatory stewardship worse because of the diversion of resource to this bureaucratic form-filling that the ACT Party pretends they’re against. That’s why it’s cover; that’s why what it really does is try to bake in property rights into, essentially, our constitutional framework.

That’s the third reason why we’re going to get rid of this bill at the first opportunity: it’s fundamentally unconstitutional. This House is where law is made. This House and its committees and its processes are the correct place for scrutiny. That’s why we have the Attorney-General’s New Zealand Bill of Rights Act reports come before us. What we don’t need is a cabal of hand-picked members of a committee that sits outside of this House on the regulatory standards board—hand-picked by the Minister for Regulation—to second-guess what goes on in this House. This is the place for deliberation. This is the place for scrutiny. This is the place for examination. To say that there is another group of people out there who you have no control over—unelected people—it’s fundamentally undemocratic. What we have is, essentially, a politically appointed group of people criticising democratically elected processes and people. It’s wrong.

Here’s the true irony of this bill: it’s procedurally flawed. The bill that is about regulatory quality broke every rule in respect of how to make good rules. Was it properly consulted on? Absolutely not. The consultation was deeply flawed and skewed. The pre-legislative consultation itself pre-empted the decision. It said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. What do you think around the edges?” Did it consult Māori as it should under the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi? No, it didn’t. It left them out: “Oh, they can just tack their consultation on to the end.” That’s not good legislative process. And what about hearing the Minister talk about regulatory impact statements and bemoaning how they’re not followed? His own regulatory impact statement for this legislation did not meet the quality standards imposed by Treasury. It was a rubbish regulatory impact statement. It was an absolute shambles. The idea that he stands up and says, “I’ve got this great piece of legislation about regulatory quality.”, when he doesn’t follow his own rules about regulatory quality, is outrageous.

What we have here is a piece of legislation that, let’s face it, has been waiting in the ACT Party wings for this moment for 20 years. You know where it comes from? It comes from a report by the New Zealand Business Roundtable—the mates, essentially, of big corporates. That’s who wants this bill in place. On that side of the House, it’s come from the ACT Party, but let’s not forget: it’s yours as well: New Zealand First, so-called stander-upper for the little guy. Here, you’re standing up for big corporates. The National Party: well, you being absolutely led by the nose by the libertarian ACT Party whilst you undermine the conservative values that you say you represent. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Ultimately, this is a politically motivated bill. It’s a bill which is absolutely libertarian in its values. It seeks to put in place a set of far-right values which come out of a theory of economics that basically says the most important right is the right to private property. It throws to one side every other right we hold dear—genuine rights, about equity, about preserving human dignity, about preserving our environment, about preserving indigenous people’s rights. To say “Don’t worry about it, we don’t need those as principles of good regulatory standards” is to absolutely demean a set of rights that we have worked and fought hard for across centuries. All for what? For profit—for corporate profit, moreover.

We are committed to repealing this bill in the first 100 days of the next Labour-led Government. This is a bill which is deeply unpopular, and it’s a bill which no National-led Government in its right mind would support. It’s a bill that New Zealand First are deeply uncomfortable with, for right reason. But what’s that? That is the cost of the baubles of power, because this is the dirty deal that has been done to pass a bill—a regulatory standards bill, that isn’t about regulation—and it has no standards. It’s a bill about hard-baking into our constitutional system—into the very cogs of the machine that makes law—libertarian principles: the protection of property over person, the protection of property over human rights, and over our environment. That’s what we’ve got here, and that’s why we will get rid of this bill at the first opportunity.

This bill is a bit like a cockroach: we keep stamping it out, but it just won’t die. They tried this three times before, as Duncan Webb just said. They’ve tried this in the past, and every single time it failed. They tried it again with the Treaty principles bill, and what happened with that? It got thrown out at the first reading—it got chucked in the bin—and now it’s come before us again. It’s a cockroach; it just won’t die.

But the danger in this bill is not actually how damaging it will be, although that is a real danger of it. The danger of this bill is how eye-wateringly boring and technical it is, so that most of the general public aren’t necessarily paying attention to the consequences of this bill. They’d be forgiven for thinking that it was just a boring old bill, because the ACT Party can’t get it by standing on what they really want, so they couch it in legal and technical and constitutional terms to try and get their foot in the door—just like a cockroach. That’s how a cockroach lives, isn’t it? In the dark, in the night—not in broad daylight, being clear about the intentions of what they hope to achieve. Or maybe it’s like a rat—maybe it’s like a rat. You see one, you think that’s it; there’s 20 more where that came from.

