Act leader David Seymour is set to make a policy announcement at his party's conference in Auckland today. Photo / Marty Melville
Act leader David Seymour is set to make a policy announcement at his party's conference in Auckland today. Photo / Marty Melville
The Act Party will today release a policy that proposes new powers to interrogate ministries and cut excess regulation, the Herald on Sunday understands.
If elected, Act will look to introduce a mechanism through which ministries would go through a six-month assessment to check whether any regulations imposed on their sectors were unnecessary.
Under the policy, the completed assessment would be presented to the relevant minister and unless there were objections, a bill would be introduced to Parliament to remove the problematic regulations.
It’s understood the policy was intended to strengthen the current regulatory assessment powers, like those held by Treasury, which publishes regulatory impact statements on some proposed legislation.
It appears similar to Act’s past moves to ditch excess red tape.
In National and Act’s confidence and supply agreement made after the 2008 election, then-Act leader Rodney Hide was made the Minister for Regulatory Reform - a portfolio designed to prompt “higher productivity growth and improvements in the quality of regulation”.
Former Act leader Rodney Hide was the first Minister of Regulatory Reform. Photo / NZME
Other Regulatory Reform Ministers included Act’s John Banks and National’s Bill English and Steven Joyce.
Current Act leader David Seymour was the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Regulatory Reform under Joyce in 2015.
In June last year, Labour and the Green Party voted down Act’s proposed Regulatory Standards Bill, which would have “required the MP, minister or bureaucrat sponsoring a bill to put forward a regulatory impact analysis”.
Seymour said the full policy would be revealed today but added that he saw Act’s role in a potential National-Act Government to cover regulation assessment.
“You’ve got to find a role and in our view that role should effectively become the red tape and regulation police,” he told the Herald on Sunday.
“When it comes to the regulatory side, you get some [regulatory impact assessments] that look like they’ve been done by school kids.
“[It’s about] putting some real political power behind where the line in the sand is. If you want to pass laws, then the regulatory analysis has got to be done properly.
“I suspect the effect of that is probably about half of the laws the current Government passed wouldn’t have been passed.”
He offered one regulation applying to early childhood education (ECE) that would be axed under this new power.
ECE services have to record the menu of food they offer children in their care and keep it for three months so it could be checked. This included recording the temperature at the time of cooking.
“At a time when everyone is concerned about the cost of childcare, people are arguing about the ratios of early childhood educators to kids in their care and you think about how much of the time has been spent looking after kids and how much time has been spent maintaining records,” Seymour said.
He said the work would be led by a minister on a “similar footing” to the Finance Minister.
“It’s like the Fiscal Responsibility Act, but for red tape.”
Act’s conference, to be held at Auckland’s SkyCity this afternoon, will feature speeches from Seymour and a handful of MPs on a range of topics including co-governance, justice and climate change.
Also speaking will be Act’s latest recruits, former National MP Dr Parmjeet Parmar and former Federated Farmers president Andrew Hoggard.
