Tina Ngata fronted up to the finance and expenditure committee this week to oppose the Regulatory Standards Bill. (Photo: Qiane Matata-Sipu)
Submitters on the Regulatory Standards Bill expressed strong opposition to the bill in a compressed set of hearings this week. Here’s some of what Tina Ngata told the select committee.
In spite of our colonial underpinnings, Aotearoa-New Zealand has received strong praise as being one of the least corrupt nations on the planet. Our government has received this praise from the international community in part because of a well-respected regulatory regime.
In international rankings for regulatory quality by GlobalEconomy.com, the World Justice Project, the World Bank, and the Trading Economics Group, we have consistently ranked in the top 10 of 142 nations for the quality of our regulatory system.
That is not to say that it doesn’t need improvement — all regulatory regimes should be open for improvement. But this bill doesn’t provide that. Rather, it degrades it.
I’d like to draw the select committee’s attention to earlier versions of this bill. It’s not only this population rejecting it — many previous populations have rejected it as well. This is the most rejected, reviled, and opposed bill in the history of our government.
We can start tracking the opposition to this bill from the 1990s in the early iterations of the Fiscal Responsibility Bill, born of the era of Ruthanasia. The neoliberal reforms of the ‘90s were sold to the New Zealand public as economic liberation in much the same way as the current RSB is being promoted. But for rural New Zealand, it economically gutted us and tethered us to offshore corporations that we are still, today, chained to.
Unsurprising, then, that this bog of neoliberal greed led to the formation of a party named to place New Zealand first.
If we bring the opposition to this bill forward to the 2000s, we see clear concerns still being raised:
“Sometimes with the best will in the world, bills such as this that try to improve transparency, improve good lawmaking, and try to make things easier as it were, in fact do quite the opposite. I suspect that might be correct in the case of this bill,” said Doug Woollerton of New Zealand First, in 2006.
Government departments were also scathing in their opposition. In 2011, they collectively stated that the costs and risks outweighed any potential benefits, and that it would create legal uncertainty and confusion.
Which brings us to today, where the same concerns are being raised again over the same bill. This government clearly has an issue respecting the refusal of consent. At some point, we need to name this for what it is: procedural harassment.
This bill is an act of bad faith in every conceivable way. From the purposefully bland title, through to the obtuse and leading discussion document, to the engagement carried out at the worst time of the year.
But still, the New Zealand public cared enough to sacrifice their own time with family over the holiday period to voice their opposition. Only to be called bots by the deputy prime minister for their troubles.
A deputy prime minister who then attempted to evade accountability by bringing forward the introduction of the bill to dodge the Waitangi Tribunal.
A deputy prime minister who has also arranged for this bill of constitutional significance to have as little time as possible in the written submission phase, followed by as little time as possible in the oral hearings phase, and then as little time as possible for officials to write up the report.
A deputy prime minister who has undertaken inexcusable public attacks towards distinguished and recognised experts in their field.
Who could have foreseen that we would find ourselves in such a situation, eh? Well, our ancestors did, and that’s why we have a treaty.
The bill’s proponents have tried to evade accountability at every turn, and if we are being honest, the bill itself is about constitutionalising corporate evasion of accountability.
Which brings us back to the issue of corruption, and what is recognised by political scientists as the most dominant form of corruption in the world: corporate political activity.
The collusion of governments and corporations to remove restrictions to corporate extraction and exploitation is exactly what regulations are there to protect us from.
And, as the select committee responsible for examining this bill, that is what you are supposed to protect us from when you are doing your job properly. That is why you must recommend that this bill be rejected in its entirety.
Tina Ngata (Ngāti Porou) is a researcher and scholar, and the author of Kia Mau: Resisting Colonial Fictions. Her work involves advocacy for environmental, Indigenous and human rights. This includes local, national and international initiatives that highlight the role of settler colonialism in issues such as climate change and waste pollution, and which promote Indigenous justice as best practice for a globally sustainable future.
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