The intentions—the intentions are the same, no matter how many times they’ve tried to do this. It’s erase Te Tiriti o Waitangi, ransack the environment, and put corporate greed over the public good. Because we used to make things here in Aotearoa: we used to create paper; we used to make wool, timber; we used to manufacture things—cars, clothing. We cared about each other. We understood that in order for people to work hard in those industries—

Hon Mark Patterson: Wool’s coming back.

TAMATHA PAUL: —like making wool, Mr Patterson—we needed to provide for them, as well. We knew that if we gave people the basics, that they would be able to live a productive life that benefits our country and our economy—a concept that seems completely foreign to that side of the House. These are the basic tenets of social reproduction: make people happy, give them the basics; they’ll work hard and they’ll make babies, and those babies will go on and be the future generation of our nation. Those are important things.

Everyone could get good healthcare back in the day. A good public education was available to everyone; even university education and training was free. Everybody had the opportunity to live in a house through State housing, and parents could stay home and raise their kids themselves. That was a time when New Zealand understood what mattered the most. That carried on for many decades. People were happy, they had more money in their pockets, and it was easier to be born into a poorer or a working-class family because you knew that if you worked hard, you could transcend class, you could move around. It’s a concept called class mobility. Don’t know if that side of the House has heard about it before, but it used to be a thing.

You could set yourself up, buy a family homestead, and really get intergenerational wealth to pass down to different generations. But then in the 1980s and the 1990s in this country, there was this idea that grew across the world where people decided that they wanted—and felt that they deserved—more than their fair share. They looked at housing and said, “What if we just bought all the houses and made everybody else pay rent to us?” They looked at healthcare and said, “What if we put a price tag on hospitals and GP visits?” They looked at university education and said, “We should put a price tag on that.” That’s the same mindset that would probably sell us back the air that we breathe, if they could. What if they could just get really, really rich? That is neoliberalism, and that is this bill. It’s the mindset that we should put a price tag on everything, and it is the concept of putting private greed of the few before the public good for the many.

Now, the ACT Party are the architects of this bill, because they understand that there are two things that stand in the way of them and their mates getting richer, and that’s Te Tiriti o Waitangi and protections for the environment. But this time, it got through—after many failed attempts—thanks to our Prime Minister. Our Prime Minister, the amateur politician who doesn’t even understand what he signed up to in his coalition agreement, who doesn’t even understand the way that he sold away the founding document of our country in his agreements. Maybe he should just stick to business, because he’s not a very good politician.

In order to serve their agenda of concentrating wealth within the hands of a few people, David Seymour has created his own ministry. He’s put himself in charge of the ministry and he’s made this bill, which on the surface, again, is very boring, but the implications are far-reaching. Now, this right here, this is a regulatory impact statement. Every time a bill is passed in this House, one of these are prepared. It is essentially the pros and the cons of a bill. The reason that the ACT Party and the Government don’t like these is because these are the really annoying things that tell us what the public and the people think. These are the really annoying things that tell us the consequences of what happens when you throw the environment aside or concentrate too much wealth in the hands of a few.

But these are the Public Service’s acts of resistance. Their resistance is a simple thing that might be a bit confronting or a bit mind-boggling to the Government; it’s a simple thing called evidence. Because when all of the political rhetoric and all of the communication lines and all of those key lines that you’re fed by your advisers are brushed aside, these stand as a statement of fact; because when all of the bills—including the fast-track bill, the pay equity bill, the Treaty principles bill—came through, these were the things that provided evidence and truth for us to make a decision. But these are the things that continue to be ignored. So these are inconvenient for the Government, and that is exactly why they want to change these rules.

Now, this bill uses words and phrases that everybody, in principle, might agree to. It takes things like the rule of law above all else but purposefully erases tikanga Māori, the original law of this land. It makes the assumption that everybody is equal under the law, erasing the fact that that is dictated by your race and how much money you have access to. It puts the rights of individuals before collective rights that we all hold: our collective right to safe drinking water; our collective right to good housing, good healthcare, good education; the collective right of future generations to inherit a planet that is livable and breathable; to inherit rivers that they can swim in, clean air that they can breathe in, forests that they can walk in, mountains that they can climb; the collective rights and mana of iwi and hapū to pursue tino rangatiratanga. These are collective rights, which an individualistic theory like neoliberalism could not even begin to comprehend.

This bill will make New Zealand more unequal. The wealthiest 311 families in New Zealand have more wealth combined than the bottom 2.5 million New Zealanders. The Government has made everything more expensive, from the supermarket to the bank, to the GP clinic, to schools. You know what one of the first things they did when they got into Government was? They removed the reporting that IRD does to actually record and track wealth inequality in this country, and then they put through bills like this just so that we can’t see what’s happening right in front of our eyes.

