Acting up: Danyl McLauchlan on David Seymour’s next bill
David Seymour: A clever way to deliver regulatory reform? Chris Hipkins: Promises to repeal Seymour’s regulatory standards legislation. Photos / Getty Images / composite
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.