John McLean: Earthqwoke over a Proposed Regulatory Standards Bill

But what’s all the fuss about?

The latest conniptions afflicting New Zealand’s Illiberal “Progressive” Elites are over further legislation proposed by ACT Party Leader David Seymour. The proposed legislation, to be called the Regulatory Standards Bill, is intended to improve the quality of legislative rulemaking in New Zealand – a laudable goal, one might think. OUTRAGE Queen in this instance is serial shrieker, Emeritus Professor Jane Kelsey.

In a 14 January 2024 article entitled The Regulatory Standards Bill: What you need to know – gleefully and lazily reprinted verbatim by reef fish news outlets The Herald and Scoop - Lillian Hanly, a “political reporter” at Radio New Zealand, took dead aim at the proposed legislation...and missed.

A cursory look at Hanly’s handiwork reveals the waywardness of her attempted hit job. Even her title is wrong. The proposed legislation is not a “Bill” (being an atavistic draft Act of Parliament); it’s a discussion paper. (The Bill has yet to be drafted.) And Lillian has failed to cotton on that New Zealanders are sick to the back teeth of being told - by ideologically-driven public broadcasters like herself - “What [WE] need to know”.

Parading her true colours and looking to land an early knock out blow, Lillian came out swinging with:

Similar legislation has a long, and unsuccessful, history in parliament. Here's what you need to know [urgghh, there it is again!].

......…

It noted it was not proposed that the bill would include a principle regarding Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Treasury’s report on the proposed legislation picks up on the Treaty Twaddle, twittering:

One omission from the principles in the Bill that will arise is whether there should be a principle relating to consistency with the Treaty of Waitangi. Government Bills are already required to be certified for consistency with the principles of the Treaty, and Queensland FLPs refer to the ‘sufficient regard to Aboriginal tradition and Island custom’.

As if New Zealand should take lessons in race relations from…Queensland.

Apparently lost on Lillian and the Treasury twats is the following provision of the National/NZ First coalition agreement:

Conduct a comprehensive review of all legislation (except when it is related to, or substantive to, existing full and final Treaty settlements) that includes 'The Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi" and replace all such references with specific words relating to the relevance and application of the Treaty, or repeal the references.

If you thought the Hikois and other hysterical histrionics over Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill were hilarious enough, just wait until Shane J and Winnie P begin to hack those cherished Treaty Principles out of New Zealand’s law books in 2025 - as also promised in the National/NZ First coalition agreement. Bring it on. Can’t wait.

Lillian then brings in Jane Kelsey and Lillian’s little friend Melanie Nelson, with the following:

[Kelsey] said the ACT Party's priority for private property rights excluded balancing considerations, things like social or environmental factors, and Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

"All of those things ... will be subordinated, if not, deemed irrelevant, in the policy and legislative making processes," said Kelsey.

Environmental groups agree, saying the bill would have the effect of undermining environmental protection.

Melanie Nelson was a researcher, writer, analyst and cross-cultural consultant who had been publicising the bill online.

She was concerned about the lack of a "democratic mandate" for "constitutional changes of this magnitude."

In December 2024, Melanie Nelson published her own piece on Seymour’s proposed rulemaking improvement legislation. Melanie’s bit was published in E-TANGATA, the self-described “independent Maori and Pacific media platform” - funded by the Public Interest Journalism Fund to the tune of just under half a million dollars.

Under the heading, The ‘dangerous’ bill flying under the radar, Melanie describes Seymour’s latest legislative initiative as the Treaty Principles Bill’s “dull but dangerous regulatory cousin” and includes the following pithy paranoiac pontifications:

Overall, the regulatory bill’s principles are very similar to the distinctive libertarian interpretations of the terms contained in the Treaty principles bill — interpretations that differ significantly from common usage.

Together, these bills propose embedding Act’s ideological worldview in the heart of New Zealand’s constitutional framework, limiting legislative flexibility, executive decision-making, and judicial interpretation.

Individually or together, these bills would entrench libertarian preferences in New Zealand’s constitutional framework. They would also obstruct the consideration of Te Tiriti in future lawmaking, interpretation and the delivery of public services.

New Zealanders must ask themselves whether they want a minor party’s libertarian ideology to shape the boundaries of legislation, government action, and judicial interpretation, even after Act is no longer in power.

Before Lillian and Melanie jumped on board the latest Outrage Omnibus, “Managing Editor” of newsroom Jonathan Milne had worked himself into an awful state of deranged alarmism with a piece entitled Powered-up Regulatory Standards Bill removes role of courts, with the byline …David Seymour is seizing the controls and handing them to a board that he’ll appoint

Milne’s crazy Cris de Coeur included:

Minister for Regulation David Seymour has unveiled a new draft law that will establish a regulatory standards board to firmly keep the courts out of law-making.

Since the election, Seymour and his NZ First ministerial colleague Shane Jones have embarked on a one-sided war with the judiciary

Which brings us to one of Aotearoa’s very own Matriarchs of Madness, Jane Kelsey.

Like most of her type including John Minto, Jane started out sane enough. She opposed the 1981 Springbok Tour and was generally skeptical of unfettered capitalism and corporatized globalization. But she then dove straight off the deep end, becoming a full blown Marxist Fascist in the true sense of those terms i.e., advocating for antidemocratic “Progressive” takeover of the apparatus of State to promulgate only official narratives and basically control, monitor and censure what the citizenry can think, say and do.

