If you want to understand the psychology and motives of the coalition government and its allies, ignore the online conspiracy theories about the Atlas Network, which is currently scrambling the brains of our intelligentsia, and watch a couple of episodes of Clarkson’s Farm.
A masterpiece of right-wing propaganda, the British reality show documents TV celebrity Jeremy Clarkson attempting to run his farm in the Cotswolds and mostly failing, partly due to his own deficiencies as a farmer, business owner and human being, but also because of the extensive costs and administrative burden imposed on his industry by a labyrinth of government regulators.
Every way Clarkson turns, frantically devising new business plans as his farm hurtles towards insolvency, he is confounded by red tape and bureaucracy. The smallest thing – digging a trail, converting an old barn into a shop – involves lengthy planning permissions and legal battles.
Some of the regulations seem sensible. The bureaucrats compelled Clarkson to test the pond water he planned to bottle and sell as pure spring water, revealing heavy contamination with toxic chemicals and animal faecal matter. Even he would probably concede this testing was a good thing.
But many are questionable at best, and the show deftly exposes the way regulations and consent processes are weaponised by local businesses attempting to block potential competitors, neighbours obstructing developments that might inconvenience them, and vexatious officials abusing their positions, all in the name of environmentalism, heritage, community wellbeing and the common good.
For New Zealand’s coalition government, this is what is wrong with our economy. Take the waste depicted in Clarkson’s show and amplify it across every sector and every business in the nation. That’s what is stealing our mojo!
Embedding his beliefs
It is the rationale for the fast-track legislation, David Seymour’s Ministry for Regulation and now his Regulatory Standards Bill, the latest controversy artfully orchestrated by Act’s leader as he attempts to embed his party’s values into the framework of government.
This bill will measure new and existing legislation and assess its impact on property rights and personal freedom. Act regards this as constitutional reform, as vital as the Public Finance Act, which prohibits politicians from lying to the public about the state of the government’s books.
The actual bill has not been released, but so far it sounds more like a concierge service for Wellington’s vast and lucrative lobbying industry. Want an inconvenient law changed? Instead of hiring an economic consultancy to draft a report and pestering Beehive staff to get it on their minister’s desk, the new Ministry for Regulation will gladly perform all this work for you at the taxpayer’s expense.
Too many notes
Every right-wing political party rails against bureaucracy. If you own a blue tie and can bellow loudly about red tape, government waste, benefit numbers and cracking down on crime you are qualified to be a National MP in a provincial seat.
But which red tapes do you want to cut? Like the scene in Amadeus when the emperor tells Mozart his opera has “too many notes” and the composer challenges him to name them, MPs often struggle to deliver meaningful regulatory reform once they acquire power and cast about for the specific laws to fix, and how to fix them.
Seymour has devised a clever solution to this problem, while massively increasing his own power and influence. His bill enables him to critique and suggest alterations to legislation across every portfolio in the government. Other ministers are free to ignore him, but this will be difficult if an affected company or industry is waving around an official assessment warning that their new law will inflict ruinous financial losses on their sector.
National and New Zealand First are obliged to pass the Regulatory Standards Bill. It’s locked into the coalition agreement, unlike the Treaty Principles Bill. The opposition’s criticism of the legislation is correct: it enshrines Act’s restrictive interpretation of property rights and individual liberty as the standard against which all the nation’s laws must be measured.
But the vast majority of New Zealanders vote for political parties that advocate for a more expansive concept of rights, including environmental protections, workers’ rights and consumer protections – ie, the right not to drink bottled water filled with mercury and faeces. All of these collide with the rights of corporate interests to make money.
Because politicians like Seymour demonise regulation, there’s a tendency for left-wing parties to champion it. But one of the most popular buzzwords in recent political science is “vetocracy”, Francis Fukuyama’s term for the expansive regulatory states that gradually coalesced over recent decades in reaction to the market-focused neoliberal regimes of the late 20th century.
It’s a lock out
If you make rights too expansive, allow too many voices to dictate what can be built, why and where, it creates a mode of government that is rhetorically progressive but operationally conservative. Nothing new can be built, housing and energy costs rise, industries become uncompetitive because existing regulations lock out new entrants. The current supermarket oligarchy was entrenched via land use and exclusivity covenants, which prevented potential competitors from opening stores that might compete with them. The vetocracy critique reframes government regulation as a Goldilocks problem rather than an unqualified evil or an absolute good.
Chris Hipkins has promised to repeal Seymour’s bill during the first 100 days of a Labour government. Incoming regimes relish closing down their enemy’s pet projects, and Labour is hungry to punish the coalition for the destruction of its legacy.
But there is a progressive version of this regulatory regime that would assess laws against a broader range of criteria, identifying regulatory failures allowing corporate interests to impose costs on the public – like the misuse of covenants – rather than the other way around.
Wouldn’t it be more satisfying to wield Seymour’s creation against the interests it is designed to serve? It might even be good for the country.
