Why has the Regulatory Standards Bill suddenly become such a big deal?

Wednesday, 25 June 2025

ANALYSIS: Slowly and then all of a sudden, the Government’s Regulatory Standards Bill - a two-decade long ACT Party idea to try to improve the quality of Government regulation - has become a political lightning rod.

A conga line of political figures, academics and lobbyists have begun rallying against it. On Monday, the Labour Party’s Duncan Webb said (perhaps optimistically) that Labour would be repealing it in its first 100 days in office. The Green Party showed up to a select committee hearing with boxes covered in yellow tape. Opeds have abounded in various publications, including this masthead.

As my colleague Thomas Manch has written, broadly put, the bill would require ministers and government agencies to assess legislation and regulations against a series of principles: rule of law; liberties; taking of property; taxes, fees and levies; and the role of the courts.

A politically appointed board would be set up to assess new regulation against the principles in the bill. It would make non-binding decisions.

It is the fourth time the ACT Party has tried to get this law passed. Its proponents argue that it will improve law making and make it harder to pass bad law.

Yet it has variously been denounced as undemocratic, favouring individual and property rights over collective rights, and being unnecessary. Particularly, leaving the Treaty of Waitangi out of the principles of the bill catches trenchant criticism, Te Pāti Māori MP Tākuta Ferris raised it again in Parliament on Tuesday.

Taken together, the political left argues it would operate as a trojan horse for corporate interests, stopping governments from passing laws in the national interest.

“It attempts to lock ACT’s far-right principles into law - elevating corporate profits above the public good, environmental protection and Te Tiriti o Waitangi,” Greenpeace CEO Russel Norman wrote in an oped in The Post in late May.

In response to all of this opposition, the ACT Party machine has swung into action, nominating a RSDS (regulatory standards derangement syndrome) victim of the week. So far, the victims have included academics Dame Anne Salmond, Dr George Laking, former Green MP Metiria Turei and Labour MP Willie Jackson.

Wellington mayor Tory Whanau wrote a letter to the prime minister complaining that Seymour has breached the Cabinet manual, he responded that he was being “a bit playful.”

But what exactly is the big deal? Why has such an apparently arcane piece of law, that is not really public facing but determines the rules by which Government regulation are made, become such a talking point?

The law has been through a first reading, select committee submissions closed on Monday.

The general thrust of the criticism mostly is grouped around the idea that the bill will stop governments from being able to make laws as it likes in the public interest.

“This bill is another concession by Christopher Luxon to ACT that puts corporate interests ahead of the public good, making it harder to pass laws that protect people and the environment,” Webb said on Monday.

“Under the Regulatory Standards Bill, laws that would keep people healthy and safe, like requiring landlords to heat homes, limiting the sale of vapes, or keeping our air and water clean would be at risk.”

Seymour has been responding to criticism for a couple of months, telling The Post in May that concerns from officials showed “how poor the level of policy thinking is in some government departments”.

If the general thrust of the argument sounds familiar, it is because this all appears to have similar hallmarks of the protests against the TPP. A technical argument, grasped by the opposition as a symbol of all that is wrong about the current Government, and an intellectual hobby horse of one of the minor parties..

For those who can remember, the protests about the trans-Pacific Partnership (which is now in law at the CPTPP), many of the same arguments were used for opposing that.

In that case a lot of argument revolved around the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) system. It was also claimed that those changes would essentially empower foreign companies over the state. At the time environmental, anti-smoking laws and Pharmac’s status were alleged to be under threat. (A similar campaign happened in Australia.)

A number of Labour opposition MPs protested against the TPP, only to pass the CPTPP when in office and spruik its benefits.

There has been no obvious uptick in rapacious behaviour from foreign companies as a result of the CPTPP - a broadly similar set of arguments also used about the Regulatory Standards Bill.

The best argument against the bill is not any of those factors, but that it simply will not achieve very much. That governments can always find a way around rules - think about the number of regulatory impact statements that get ignored or not commissioned in government haste, for instance.

Those arguments will be ongoing.

In more brute political terms, some of the arguments against the Treaty Principles Bill, which was voted down at second reading in the House by every party except the ACT Party, seem to have jumped across to the Regulatory Standards Bill. A key criticism being that the Treaty of Waitangi is not included as one of the key principles in the new law.

In order for the bill to pass, the coalition partners will have to support its passing - NZ First has expressed some scepticism of it in its current form, so it could well be changed.

However, unlike the TPP, it seems unlikely to become some sort of widespread political rallying point in the way the Treaty Principles Bill was - but much more likely to be passed into law.