This is the most fundamental breach of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in modern times. It tramples over and erases tikanga Māori. There was no consultation with Māori, which actively breaches principles of good faith and partnership. When this bill comes into force on 1 January 2026, a few weeks away, any piece of legislation that mentions or honours or gives effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi will be in its sight lines. This is capitalism, and this is recolonisation.

The people who engineered this bill don’t care about New Zealand. The people who engineered this bill don’t have the range to even comprehend te ao Māori or Te Tiriti or iwi and hapū. Their mates are placed in Australia, in Canada, in America. They don’t care about us. Make no mistake, this is capitalism, and David Seymour: you better run and tell your mates in the Atlas Network that we’re going to burn capitalism to the ground, because socialism is about honouring and upholding the dignity of all people.

I want to use this occasion to congratulate the ACT Party on what has been over 20 years of advocacy and hard work by the ACT Party. This Regulatory Standards Bill gives effect to National’s coalition agreement with ACT. We heard and we consulted widely; we heard approximately 30 hours of oral evidence, and received over 159,000 written submissions. Of course, that was on top of over 23,000 submissions last year, after considerable departmental consultation.

But as the chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee, now I want to point to the fact that we have improved this bill considerably with amendments that have seen the tightening up of the board and chair’s independence and separation from the Minister and the Government of the day, consistent with provisions in the Crown Entities Act. So, again, I congratulate the ACT Party.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak on the third reading of the Regulatory Standards Bill and to bring some context back into the very emotional debate that has occurred and bring it back to some semblance of fact. Again, the trouble with the principles of socialism, as we’ve heard so many times before, is that, eventually, you run out of other people’s money.

We support this bill because, on the fundamentals, it promotes an open and accountable Government that legislates with key principles in mind: the rule of law, efficiency and regulation, property rights, an independent judiciary, and the belief that every New Zealander is equal before the law. That equality relates to your equality of opportunity, that everyone has that chance to achieve their full potential.

So, therefore, we have no hesitation in commending this bill to the House.

This call is a split call—Rawiri Waititi.

As I take to my feet, as my people took to theirs a year from today, I remember standing at the edge of Te Rerenga Wairua, thinking of the many people who have sacrificed and dedicated their lives to liberation of our people and to the mana of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, resolute and unwavering in their conviction, whether thousands of people followed them, or only a few.

I remember the ika huirua [two deaths at once] of that time: koro “Bom” Gillies and Ricky Mitai.

Ngā pōito o te hāo kūpenga o te iwi Māori [The buoys of the net of unity]—the buoys of the net of kotahitanga that held our people together during the biggest hīkoi this country has ever seen. I remember the ahi, a righteous, raging inferno in the puku of everybody that walked the hīkoi. I remember the kāpura ahi [burning fire] that was lit in Rangiriri, the declaration of undisturbed occupation—a reflection of the same fire burning in the puku of everyone on that hīkoi; their declaration of undisturbed sovereignty.

Then, I remember Te ahika o Tainui [burning fires], a time when a fire threatened our whenua at Whangaparāoa and it was burnt to smithereens. And yet Te Haika o Tainui, the marker of the landing place of the Tainui waka, remained untouched. In the middle of scorched earth, the pou of our story still stood.

I remember Kiingi Tuheitia. I remember, in recent days, the inferno that blazed on Tongariro Maunga—scorched earth, once again—and still, Te Ririō, that significant pouwhenua, marking undisturbed sovereignty, remained untouched. From the ashes, the declaration remained.

I remember Te Arikinui Tumu Te Heuheu. I remember, on this day last year, coming back to this House during the hīkoi, ki te mura o te ahi [to the lion’s den], our righteous, burning anger, the fire in our puku as we shook the very foundation of this House, and the world, with a haka. A haka led by voices of our rangatahi—a declaration of our resistance.

Again and again, the same pattern appears. First, the land is scorched. The system thinks it has burnt us out—and yet the pou remain. The stories remain. The people remain. And so when I look at the Regulatory Standards Bill, I see it for what it is: another fire. Not the fire of our people seeking justice, but the cold, calculated arson of a Government that wants to burn down the constitutional protections that stand between our people and exploitation. It is no accident that this Government has brought the Regulatory Standards Bill to its final reading one year after the first reading of the Treaty principles bill and during the anniversary of the hīkoi o Te Tiriti. We remember that Te Tiriti o Waitangi is the first and highest regulatory standard of this land.

We will repeal the Regulatory Standards Bill. Ahi, in all its forms, means to withstand, to hope, to regenerate, to rejuvenate, to reset. It is a declaration of our occupation and our tino rangatiratanga. This bill tries to smooth that ahi. Our job is to keep it burning. To the day one year ago that our people stood in the streets and reminded this House who we are, today, as this Government tries to pass a law to forget us, we stand again to remember. We remember that Te Tiriti is our standard, our covenant, our fire that does not go out.

