David Seymour is the Minister for Regulation. Photo / Mark Mitchell
David Seymour is the Minister for Regulation. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Opinion by David Seymour
David Seymour is the Act Party leader and Minister for Regulation.
THREE KEY FACTS
The Regulatory Standards Bill aims to improve the quality of regulation in New Zealand so regulatory decisions are based on principles of “good law-making and economic efficiency”.
The bill, yet to be introduced into Parliament, is part of National and Act’s coalition agreement.
Sometimes New Zealand is all milk and honey. Other times you can sense widespread frustration that things could be better.
Our country is in one of those times where we need to choose how we proceed.
We cannot change our size, or the impact of theworld’s largest economies. We can’t change our underlying history or culture, and we cannot quickly change our levels of education. What we can change is our policies.
As 1970s Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk is often quoted, people everywhere need “someone to love, somewhere to live, somewhere to work, and something to hope for”. It is still good advice for the success of any country.
I believe people are leaving because they feel let down. They’ve done their homework, got the grades, worked hard and saved money. And yet, life remains harder here than other places they could be.
Bad regulation is at the heart of this. Make no mistake, in a country where you’re free to do as you please unless there’s a law against it, every extra law is a restriction on your basic freedoms, and I hear about it in nearly every field.
There are builders who’ll tell you it takes longer to get permission than to build something. One person recently wrote to me saying, “The thing that I have learned is that everything that we want to do is not trusted by the council, yet everything that the council does we are supposed to trust”. No wonder we are short of affordable housing.
New Zealand has lost a fortune to earthquake regulations in the past decade, because politicians thought, or should I say felt, more restrictions were the right thing to do aft er the Canterbury quakes. And yet, fewer than 500 people have died from earthquakes in the history of our country. That’s about as many as die from cancer every three weeks, but we can’t afford all the drugs they need. Hmmm.
It will help us get our mojo back as a country, because we’ll be able to spend more time doing useful work, and less time complying with the powers that be for little reason.
It goes on, people in finance face endless red tape thought to prevent them from giving out loans to people who cannot repay them. Somewhere the regulators missed that the whole point of the finance industry is not to lose money by giving loans people cannot repay.
Educators say they only want to help children grow to their potential but spend far too much time on bureaucracy. Generations of politicians and bureaucrats with little understanding of their work felt making another rule was the right thing to do, and workers face the accumulation of their efforts.
Bad regulation doesn’t just add cost to the things we do, it stops us doing things we’d otherwise do.
Whole projects don’t happen because they’re just too hard. Property developers have told me they turn down proposals to build more homes after adding up the regulatory costs, and a shortage of housing is one of our biggest national problems.
It’s not just the workplace and the housing market that are affected by overregulation, it’s our culture.
At the school where Sir Edmund Hillary learned to climb, the climbing walls have health and safety notices saying “do not climb”. Much loved community events such as parades cannot go ahead thanks to the absurd cost of planning something that never caused a problem before.
Into all this comes the Regulatory Standards Bill.
It requires politicians and officials to ask and answer certain questions before they place restrictions on citizens’ freedoms. What problem are we trying to solve? What are the costs and benefits? Who pays the costs and gets the benefits? What restrictions are being placed on the use and exchange of private property?
'There are builders who’ll tell you it takes longer to get permission than to build something.'
The law doesn’t stop politicians or their officials making bad laws. They can still make rules that don’t solve any obvious problem, whose costs exceed their benefits, whose costs fall unfairly on some at the expense of others, and that destroy people’s right to property.
They can do all of that, but the Regulatory Standards Bill makes it transparent that they’re doing it. It makes it easier for voters to identify those responsible for making bad rules. Over time, it will improve the quality of rules we all have to live under by changing how politicians behave.
It does that by requiring a rigorous statement setting out how a rule will meet the standards, or why it is being passed despite not meeting them.
People affected by bad laws will be able to appeal to a Regulatory Standards Board, made up of people who understand regulatory economics. That board will be able to make non-binding declarations on whether the law was made well, turning up the heat on bad lawmaking.
It will help us get our mojo back as a country, because we’ll be able to spend more time doing useful work, and less time complying with the powers that be for little reason.
We’ll see more homes, more jobs, more community, and more hope - Kirk’s prescription for a better country.
