Created by politics, tested by an election: Inside the Ministry for Regulation

Sunday, 8 February 2026

Sprouted from a political promise, the Ministry for Regulation is about to celebrate its second birthday. But uncertainty hangs over it. Born under ACT’s push to cut red tape, the small central agency now finds itself at the centre of an election-year debate over cost, value and whether it should exist at all. Anna Whyte reports.

At the Ministry for Regulation offices, Secretary for Regulation Gráinne Moss can be spotted at a row of desks, surrounded by colleagues. Moss hot-desks alongside staff, saying she never believed she should have an office if no one else does.

For Moss, building a ministry from scratch was a rare opportunity.

“When we started… there was six of us in a little corner,” Moss tells the Sunday Star-Times.

The vision for the ministry came from Regulation Minister David Seymour, who first floated during ACT’s 2023 conference that every sector was “ripe” for red tape cutting: From farming and finance to early childhood education and traffic management to construction and biotechnology.

And then Cabinet signed off on the repeal of the Productivity Commission, providing a source of funding for the new ministry.

While the brief was clear, the question remained for Moss: How do you make it a reality?

“I remember in the early days… I would spend quite a lot of time briefing [Minister Seymour] on the kind of administration I’ve set up,” Moss says.

“And at one point he was like, well… ‘do I really need to know this?’ And I said, ‘it's really important, because we want people to come and work with us’.

Moss says getting pay, the back office and onboarding right was critical to attracting staff and making the ministry work from day one. That attracted criticism in its first year, when the average salary for staff was more than $150,000.

Moss points instead to the output - a steady stream of reviews aimed at improving regulation across multiple sectors.

“We've done ECE, we've done importation of agriculture and horticulture products, which has been a really successful review. Then we had the hairdressers. We've come into the end of a review into the telecom sector. We're also doing a review into product labelling and hospitality.”

Moss says she is proud of helping raise the threshold for enduring power of attorney and working with the Ministry of Justice to raise the threshold levels for wills.

“If you take things like the will problem, a threshold change might not seem a lot, but it's a lot to the person who didn't have to do the admin after their grandmother died and was able to focus more on supporting the family.”

It’s a long list, a lot of reviews, but with little staff. With fewer than 100, Moss says being small forces discipline.

“I like that quote, ‘if we don't have money, we have to think’. It really forces us to make those trade-offs that have actually ended up with us delivering that high quality, high volume, high pace work.

“Time is limited, talent is limited, and where you spend that time is important.”

She says this is where hearing from the public directly is important.

“We've had nearly 1600 tips in through the tip line, and 70% of those people have said to us they haven't raised with a government agency before.

“Some people said to us, ‘I just didn't think my problem was big enough. But you seem to want to listen to it.’

“…People feel that they can raise ‘annoying’ things with us that they maybe feel aren't big enough to raise with another big ministry.”

It takes the politics out of it, letting the problem speak for itself, she says. But the politics are far from removed from the ministry.

Regulation Minister David Seymour says the ministry is working, “and the best proof is that it’s saved more than it costs”. Peer reviewed by Motu, the estimated net public benefit of the ministry’s work on 12 issues was between $223 to $337m over 10 years.

“We have proven the concept this term and there is the potential to do a lot more if we are re-elected.”

But the Opposition isn’t convinced, and that scepticism puts an even bigger question mark over the future of the ministry.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins describes it as a “gold-plated ministry”.

“People there are earning more than most government departments, and I've yet to see any evidence that we're getting good value for that investment.”

Green Party public service spokesperson Francisco Hernandez went even further: “We will torch all traces of Seymour’s agenda… we will repeal the Regulatory Standards Bill and dismantle the Ministry for Regulation.”

Moss realises the inevitability of change in the public service.

“Do I think we will always stay the same? Absolutely not. Because the nature of our work - what the public are telling us bothers them, government priorities - they will alter, and we will need to continue to evolve.

“I always try to think, what can you do right now to actually make life a bit better for people, and how do you make sure that you don't get too stuck in terms of not being open to thinking in new ways?”

The Regulatory Standards Act could also change the way the ministry works.

There’s 1200 primary acts in New Zealand and hundreds of thousands of secondary pieces of legislation, Moss says.

“Everybody's doing the big stuff… but nobody's systematically going through and clearing the house.”

Agencies will need to have a plan to keep regulation up to date, and the Ministry for Regulation will be helping with that.

“We're going to get a lot of good, positive changes in the system, which will mean over time we probably don't need to do reviews.”

For Moss, she’s focused on what’s next. “We've got a couple of things in the pipeline I'm pretty excited about, I think will be… influential pieces of work over time.”

If its regulation reforms succeed, the Ministry for Regulation could ultimately make itself less necessary - a rare ambition in Wellington.

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