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Act leader David Seymour suggested ‘bots' drove ‘fake submissions' against his Regulatory Standards Bill

Act leader David Seymour suggested ‘bots' drove ‘fake submissions' against his Regulatory Standards Bill

NZ Herald03-06-2025
David Seymour claims 99.5% of submissions were created using bots. Photo / Mark Mitchell
RNZ
Act leader David Seymour has claimed 99.5% of the submissions received on the Regulatory Standards Bill were created using 'bots'.
The Ministry for Regulation received approximately 23,000 submissions regarding a discussion document about the bill in January.
In summarising the feedback,
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Open Letter Calls For Halt To The Undemocratic Regulatory Standards Bill
Open Letter Calls For Halt To The Undemocratic Regulatory Standards Bill

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Open Letter Calls For Halt To The Undemocratic Regulatory Standards Bill

As some of the country's senior lawyers and researchers in a range of disciplines (law, economics, Tiriti o Waitangi, public policy, environment), including a former Prime Minister and two New Zealanders of the Year, we cannot stand by as the Regulatory Standards Bill is rushed through a parliamentary select committee next week. Each of us has written extensively and spoken out against this Bill from our respective areas of expertise. Many of us have done so for the three previous iterations of this Bill when it was promoted unsuccessfully by the Act Party and the Business Round Roundtable (later, the New Zealand Institute). On each of those occasions Parliament has rejected the Bill as philosophically and legally unsound, profoundly undemocratic, and contrary to Te Tiriti o Waitangi. This time the Act Party has sought to bypass rigorous parliamentary scrutiny by securing commitments from the National and New Zealand First parties to legislate the Bill into law. There was an opportunity for public submissions on the proposal late last year, where it secured the support of only 0.33% of the over 23,000 New Zealanders who expressed their views on the consultation document. It is evident that the advice in virtually all the submissions was ignored by the government. The Bill could have profound constitutional consequences. 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. Te Tiriti o Waitangi has been excluded altogether. The power vested in the Minister for Regulation and a ministerial-appointed board is not subject to the normal accountabilities of Crown entities, conferring significant yet largely unaccountable authority on the executive. Advertisement - scroll to continue reading Dr Jim Salinger, 2024 New Zealander of the Year, further notes the chilling effect the Bill will have on any future policy on climate change and adaptation following the almost $4 billion cost of the 2023 Auckland Anniversary weekend floods and Cyclone Gabrielle, the highest in our history. While there is a select committee review of the Bill, it is truncated and circumscribed. The Coalition government has decided to submit the Bill to the Finance and Expenditure Committee rather than the Justice Committee, limiting the time to hear many tens of thousands of oral submissions to just 30 hours – at most 360 submissions - with 5 minutes per submitter, and truncating the period for those hearings and the committee's report, further exposes the hypocrisy that this Bill is about good governance, better laws, improved regulation, greater transparency and enhanced governmental accountability. We are gravely concerned that the National Party and New Zealand First appear to be complicit in this undemocratic process. We have each thought long and hard about whether to say we want to challenge this Bill before the select committee, lest it give some credibility to a process that is devoid of legitimacy. Some of us, such as Professor Dame Anne Salmond, 2013 New Zealander of the Year, and Professor Andrew Geddis, made written submissions, but feel there is no point in participating such a harmful process. Professor Emeritus Jonathan Boston, Dr Geoffrey Bertram, Dr Bill Rosenberg and Dr Max Harris have indicated they want to address the committee to reinforce their submissions. In Professor Boston's view: 'The current Bill is destined to have a very short and ignominious life as an Act of Parliament: it enjoys virtually no public support; it lacks cross-party backing; it is opposed by the very Ministry that will be responsible for its implementation; and it endorses principles that have been found wanting by multiple generations of people throughout the world". In similar vein, long-standing academic critic of the Bill Professor Emeritus Jane Kelsey feels a responsibility 'to speak truth to power' - in this case the abuse of proper process and the Act Party's ongoing contempt for Te Tiriti o Waitangi. For a time it appeared the Sir Geoffrey Palmer, former Prime Minister and Minister of Justice, Professor of Law at Te Herenga Waka/ Victoria University of Wellington, author of numerous books on parliamentary constitutinalism, and staunch critic of the Bill, was originally not invited to address the select committee, despite saying but he wanted to be heard. 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Regulatory Standards Bill could be barrier for Māori housing
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Regulatory Standards Bill could be barrier for Māori housing

