Neil Sands
Proposed legislation designed to cut red tape will instead result in more paperwork and risks undermining the role of Parliament, former Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer says.
His remarks on Monday about the Regulatory Standards Bill to the Finance and Expenditure Select Committee drew a strong response from the bill’s author, ACT leader David Seymour, who likened its critics to “vaccine sceptics”.
Palmer told the committee that the bill was based on the unproven assertion that there was too much regulation in New Zealand.
Sir Geoffrey Palmer
He said the bill’s solution to the perceived problem – setting up an independent board appointed by Seymour to scrutinise regulations – was “dangerous, wrong and lacks constitutional legitimacy”.
Palmer, a noted constitutional scholar, also predicted it would create an extra layer of bureaucracy and vastly increase the workload of government officials.
“This proposal is going to disrupt the working of the House of Representatives. Indeed, it’s designed to do that,” he told the select committee.
“The regulations standards board is going to drop reports like leaves in autumn over all sorts of ministers, select committees and everything else, saying, ‘how do you justify this regulation?’.
“Now that’s a disruption … What it does is split ministerial responsibility and that is going to make the conduct of ministers in the Parliament very difficult.
“They [ministers] must take responsibility for statutory regulations that are made under the authority of the Acts in their portfolio, and this is going to produce a terrific amount of extra work and over the long term.”
‘Fundamentally objectionable’
Palmer said establishing an unelected, unaccountable body to interfere in the legislative process was unprecedented.
He said the bill, which is part of the ACT-National coalition agreement, overlooked the fact that there is already a Regulations Review Select Committee which regularly examines statutory regulations.
“They’ve just ignored that,” he said. “Why don’t they examine the existing material and try and use it better? That would be the way to fix this bill, because this bill needs a lot of fixing. It is fundamentally objectionable.”
Palmer was a signatory to an open letter released last week by a group of academics from a range of disciplines, including law, economics, public policy and environmental science.
The letter said the bill completely excluded any mention of the Treaty of Waitangi and vested huge power in Seymour and the review board.
“The bill could have profound constitutional consequences,” it said.
“It establishes a set of principles as a benchmark for good legislation/regulation, many of which are highly questionable and designed to establish a presumption in favour of a libertarian view of the role of the state – one that ceased to have any currency globally more than a century ago.”
‘Not a spiritual exercise’
Seymour said that Palmer was entitled to his view, but he did not accept the criticism.
David Seymour
“Frankly, if he thinks it’s too hard for the government to keep tabs on all the rules it’s making, then he should be worried about all the poor buggers out there who have to follow the government’s rules… It takes longer to get permission to do something than to actually do it. That’s the problem.”
Addressing broader criticism of the bill, he said opponents were spreading misinformation about its possible impacts.
“We’ve faced this before. We had it, dare I say around vaccination during the covid period. We had it over the roll-out of 5G [telecommunications].
“There will always be a group of people out there – and some of them will say they’re lawyers, some will say they’re experts, some will say they were in politics once – and they will say ‘actually, we think this is terrible’.”
Seymour said the treaty was omitted from the bill because it had no bearing on the aim of reducing red tape.
“The point of the law is to improve the rules that New Zealanders have to live under. This is actually a practical project, it’s not a spiritual exercise,” he said.
Business New Zealand supported the bill, saying it would help tackle red tape that was driving up the cost of housing, infrastructure and doing business. The advocacy group said the bill would help identify poor regulation and make the country’s regulatory framework more consistent.
“We can only make progress in removing bureaucratic costs and burdensome regulations where identified pain points are doggedly eradicated over time,” it said in a submission to the select committee.
The irony in the Hon David Seymour’s comparison of the Bill’s critics to vaccine skeptics should not be lost on a reading of cl 8(b) which purports to advance the cause of individual autonomy. In reaching for ad hominem attacks on his critics Mr Seymour contradicts a principle his Bill supposedly promotes.
Vaccines manufactured for profit by large corporations are not the only strong medicine the promoters of this Bill want to inject into the body politic.
As I understand ACT policy, the party sees a restricted role for the Waitangi Tribunal- but it wants an unelected Regulatory Standards Board to have a remit across a much broader front-this doctrinal incoherence requires explaining. I thought ACT stood for parliamentary supremacy? Apparently having a Board of examiners mark parliament’s card is okay. It’s a bit like having one’s English teacher hovering over you, correcting spelling and grammar; but instead of being armed with Fowlers Modern English Usage, the Board will be armed with Hayek’s Law, Legislation and Liberty.
The ‘standards’ promoted by the Bill are a melange of substantive and formal requirements, presenting something of a lolly scramble for those who seek to shape or be critical of a particular government’s policies.
Lastly, the point I think many of the Bill’s critics are making is this: government is there to put up legislation for parliament to deliberate upon, in which forum everyone is directly or indirectly represented. Policies advanced by an elected government will often be picked from a broader menu than those represented by the dieter’s faire that the principles in cl8 allow for. Government policies in a country like New Zealand often seek to promote the public or national interest, which of necessity will traduce individual and property rights to one degree or another. We don’t live as noble and rugged individualists in a blissful state of radical freedom: we live in a nation made up of communities in which we share the commons and national and regional infrastructure and services, which are vital to maintaining a civilised society, as are environmental and other standards, workplace safety and the taxes that pay for the roads we drive on, the mountains of rubbish we create, clean water, hospitals courts and police.
The last thing we need is yet another quango to tell us what to do.