We remember those who walked before us, who stood often alone and lit the path anyway. To our people feeling the same fire in your puku: do not be distracted by the noise. Remember the bigger picture. Remember who we are. Remember why we believe. Keep the ahi burning. This bill may pass in the House today, but it will not survive our people tomorrow. We will all rise from the ashes and we will build an Aotearoa hou—not on the scorched earth of deregulation, but on the enduring fire of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Kia ora tātou.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This bill, essentially, embeds a neoliberal cuckoo egg in every legislation. It is a parasite that is going to be wiggling its way throughout everything that this Government and any other Government does. There is no logic, there is no rationality—one can’t find any form of enlightenment here—so what is this bill really, really about? Now, I want to say that I am surprised, but, frankly, I am disappointed but unsurprised at the Government and the Cabinet and the executive allowing such a bill to get through, allowing an ACT-led Government to create a noose around every single Minister’s neck. They are allowing the passing of a bill that probably is one of the bills in history that has a near 100 percent opposition rate during the select committee stage. This shows the naivety of this Government. This shows that this Government will do whatever they can, and trample over whoever gets in their way, to obtain and retain power.

But let’s talk about what this bill intends to do. This bill intends to empower the legislature, but we have seen those who proposed this bill having no qualms about pushing through urgency in the House and sending bill after bill into urgency and extended sittings. That’s not empowering the legislature. We have seen a Minister of the very party that proposed this bill pushing through a pay equity amendment bill that got rid of every active pay equity claim in the country without public consultation. How is that empowering the legislature? The sheer hypocrisy is astonishing. We have seen opaque track records of anything that that particular Minister has introduced. We have seen school lunches being harmful for our tamariki, to the point that it’s a health and safety risk.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Back to the bill.

Dr LAWRENCE XU-NAN: It is back to the bill, Madam Speaker.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: When you were talking about the legislation, you were on the bill, but now you’re just deflecting a little bit.

Dr LAWRENCE XU-NAN: It is addressing the broader context of the principles of this bill, of empowering the legislature and decisions that are made. This bill introduces the Regulatory Standards Board, which is, presumably, there for the people and to be objective. However, the same Minister who will be responsible for the creation of such a board has also created other agencies and ministries that are opaque and do not adhere to what is needed in terms of transparency and the expectations of the people of Aotearoa. We’re seeing the Charter School Agency that has been introduced, signing a deal with a non-existent company when it comes to the creation of new charter schools. We’re seeing the Ministry for Regulation having, on average, one of the highest salaries yet, producing reports that have no evidential basis. So it does beg the question: how is the Regulatory Standards Board going to achieve that, when they respond to one Minister—and one Minister alone—when we already have parliamentary mechanisms that are cross-party in the form of the Regulations Review Committee, which performs the same function? I don’t know about you, but I hear yellow tape in all of this.

So the Green Party sees this as a zombie, Frankenstein of a bill that does nothing for Aotearoa. New Zealanders care about each other and the planet, and they will not stand by this bill, and so the Green Party will repeal it, for sure.

Oh, thank you, Madam Speaker. I don’t have time to talk about the fires burning and the ahi mentioned by Te Pāti Māori, even as they engage in their own acts of self-immolation. In a brief contribution, I just want to focus on the comments made by the Hon Duncan Webb alleging some form of democratic deficit.

As the sponsor of the bill has quite rightly pointed out, this is merely an accountability mechanism, such that Parliament can still pass laws, notwithstanding that it will have to account to the people of New Zealand about the way they’re passed and the effects that they will have on ordinary New Zealanders. I’d also point out that Parliament has already given a much more muscular power to the courts, enabling them to declare legislation inconsistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. That’s a much more muscular power. That is a genuine democratic deficiency, and this Parliament has already established that it’s happy with it. While courts can’t strike down legislation in the same way as the Supreme Court in the United States—thank goodness—nevertheless, we require of ourselves some kind of response when courts engage in that way.

This is a much more tame, much less muscular power. It’s an exercise in increasing accountability, democratic responsiveness, and I join others on this side of the House in recognising this commitment within our coalition agreement, and I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. When we are elected to Government, we will repeal this bill. We will repeal this bill. It is an odious bill. It should never have come to this House. It has been opposed by the great majority of New Zealanders. Less than 1 percent of the people who sent in a submission to the Finance and Expenditure Committee supported this bill. The reputable submitters, people like the Legislative Design and Advisory Committee, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment—

Rawiri Waititi: The Clerk of the House.

Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL: Yeah. So many of our civil institutions opposed this bill. It should not be here, and we will repeal it.

I’ve noticed, in speeches in the House, all too often people fling around words like “common sense” and “ideology”, and they’ve become a shorthand for something that people don’t agree with or that they think is right. I’m going to avoid those words, in this bill. I actually want to dig into the actual principles and talk through why they simply don’t work for legislative processes. I want to start with the concept of principles in the first place. We’ve called them principles. They are, here, really working, in some ways, sitting in here as rights. Now, I don’t follow Jeremy Bentham, I don’t think that rights are “nonsense on stilts”. Nevertheless, I think they are something that we have, as it were, invented or constructed in order that we can live with each other, in order that we can find our way in groups and in society. They’ve become, if you like, heuristics or rules of thumb that we deploy—and for good reason, because we live in complex societies and we want to find ways to live alongside each other.

This bill puts inside it some rights or principles, and they are set out in clause 8 of the bill. They’re called the “Principles of responsible regulation”, but what we are really doing is putting some rights in here. There’s some around the “Rule of law”: “(a)(i) the law should be clear and accessible:”. To be honest, this is not the usual account of the rule of law, but never mind. That “(ii) the law should not adversely affect rights and liberties, … (iii) every person is equal before the law:”, and so on, seems pretty reasonable. There’s an element of individualism going through there that I do want to talk about, later.

Then, under “Liberties”—again, a somewhat foreign word in New Zealand. Though we do talk about freedom and liberty, it’s one of those we don’t normally talk about, the liberties that we have. But it says that “(b) legislation should not … diminish a person’s liberty, personal security, freedom of choice or action, or rights to own, use, and dispose of property”. That’s in clause 8(b).

But then the emphasis of this law, of these principles, on property becomes very clear in clause 8(c), where it talks about the “Taking of property” and that “(c) legislation should not impair” property rights. What this bill does is it reifies property rights above other rights. Now, that’s an interesting step to take, because one of the things about rights or principles is that we actually have a whole lot of them that we’ve said are good things for us to abide by in our society: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association. We do think that property rights are important. But the thing is, these things often exist in tension. They often run up against each other. One person’s freedom of speech runs up against another person’s freedom of speech. One person’s property right runs up against other people’s property rights. There’s a whole lot of tension there, and there is no single right which is a trump card, of which can be laid down and said, “This one trumps everything else.”

Part of the job of Government, part of what we are trying to do here, is to reconcile the tensions between these rights, to find ways through them. It’s actually a hard and difficult job—that’s why Government ends up having to try to do it. It is hard to reconcile the tensions between some of these rights. We actually try to do this, but not by slamming down a trump card and saying that one is the one that matters most.

Now, the Hon David Seymour talked in his speech of a sad case of a person who had lost her retirement savings because of some new obligations that were imposed on property owners in the wake of the Christchurch earthquakes. You know, eight people died on the 702 bus when the facade of a building collapsed on them. The reason, as a Government, the National Party decided—back in I can’t remember which year it was—to put in some earthquake strengthening requirements is because people lost their lives in earthquakes, because many of our buildings are not up to earthquake standards. Yes, people have property rights, and yes, people have a right to be alive, and those things can run up against each other and it can be hard to work out how much we pay where. But property does not trump. It is something that has to exist in tension with all the other rights. Those rights are in tension, and yet this bill says that property is the one that comes first.

I talked briefly before about the right of association. There was a very good reason for that, because some rights exist as group rights. But we are not just some kind of set of individuals, one plus one plus one plus one plus one plus one. We are a society, and a society is composed of groups of people standing in particular relationships to each other. There are some rights that only exist because groups exist—or group rights, as it were. I’m going to give a particular example that might matter to us. If you want to hold and keep and speak a language, it can only be done if other people hold and keep and speak that language too. There is a reason why we think that it is important to have te reo Māori as an official language in this country and to support the teaching of te reo Māori in schools: to ensure that it is used across our society. There is a reason why it is so often that we hear that language spoken in this Chamber. It is because we hold it dear, yet if we can only have te reo Māori spoken by one person alone it doesn’t work. Languages work collectively.

Sometimes, in this bill, it reifies individual rights. It says that individual rights come first. But we actually have to work to hold that tension together. Yet this bill says—and I think I’d have to go to the exact clause—that “clause 8(b) legislation should not unduly diminish a person’s liberty”. Individual liberty matters, but so, too, do group rights, and we should not trump one over the other. Instead, Government should work its way through them.

