Anne Salmond: Freedom, for whom?

Newsroom

3 days ago

The debate over the Regulatory Standards Bill has been illuminating. New Zealanders have learned a great deal about how our society is being run at present, by whom and for whom.
In this bill, a small libertarian minority is attempting to use the law of the land, past and present, to uphold the priority of private rights and property over all other values, including care for the environment, the just treatment of minority groups and the public good.
A recent Post article by Andrea Vance casts light on how the Regulatory Standards Bill was conceived and drafted, and by whom. The New Zealand Initiative, a right wing think tank, with its predecessor the Business Round Table, has been trying to get such a bill passed for the past 25 years.
After the last election, while the coalition Government was being formed, the Act party with just 8.6 percent of the vote negotiated the inclusion of the draft Regulatory Standards Bill in the coalition agreement, with the Treaty Principles Bill and many other measures.
The Government was formed in late November 2024, with the leader of Act appointed Minister for Regulation with a new ministry, and as Deputy Prime Minister for the second half of the parliamentary term.
The draft Regulatory Standards Bill was sent out for public consultation. The period for feedback was brief and included the Christmas holidays, a timing that aroused resentment.
According to the Post article, during this time the New Zealand Initiative was deeply engaged in backroom discussions with the government. A primary architect of the Bill, a senior fellow of the New Zealand Initiative, was constantly in touch with the Act leader as Minister for Regulation and the CE of the new Ministry throughout, consulting on the bill.
The impression one gains from the written correspondence, now in the public arena, is of a lack of wider discussion within the ministry, with critics of the draft legislation (including myself, with almost every other commentator) being dismissed in the most patronising and jaundiced terms – the opposite of a democratic exchange of ideas.
In the event, and despite the unhelpful timing, 23,000 New Zealanders submitted on the draft Regulatory Standards Bill, with only .33% in favour. Nevertheless, in May 2025 the bill was brought to Parliament for its first reading, which was held under urgency, and sent to a select committee.
During the consultation period, which ended in late June, a reported 150,000 New Zealanders sent in their submissions on the bill, the vast majority opposed to its measures, with 16,000 citizens asking to be heard by the select committee.
Meanwhile, as Minister for Regulation, Deputy Prime Minister and Acting Prime Minister, the leader of the Act party authorised an online 'Victim of the Day' campaign, designed and delivered by staff using the logo of the Parliamentary Service on their social posts.
This featured the portraits of a series of academics (including myself) and others, describing them as 'Victim of the Day' and 'deranged' for criticising the bill, and decorated with the parliamentary insignia.
This effort to silence critics by online trolling, not just by the Act party but from Parliament and the highest office in the land, provoked a petition that has attracted over 24,000 signatures to date.
This petition calls on the Prime Minister to uphold the requirement in the Cabinet Manual that ministers 'behave in a way that upholds, and is seen to uphold, the highest ethical and behavioural standards.'
In early July, the select committee on the Regulatory Standards Bill began hearing submissions, over just 30 hours in total with no MPs in the room. Of 16,000 individual citizens who had asked to submit in person, only 208 were allowed to speak, and then for 5 minutes each.
This was a further breach of the rights of citizens to have their views about legislation before parliament heard and weighed in the balance.
Throughout the deliberations on this bill, in the name of individual freedom, the rights of individual New Zealanders to speak their minds and think differently from a small libertarian minority have been thwarted.
This applies across the political spectrum, including many who might be described as 'conservative' in their values.
New Zealanders who uphold ideas about civic responsibility as well as individual rights and property, including care for the environment, the just treatment of minority groups, Te Tiriti and legislative measures in the public interest, for instance, are dismissed as 'misinformed,' or even incapable of rational thought.
If most Kiwis realised that when the bill talks about freedom for 'persons,' it's talking about freedom for corporations (which in law, are defined as legal 'persons'), not just citizens, they'd see why its backers are so keen to annihilate its critics.
Individual freedom and rights sound appealing, until you understand the bill is also seeking freedom for corporations as legal 'persons' to make profits with minimal restraints.
In the event, the submitters who spoke in front of the select committee were overwhelmingly opposed to the draft bill. Incisive, authoritative analyses of its flaws and negative consequences if enacted were offered from many different vantage points.
In a healthy democracy, one would expect that given this kind of feedback, a select committee would recommend to reject the bill, or at least significantly revise it.
A few days ago, however, an article in The Herald by Thomas Coughlan revealed that the leader of the Act party has threatened to break the coalition unless the Regulatory Standards Bill is passed as drafted.
This would be another breach of the right of citizens to be heard by those in power, and for their views to be taken into account when legislation is enacted.
While the Deputy Prime Minister and other advocates continue to argue this bill is simply a technical measure, aimed at smoothing the legislative process, this is clearly not the case.
No political party in a coalition would threaten to bring down the Government over a trivial matter of that kind.
On closer analysis, passionate rhetoric about individual rights and freedoms by Act and its supporters emerges as 'double speak,' talk that disguises an opposite intention – in this case, to force others to adopt libertarian values about the primacy of private property and the rights of corporations as legal persons, using the law to do it.
This includes imposing libertarian versions of 'freedom of speech' on universities, alongside efforts to control the media in New Zealand, including the internet.
Rather than the pursuit of freedom of speech, this is a fundamentally authoritarian project, underpinned by a sense of intellectual superiority. Anyone who thinks differently from the Act party, its think tanks and its backers is misguided or a fool, and must be made to pull the forelock and bow the knee, by law.
'Closed' rather than 'open' minds, backed by the exercise of political power.
Faced with this kind of imposition, most New Zealanders would tell its proponents to get lost. Democratic values, a care for others and the land are still strong in this country, if not in some political parties.
Distilled to its essence, that is the message coming from the electorate about the Regulatory Standards Bill – and the attempts by the same fringe party to subvert academic freedom, for instance.
The majority in Parliament would be wise to listen. Act's libertarian stunts are a self-serving distraction from other, more urgent challenges – the health crisis, the energy market, resilience to climate change, and the hordes of Kiwis leaving the country, for instance.
They're fiddling with old, passé ideas while the world is drowning, or burning. At the heart of the matter, a bill that requires the primacy of private property and the rights of 'persons' in all law making in New Zealand will inevitably privilege those who have 'property' and power over those who don't.
While many Kiwis hold fast to ideas of 'a fair go' and a decent society, since the 1980s neo-liberal philosophies have dominated governance in this country, so that the top 1 percent in New Zealand now hold 23 percent of the wealth.
Productivity suffers when there's not enough to eat at home and children go to school hungry; housing is poor or lacking altogether for many families; and low-paid workers are penalised to allow tax breaks for landlords and other wealthy interests, as in the Act-driven changes to the Pay Equity Act.
The World Bank, the OECD and Nobel prize winners have all concluded that radical inequality works against sustainable prosperity. The Regulatory Standards Bill, with its privileging of libertarian ideas, will make inequality even worse, with widespread child poverty, low paid, insecure jobs and social misery.
No wonder so many New Zealanders are leaving the country.
Its time for National to agree to disagree with Act, and start making a positive difference for New Zealanders, or as Peter Dunne has warned, face the electoral consequences.