Regulations Minister David Seymour Photo: RNZ / Mark Papalii The Ministry of Housing and Urban Development has warned that the Regulatory Standards Bill could stymie progress in enabling papakāinga, or Māori housing, documents show. A ministry official also flagged concerns the legislation could make it harder for ministers to do their jobs, and warned the reach of the proposed law - and the minister-appointed board - seemed "disproportionate to the authority of Parliament". Regulations Minister David Seymour rejected the criticism, saying the ministry should be "leading the charge to cut through this bureaucracy so more homes can be built". The Regulatory Standards Bill is non-binding on Parliament but proposes a set of principles MPs and officials would have to consider when designing regulation. It also would set up a board, appointed by the minister, to examine current and future laws' consistency with those principles, as well as requiring regular reviews of all regulations. In its feedback, the housing ministry raised concern about the potential for individual property rights to be elevated over and above collective rights. "...the lack of provision for collective rights/rangatiratanga and the indicated shift towards Individual rights, in a way that is not currently in New Zealand's constitution, could impact the way we can develop policy and legislation with significant negative impacts on Māori housing outcomes," it said. The ministry said one of the proposed principles - dealing with taxes, fees, and levies - could hinder progress on Māori-led housing projects. "If this principle is imposed over regulation, we are concerned it could be misaligned with the current approaches to whenua Māori, lead to greater fragmentation of land/whenua Maōri, be a barrier to pooling resources for collective good and further entrench the negative housing outcomes that currently exist." The government in May announced plans to make it easier to consent papakāinga. However, funding for the Whai Kāinga, Whai Oranga housing fund has also been cut . In a statement to RNZ, a spokesperson for Seymour said if the Regulation Standards Bill had been in place years ago, it could have prevented "much of the pointless red tape" that slows down building and consenting. "New Zealand faces a serious housing crisis. Anyone who has tried to build a home knows the delays and costs caused by red tape," the spokesperson said. "I'd have thought the Ministry for Housing would be leading the charge to cut through this bureaucracy so more homes can be built." An FAQ document prepared by Seymour's office also rejected the idea that the bill would favour individual rights over collective ones, saying it preserved the status quo "that collective Parliamentary law can trump all individual rights to personal autonomy and possessions". 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"As with compliance with international obligations, legal obligations under Treaty settlements are a given. A central part of the RSB is to protect existing legal rights from unprincipled appropriation," it said. The ministry also said the ability for the proposed Regulatory Standards Board - appointed by the Regulations Minister, currently Seymour - to carry out reviews of regulations ahead of agencies' own regular reviews of legislation "would not be the most effective use of the board's time". Seymour has previously defended the extra cost and workload, saying the cost was about 2 percent of the policy work currently done across the government. "If it costs $20 million just to check the regulations, imagine the cost to all the poor buggers out there who have to comply with all this crap," he said. In preparation for providing feedback on the Cabinet paper in October, an MHUD official warned that giving the Regulation Minister power to set the terms of regulatory reviews could interfere with the work of other ministers. "The power of the Minister of Regulation to initiate regulatory review and set terms of reference gives considerable power and will affect the ability of a portfolio minister to advance their work," the official said. "There should be elements of mutual agreement, or consultation required, or some detail about the threshold for the Minister to initiate a review (eg requiring an Order in Council)." The official also questioned whether a board chosen by the minister should have so much influence, saying it seemed "disproportionate compared to the authority of Parliament". They pointed out there was already a process - through the Regulatory Review Committee and the Legislation Act - that allowed MPs to examine regulations if concerns were raised. 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David Seymour's hypocrisy over drugs and poverty
David Seymour's hypocrisy over drugs and poverty

