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Friday, May 29, 2026

David Farrar: 260 regulators!


David Seymour announced:

For the first time, the full scale and structure of New Zealand’s regulatory landscape has been mapped, exposing decades of overlap and complexity, Regulation Minister David Seymour says.

“In New Zealand there are over 260 regulators. This includes 95 in central government, 79 in local government, and 57 statutory bodies, committees, or tribunals,” Mr Seymour says.

The total number is bad enough, but look at how many one entity may have rot deal with.

As you can see here, the dog control system actually has five regulators – the Department of Internal Affairs, the Ministry for Primary Industries, the Ministry of Health, the Department of Conservation, and the Ministry of Justice.

What’s more, those five regulatory agencies govern dog registration and control with 11 Acts of Parliament, so not just the Dog Control Act.

Day-to-day, the task of carrying out dog control, split between central and local government, is delegated to at least a dozen different groups of people, depending on where you are and what dogs are doing, from various types of rangers, authorised officers, the Police, the SPCA, DOC staff and public health.

So five regulators for dogs!

David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders

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