I had intended to speak a little of Te Tiriti, but our colleague Rawiri Waititi has done that. I want to speak of one further set of group rights, rights that are not in this bill, that we do need to think hard about, and that is environmental rights. Now, there is a sense in which the environment holds its own value, but that’s a hard and complicated one to explain in this speech. But I want to talk about how environment—our environment—affects us all. My trees affect my neighbourhood. The beautiful kahikatea on my property, they matter to my neighbours. But if I chop those trees down, they belong to me. My name is on the title deed, they belong to me, but if I chop them down, there goes the security of our hillside. That’s why those kahikatea matter. No, they are not assets just to be deployed by me; they are trees that belong to the neighbourhood. My using an internal combustion engine car affects us all, through the heating of the earth, through the use of fossil fuels, every time. By myself, just one little bit of me doing that—me doing it wouldn’t matter too much; the trouble is all of us do it, and together we create a problem for all of us. We need to think about the environment as well, and yet the environment is not in here.

Property rights do not normally encompass environmental rights as well. Those things can be in tension, yet this bill does not address those tensions. This bill reifies property rights above all. It says that is what matters most, and, actually, as New Zealanders, we have rejected that for a very, very long time. We will repeal this shoddy legislation.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Look, I’ve listened to some of the contributions, and I think they were debating an entirely different bill in an entirely different time. The Regulatory Standards Bill is very easy to pick up and read. If we actually look at its purpose, it does some of the things that it’s being criticised for, like supporting Parliament’s ability to scrutinise bills, ensuring we’re developing high-quality legislation, and exercising stewardship over regulatory systems—that’s just in clause 3 of the bill. Really, it’s already doing some of the things it’s being criticised for.

Its principles are very straightforward. In clause 8, the “Rule of law”—no one can disagree with the rule of law; even Deborah Russell accepts that the rule of law is important—it sets out what that is. It is very easy to read. “Liberties”: it’s talking about people’s ability to own property and do with it what they will, and, if that’s impinged, that’s what we start to look at in this bill. Again, as the Minister outlined in his excellent introduction, it doesn’t stop Parliament doing anything. What it does is it makes sure that the people entirely understand what Parliament’s doing when they infringe—

Rawiri Waititi: You’re going to give it away.

TODD STEPHENSON: —on their property rights or take them away. I hear Te Pāti Māori yelling out at me from down there. It’s hard to know—I mean, they didn’t even bother to do a differing view on this bill? That’s how engaged they were in it.

You can easily read through the important principles that this bill puts in place. It’s not going to restrict Parliament. It simply provides—[Interruption]

DEPUTY SPEAKER: All right, stop the interjections and let the person giving the speech tell us what he wants to tell.

TODD STEPHENSON: It simply provides more information for the public to judge whether a Minister or Government is doing the right thing, what the costs of doing that thing are, and whether it is supported. This is an excellent bill, and, in fact, members of the Opposition should actually be supporting it because when Parliament infringes Treaty property rights, it will be a useful thing. So I commend this bill to the House.

This is a split call.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. If anyone wanted yet another example of how Christopher Luxon is all talk, this bill is the perfect example. He came into the election campaign promising to be the master negotiator, and when it came time to sit down with David Seymour, he gave him everything he wanted. This bill is exactly the sort of thing that happens when that is the approach taken by the Prime Minister.

We’ve witnessed this through the debate. The National Party don’t want to talk about this. They’ve taken very short calls, and they’ve even given one of their calls to the ACT Party. They do not want to be associated with this bill. They are being forced to do this because they didn’t have the gumption to say no when they should have, and they were locked into it. The same can be said for New Zealand First, for that matter: you would think that a party that has signed up to this, that has only got one call and a debate, would take that call. They did not. I think it is very clear to anybody that is witnessing this debate—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Just to clarify, there was a call from New Zealand First.

Hon KIERAN McANULTY: Oh no, I know. That’s what I said. It just wasn’t very long. No, that’s all good.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Sorry, I misunderstood what you said.

Hon KIERAN McANULTY: No worries—no worries at all. I appreciate the opportunity to repeat for absolute clarity that New Zealand First, you would think, would want to have an opportunity to explain to all of their voters that have got in touch with their party—and we know that is the case: a large number of New Zealand First voters have got in touch with them and said “Do not support the Regulatory Standards Bill, because it is overreach.”—because there is quite possibly the largest proportion of people opposed to a bill through a select committee process ever: 98.7 percent.

There are many members that have been in this House longer than me and some have not, but I would wager even the Rt Hon Winston Peters, who Christopher Luxon kept going on at in an exasperated state this week—“He’s been here for 50 years, for goodness’ sake,” he said—I guarantee he hasn’t seen a bill that’s come through Parliament that has had this level of opposition. You would think that given that it’s because of the National Party and because of New Zealand First that this bill is passing, they would have the courtesy of explaining to New Zealanders why. They don’t. They don’t want to know about it. They just want to do their cursory, customary comments and sit down, because they know, deep down, this bill is a dud.