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The state should spend more on pharmaceuticals like Wegovy because of the benefits to society as a whole, says the deputy prime minister. So why does he refuse to apply the same logic to other forms of spending? On Tuesday, as the weight-loss drug Wegovy finally became available on prescription, Act leader David Seymour renewed his call for more to be done in just about the only area of government spending he likes: pharmaceuticals. We must, he argued, consider the 'whole of society' benefits from this spending, because without such analysis the state will – in his view – always underinvest. Which would be fine, were it not for the colossal hypocrisy of his opposition to such analysis elsewhere. Let us rewind briefly. In an interview with RNZ's Guyon Espiner last year, Seymour argued that, when it comes to pharmaceuticals, governments could save money by spending money. 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Seymour's analysis is flat-out wrong: official data showed very clearly that the big welfare spending increases, notably the 2018 Families Package, led to a noticeable drop in child poverty and the number of kids going hungry. The only real problem was that, when the pandemic hit, Labour didn't continue down the same path and do more to cushion the impact on the poorest New Zealanders. More than that, though, Seymour's argument ignores the fact that a genuine 'whole of society' approach would commit a government to spending vast sums tackling child poverty. Early-years hardship, after all, shows up in later-life damage: children born into poverty typically have worse school results, and lower employment rates and earnings, creating a drag on economic productivity more broadly. They're more likely to be on benefits, they experience twice the rate of heart disease of richer kids, and they require higher spending on health, housing support and criminal justice. Economists have produced various estimates of the total cost this imposes on society. The Poverty by Design conference last year heard that researchers had put the cost at 1-2% of GDP in Britain, 3.8-4.5% of GDP in Canada and as high as 5% of GDP in America. In New Zealand, the estimates – from roughly a decade ago – were around 3% of GDP (Infometrics in 2011), upwards of 3.5% of GDP (Analytica Auckland in 2010), 2.8-3.7% of GDP (the Expert Advisory Group on Solutions to Child Poverty in 2012), and 3.8-4.6% of GDP (the Child Poverty Action Group in 2011). Child poverty has, admittedly, fallen since then, so the lower estimates are probably the most accurate. But even today, hardship in New Zealand is roughly the same as the European average, and a 2022 OECD study of 24 European countries suggested the cost of child poverty was typically around 3.4% of GDP. Applied to the New Zealand economy, which was worth $415 billion last year, that figure implies child poverty costs us about $14 billion annually. If we take seriously this 'whole of society' approach – to use Seymour's words – we could justify spending a genuinely enormous amount of money to slash child poverty rates. Even just the increased tax take – generated from healthier and more productive workers – would cancel out the cost to government in the long run, quite apart from the wider benefits. The only possible counter-objection is that even if tackling child poverty is so important, direct government spending is not the way to do it. But the evidence says otherwise. Although we can't rely solely on the state putting more money in families' bank accounts, it is an extremely effective form of action. Decades of evidence show that when you lift family incomes, parents generally spend it on things that benefit their children. And the results are impressive. Just US$1,000 extra a year in family income, for instance, closes up one-quarter of the achievement gap between poorer and richer kids. In long-term US research, state payments made to families decades ago show up in adults' better health and higher earnings. The government recoups so much tax from those more productive adults that the payments quite literally pay for themselves. Of course an anti-poverty strategy can't rely on welfare alone. Where possible, people should be supported to earn more through paid work. But even that, the evidence shows, requires greater investment in vocational education, mental health services and other welfare-to-work supports. (We also shouldn't forget that four in 10 poor children have a parent in full-time work; as it stands a job is not a guaranteed route out of hardship.) But when people don't have the option of paid work – when disability rules it out, child-raising has to come first, or individuals just need help getting their life back together – then they will need higher welfare payments to support themselves and their children in dignity, and to avoid all the damage that poverty can inflict. Not that Seymour, of course, finds such arguments persuasive. Whereas he cannot blame cancer patients for their situation, he can blame poor parents for theirs, and this harsh moral judgment overrides the investment case. As do political pressures: in his interview with Espiner, Seymour notes that his Epsom constituents regularly complain to him about pharmaceutical underfunding. And those constituents are, of course, some of the richest in the country. Taking a 'whole of society' approach to funding cancer drugs is very much on their radar. Doing the same for child poverty? Not so much.

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