How David Seymour's Regulatory Standards Act will change what public servants write - and what the public sees
Friday, 15 May 2026
Under his new law, public servants might not write detailed analysis of how changes to welfare would impact various groups, Regulation Minister David Seymour says.
His Regulatory Standards Act comes into full force on July 1 and will change the way public servants assess almost all new lawmaking and regulatory decisions, and the information subsequently available to the media and Opposition.
Detailed guidance for those public servants is now being released and suggests a big change in the documentation provided by public servants for regulatory decisions like new laws or policies.
The standard “Regulatory Impact Assessment” (RIAs) currently completed for almost every law change, regulatory decision, or discussion document will be replaced by a “Regulatory Analysis Summary” (RAS).
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Like RIAs these will be publicly released by the time any decision made it to the House, although Seymour did not promise that they would always be available immediately upon an announcement, saying that was ultimately a political decision.
Seymour told The Post he expects there to be fewer of these than there were for RIAs as he has removed the need for them for most discussion documents and widened the criteria for regulatory proposals to be excluded.
“You are more likely to be exempt if you are not placing restrictions on the use and exchange of property,” Seymour said.
But he says the resulting documents will be stronger and focus in a more rigorous manner on the impact of regulation, in particular when it impacts private property, rather than “all purpose policy analysis”.
“The audience here is the wider public. The intention is to reduce the cost to the voter of monitoring regulatory impacts,” Seymour said.
He said of the three things the Government really “did” ‒ own things, tax and spend money, and regulate the exchange of other people’s goods or services ‒ the third did not have the same level of rigorous scrutiny as the other two.
“Previously the RISs had been quite wishy-washy, the problem definition being ‘well my minister wants me to do this’ … We want to raise the standard to be able to say ‘well the Government ought to intervene when and only when there is a fundamental breakdown in co-operation that can’t be solved any way’,”.
When asked if say, a change to the rate of the jobseeker benefit would get a RAS, Seymour said it technically would result in a RAS but he didn’t believe it really needed one, and an exemption would be more likely to apply.
“A tax and transfer system or a social insurance scheme is many things but it is not regulation. If we say that everything is regulation we lose something,” Seymour said.
“The complexity isn’t there ‒ you either pay someone more or less and I think we all know what the effects of paying someone more or less are.”
The new act would not stop other analysis from public servants being released in Cabinet papers and the like.
A Cabinet circular about consistency with the new act specifically noted that decisions made as part of coalition negotiations or as part of 100-day plans should still have full RASs completed ‒ which wasn’t always the case with RIAs at the start of this term, with the Government arguing 100-day policies had already been campaigned on.
Seymour said he hadn’t fought to complete RIAs on those policies because he hadn’t backed the old system but wanted to make sure that even if ACT agreed to a policy it might not agree with during coalition talks next term, it would still have the ability to publish documents showing the regulatory costs of those decisions.
“We might support a policy that we don’t particularly, but we’d like people to be able to see the effects of them.”
He suggested as an example a big reform of the energy market to break up the gentailers ‒ a policy NZ First have pushed but ACT and National oppose.
New paperwork on compliance with the Regulatory Standards Act
Chief executives of public service agencies would also have to complete a new kind of paperwork for most new laws or secondary legislation ‒ a Consistency Accountability Statement (CAS).
These CAS documents would force the chief executive to explain how the new law either complied with the principles of the Regulatory Standards Act or why they were breaching them.
These principles include obligations to consult those being regulated, respect for the rule of law and role of courts, and a push to protect personal liberty ‒ including their liberty to “own, use, and dispose of property, except as is necessary to provide for, or protect, any such liberty, freedom, or right of another person”.
Many have pushed back on these principles, with Victoria University law professor Dr Dean Knight describing them as “strongly libertarian in character” and too political for a bill with such wide power.
“The key point is that many of these legislative design principles are not above politics or universally agreed -- and therefore unsuitable for the type of constitutional blueprint this bill contemplates.”
Labour has attacked the act and promised to repeal it if elected.
“The Regulatory Standards Bill puts corporate interests ahead of what’s best for the public. It puts everything from our health to clean water and food safety at risk,” Labour’s regulation spokesperson Duncan Webb said.
Seymour said the CAS was not about creating extra paperwork for anyone other than public servants trying to restrict the public’s rights.
“This is an obligation only on public servants, and specifically on public servants who are trying to create bureaucracy on everyday people.”
The act comes into force on July 1.