This is right-wing ideology in the extreme being enforced on the executive that basically every Minister is now going to have to kowtow to David Seymour for permission to continue. This is the bloke that portrays himself as the one that wants to find efficiencies in Government and saving money, when the cost that this bill imposes will be as high as $60 million a year—and supposedly, that is efficiency.

The ministry, another pet project of David Seymour—the Ministry for Regulation that wasn’t needed in the first place—they’ve advised him that this bill isn’t needed, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care because he knows better, and because he knows that he’s got the National Party backed into a corner from day one, because Christopher Luxon didn’t have the gumption to say “This is dumb, we’re not going to do it.” The master negotiator said “Come one, come all, have all you like. As long as I’m Prime Minister, I don’t care.”, and now we’re stuck in this situation where we have to deal with this bill. New Zealand is a country that has a proud history of ensuring that society as a whole is considered when decisions are made. But now, all of a sudden, we are a country that is at the whim of David Seymour.

This bill will be repealed within 100 days of the next Government. That is absolutely ironclad, locked in. This is a temporary experiment of right-wing ideology that will not last the test of time. Like all other ideological berks, this will go down into the history of political science classes at university. That will be the legacy of this bill, because this will not last. This is dumb. This is stupid, right-wing thinking that New Zealand First and National had the opportunity to say no to, but they were more interested in becoming Ministers than actually standing up for what they believe in.

I stand to speak in support for the third reading of the Regulatory Standards Bill. The Finance and Expenditure Committee (FEC) that I’m part of have worked really, really hard to improve the bill from its original state until now to pass in the third reading. We have tightened the board and the roles and responsibilities for the Minister of the day. The FEC have put in the hours of work to improve the bill. This bill also gives effect to the National-ACT coalition agreement that New Zealanders actually voted for. Therefore, congratulations to the ACT Party, and I commend this bill to the House.

Taku rakau e

Tau rawa ki te whare

Ka ngaro a Takahi ē

Te whare o te kahikātoa

Hei ngau whakapae—ē

Hei whakapae ururoa e hau mai nei

Kei waho kei te moana

Kāore aku mihi—ē

Aku tangi mō koutou

Mau puku ko te iwi—ē

Ka mōwai tonu te whenua

E takoto nei

[I have put my weapon away

Footsteps no longer heard

The house of the red mānuka

Protects me

Shielding against ill-winds

That blow from the sea

No words

No tears my people

But deep sorrow

And a desolate land

Lying afore me]

You can hear my emotion in my voice today when I stand, seven generations from the land takings of Tūhoe that song recalls, as the chair of the Regulations Review Committee that is charged with the review of regulation. That land taking was lawful, and it was made under regulations passed by executive Government that no elected person was accountable for. They were certainly not accountable for the people of Tūhoe, who are largely still landless.

For that member to stand in this House and claim that land takings will be solved by this bill, that property rights will be protected, and that those people who still have no justice in the eyes of the State is a farce. When I think of the role of the Regulations Review Committee, it is more than just a committee that oversees a technical and legalistic area of our Parliament; it is people who care about the function of regulation and the people who it serves. It considers complaints from ordinary New Zealanders who are able to bring something that they care about in their lives, whether it is their electricity bills or the fees that they pay to become a nurse or a doctor; to people who they can meet with at street-corner meetings; people who they elect at the ballot box; people they might not agree with, but who they can go along to a community meeting with and ask a question.

That is a fundamental function of our democracy. It is not one that is guaranteed and it is the one that we must fight for, because seven generations ago, people in New Zealand did not have that right. Many of the names I’m going to read you in my whakapapa of those seven generations—Māori did not have that right. It started with Honewahia o Taihakoa, then his son Tutaka Ngahau, then his daughter Whiuwhiu, then her son Te Amo, then his son Te Wehenga, then his son Hare Mahanga Te Wehenga, then me. These are people who I remember. Their names live on in my children’s names. They are people who have been denied the right to come to Government and have a say, and that is why this debate matters to people.

When I speak of the Regulations Review Committee, it’s a well-loved committee. There are many people sitting in this House today who served on it. They are Parliament’s legislative enthusiasts. They are the public law nerds; they’re the regulatory experts. They are people who care about shaping lives and making a regulation in our law work for us. It’s one of the few parts of Parliament that still works across party lines and requires genuine cross-partisanship. We hear from ordinary people, from businesses, from experts, and we test whether the written rules by Government are fair, proportionate, and effective, with the best legislative council in the country advising it.