Naturally, as soon as the Treaty of Waitangi began to morph into “Te Tiriti”, Strange Jane swallowed the sacred manuscripts in one greedy gulp and has been excreting all sorts of tangled crap about them ever since, starting with her 1991 legal doctoral thesis entitled Rogernomics and the Treaty of Waitangi: the contradiction between the economic and Treaty policies of the fourth Labour government, 1984-1990, and the role of law in mediating that contradiction in the interests of the colonial capitalist state.

Kelsey’s grandiose, pseudo-intellectual submissions on Seymour’s mooted Regulatory Standards Bill include the following malodorous crapulence:

The conceptual origins of this Bill lie in the theory of “economic constitutionalism”…The objective is to bind governments forever to the logic of economic freedom (libertarianism) by setting overarching rules and principles within which all future political decisions must be made

This ideological project was proselytised in Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1980s and early 1990s

The missing piece in this “economic constitution” was a Regulatory Responsibility Act that could guarantee the primacy of private property and impose a regime of “metaregulation” that regulates the way that governments can regulate.

Requiring future and existing laws and regulations to comply with a selection of libertarian-slanted principles, including an abridged notion of the rule of law, and protection of individual liberties and private property rights, would embed this ideology at the core of governance and excludes other principles that reflect different values. Requiring ministerial confessions of non-compliance would instil disciplines on policy makers. Fellow travellers would be installed in oversight bodies to expand the regime proactively into new regulatory areas, or conduct reviews in response to private interests, and to sound the “fire alarm” at the first sign of deviation.

It is extraordinary that this Minister and his ideological fellow-travellers are asserting the power to redefine core constitutional principles to govern future polities, just as he did with the “principles of the Treaty”. This is neither a Tiriti-based nation nor a democracy.

This has the potential to be our ideologically driven version of the Trump administration.

The National and New Zealand First parties need to take responsibility for allowing this travesty of democratic governance to reach even this far, and vow to stop it before it even reaches the select committee.

Holy sh*t, what’s all this about?

First up, Seymour’s proposed legislation to improve the quality of law-making is simply New Zealand democracy in legitimate action. Parliament can, and probably will, pass a Regulation Standards Act. It will do so a simple majority of votes in Parliament, and future Parliaments will be able to repeal or amend the Act in exactly the same way. That’s what New Zealand’s Parliamentary democracy is all about.

For Melanie Nelson to try and assert a lack of "democratic mandate" for "constitutional changes of this magnitude" is poppycock. Herald journalist Thomas Coughlan, pictured on the right below, doesn’t suffer this sort of constitutional confusion.

The Regulatory Standards Bill will go through the Select Committee process, and its three readings in Parliament, just like all other proposed legislation.

The Jane Kelsey/Lillian Hanly/Melanie Nelson/Jonathan Milne-types, in their fantasy land of Aotearoa, simply don’t like democracy, especially when its outcomes and potentialities offend their delicate ideological prejudices and sensibilities.

Neither do these types have any real appreciation of the economic quagmire that New Zealand has got itself into, or that the only way out is to increase economic productivity, or that good regulations improve productivity. Without an improving economy there’ll be no universal healthcare, no environmental pest control, no decent roads, no reliable power supplies, no Waitangi Tribunal…not much of anything, in fact.

New Zealand is currently a society mired in mindless rules, designed mainly to sustain bloated central and local government bureaucracies. As Seymour says in his Minister’s foreword to the discussion paper:

The Bill aims to establish high-quality regulatory standards to help ensure that regulation keeps up with societal change, and drives productivity, by codifying principles of good regulatory practice.

What humanity’s Jane Kelseys really want is a global order of impoverished equality. But not thorough-going equality. The likes of Kelsey would be at the helm, in their tribal elite garb, dolling out indulgences, redistributing scare resources, grabbing far more than their fair shares and telling us all how to live our little lives.

The fundamental difference between free societies and authoritarian regimes is that, in free societies, citizens can do anything they like unless it’s expressly banned, whereas in authoritarian regimes the citizenry can only do what is expressly permitted by State edict. New Zealand has, in the last decade or so, flirted dangerously with the latter.

At core, what Jane Kelsey and others of her ilk are saying is…DAVID SEYMOUR IS EVIL & WE HATE HIM. The level of visceral hate for his perky, industrious, enthusiastic, funny, patriotic gent is weird and slightly sinister. I don’t happen to agree with him on lots of stuff – including his contention that New Zealand’s electricity market is working as it should - but hey…how could anyone hate him over such things?

New Zealand has probably never been at a lower ebb of academic and mainstream media inanity and insanity. How could newsroom’s Jonathan Milne descend so far as to open his piece on the proposed Regulatory Standards Bill with “…David Seymour has unveiled a new draft law that will…keep the courts out of law-making”. WTF?! In a properly functioning Parliamentary democracy such as New Zealand, the courts of course shouldn’t be “law-making”. Courts should interpret and apply legislation, as it’s literally written – that’s the essence of Parliamentary Sovereignty. And the provisions of any Regulatory Standards Act will be as open to judicial scrutiny and interpretation as any other legislation.

We surely don’t have long to wait long before the Waitangi Tribunal finds that the mere concept of the Regulatory Standards Bill breaches Aotearoa’s elusive and malleable Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. Well, Whoop-de-doo.

John McLean is a citizen typist and enthusiastic amateur who blogs at John's Substack where this article was sourced.