I record my thanks now here to the Office of the Clerk for their exemplary public service in that committee. That committee’s cross-partisanship and its cooperation is its strength. It ensures that regulation is grounded in real-world impacts, and that elected representatives are accountable to the people for that. It’s because of that—because of the trust New Zealand has now placed in our democracy—that I’m standing today with that kind of emotion and passion for this area.

This bill weakens democracy. Transparent scrutiny that Parliament provides is important to everyone, and this bill sets up a new framework that elevates narrow interests over the public good and, ultimately, public trust. It makes it harder for this House to pass the kind of protections that New Zealanders rely on: a fair go for those small businesses competing with the top end of the town, and reliable electricity, and phone connectivity, and safe workplaces. It means that ideological ideas enter into our legal system through the executive. That’s destabilising, because it shifts power away from accountable MPs and towards an ideological test that was never asked for by the public.

National MPs on the other side of the House know that, and they should be ashamed of that. They know this is a dark day for our democracy. Everyone in the National Party should be hanging their heads in shame, and they will be, because their names will for ever be attached to this harmful bill. It lays bare just how weak this Government really is. Once again, Christopher Luxon has shown he is too weak to stand up to David Seymour; just like in the Treaty principles bill, and just like legislation last month which confiscated the rights to the foreshore and seabed that people have won in the courts.

This bill is completely out of touch with what people want, and it’s harm that Christopher Luxon is willing to do to New Zealand, just to cling to power. It’s disturbing. National chose a grubby deal to stay in office over standing up for the people that they serve in their electorates. They’re trading away the responsibility to govern in the public interest for the comfort of keeping the seats on that side of the House.

I want to make one thing clear: Labour will repeal the Regulatory Standards Bill. Fewer than 1 percent of submitters supported this bill at select committee; fewer than 1 percent. Christopher Luxon was told loudly and clearly that New Zealanders do not want this, and he pushed ahead anyway. If he or anyone else in the National Party is not willing to take decisions on behalf of the people that you purport to lead, why even be here? The Regulatory Standards Bill puts corporate interests ahead of our communities, ahead of environmental protections, and ahead of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. It is a grim and visionless idea for a country that is founded on something bigger than any one of us.

Laws and regulations that keep people healthy and safe, like requiring landlords to heat homes, will be left to the whims of David Seymour and whether he thinks it’s a good idea or not. It will make it harder to keep our air and our rivers clean and to reduce climate emissions. New Zealanders will remember this day in 2026 when they vote National out, because those are the MPs they can hold accountable; those are the MPs that represent the electorates they sit in. So I want to tell them: the next Labour Government will repeal the Regulatory Standards Bill within our first 100 days.

The strength of these words reflects the strength of the evidence presented to us. Submitters told us this bill would make regulation less stable, less fair, less democratic, less of a New Zealand they wanted to be a part of. Fewer than 1 percent supported it. That alone should cause any responsible Government to pause. Instead, the Government pressed ahead anyway, and in doing so it has ignored the very principle that sits at the heart of good regulation: legitimacy, faith, public trust in the system. For regulation to work, it must be trusted. David Seymour, in his opening speech, referred to the strengths of those institutions as a fundamental principle of any economy that works. That is true. To undermine public faith in this way is not only bad for this place but it’s bad for our economy.

We need a carefully balanced, transparent system, and this bill undermines that trust. It also undermines Parliament. It weakens ministerial responsibility. It shifts decision making to a structure that is not democratically grounded, and it sidelines that cross-partisan, evidence-based work that the Regulations Review Committee can and does still do. It’s work New Zealanders rely on to protect their rights.

Regulation isn’t abstract. It means something to the people who need it, and it affects their daily lives. It’s a patchwork of protections for the things we care about, including Te Tiriti o Waitangi and those places that make New Zealand special. This bill puts all of that at risk, and as the chair of the committee entrusted with scrutinising regulation on behalf of the public, I needed to raise how much of an impact this will have not only on the work of that committee but on all of the systems that this Parliament is proud of and has built up on the world stage for that kind of regulatory scrutiny.

New Zealanders deserve a system that protects them, and not one that basic protections are harder and harder to achieve within. This bill is wrong for our democracy, it’s wrong for our people, it’s wrong for our future, and I’ll be glad when Labour repeals it.

I’ve listened intently to the debate in the House today and there’s nothing new that has come from this debate that I haven’t heard already in the Finance and Expenditure Committee. This bill is all about accountability of the executive. On balance, I think this is a positive step forward. I certainly look forward to the day when we see more cost-benefit analysis. I’ve seen far too many bills across this House with very poor drafting, very poor cost-benefit analysis, and I want to congratulate the ACT Party and I commend this bill to the House.