The long neoliberal con

The Regulatory Standards Bill is another attempt by Act leader David Seymour to prioritise corporations over the collective rights and good of the public

While all the media and popular coverage seems to have been directed towards the Treaty Principles Bill, David Seymour and Act are poised to achieve another substantive victory that has been over 20 years in the making.

The Regulatory Standards Bill, first introduced to Parliament in 2006 and reintroduced last year by Seymour in his role as the Minister for Regulation, is under the public consultation phase (quietly started on the day of the arrival of the hikoi in Wellington).

It will be taken up by parliament in early 2025.

As detailed by Melanie Nelson, the passage of this bill (an agreement in the coalition Government’s negotiations) will help Act to realise a longstanding goal of their neoliberal policy agenda, which is to enshrine the rights of individuals, particularly property holders and business owners, over the collective good of all New Zealanders.

“The focus on the Treaty Principles Bill risks overshadowing its dull but dangerous cousin, the Regulatory Standards Bill, which is currently open for consultation,” she writes. “The Regulatory Standards Bill is the brainchild of the Business Roundtable (now the New Zealand Initiative) and has been attempted three times previously by the Act Party.”

If passed, the bill will establish a hand-picked regulatory board to ensure that law-making complies with its regulatory “principles” and to deal with complaints of violations (the public can even call in their complaints via a newly established tip line).

These principles, though not yet fully drafted, stress individual freedoms as the ultimate societal good.

This regulatory board would have sweeping oversight over all proposed government regulations, with the ability to make non-binding recommendations.

Furthermore, all proposed legislation or ministerial statutes (with a compliance review of all existing laws within 10 years) would fall under the purview of the new regulatory board, severely curtailing the ability of the government to regulate harmful business practices or corporate exploitation, even if such regulation is in the public interest.

More seriously the current version of the bill has removed any role of the courts to provide regulatory oversight or interpretation; a move that seems to be explicitly targeted at blocking any incorporation of Te Tiriti into the regulatory discussion.

All of this is – of course – the purpose of the bill, notwithstanding its rather banal stated goal “to improve the quality of regulation (meaning Acts of Parliament and secondary legislation) in New Zealand”.

None of this should come as a surprise when we remember that the Act party is the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers.

The party, founded in 1994 by Roger Douglas after the failure to implement his right-wing neoliberal agenda in full under the Fourth Labour government, is committed to “advocating for expanded personal freedom and responsibility”.

As has been detailed elsewhere, Act’s definitions of personal freedom and responsibility do not mean what the general public understands them to mean.

These are carefully and intentionally deployed terms that have been co-opted by free-market advocates to refer explicitly to the freedom to act as an economic agent and the responsibility to bear any of the risks or harmful consequences of an unregulated free market.

Still, the extensive reach of the Regulatory Standards Bill into all areas of government policy may seem at odds with Act’s stated principles of existing “to promote and implement better policy for all New Zealanders, particularly through reducing the role of government and increasing the role of free markets”.

But this is another area in which the neoliberals have concealed their true goals and vision.

In Globalists: The end of empire and the birth of neoliberalism, Quinn Slobodian shows how after the near collapse of international capitalism post-World War I, intellectual free-market thinkers recognised the fragility of this system and worked toward its preservation.

Contrary to the rhetoric about reduced government regulation common among free-market advocates today, these thinkers did not (and still do not) envision a libertarian realisation of small government and unregulated free markets, but rather specific policies and proactive international regulation to encase and protect the global flow of goods and capital from democratic and state interference.

For neoliberal thinkers, the end of empire and the advent of decolonisation was a direct threat to the stability of the world economy.

States claiming sovereignty in political and economic arenas needed to be tempered by an internationally binding law that would guarantee the rights of investors to speculate and move capital freely without worry about any requirements for redistribution.

Far from a vision of a general and overall reduced role for government, these advocates explicitly lobby and work for a role for government in the protection of free markets and corporate rights and welfare.

On a global level, neoliberal advocates won a large victory with the establishment of the World Trade Organization which dictates the global rules of trade between nations, rules that heavily favour the sovereignty and interests of multinational corporations over sovereignty of democratic states, even allowing corporations to sue nations in international court.

On a much smaller scale, neoliberal advocates push to insulate and protect corporate interests from any democratic threat within nations.

In addition to pushing for reduced state expenditure on public goods and services and moves to privatise, free-market proponents also advocate and legislate, in cooperation with business groups, for direct government intervention and support for business and corporate interests.

The Regulatory Standards Bill is another attempt by Seymour to enact an agenda that prioritises the rights and profits of corporations over the collective rights and good of the New Zealand public.

Under the guise of equality before the law and the rather boring talk of regulation and “cutting red tape” is a more insidious goal of stripping the democratic right to regulate business and corporate activity, even when such regulation is in the best interest of the majority of New Zealanders.

For Seymour, however, the fact that increased regulation may not benefit the bottom line of a minority of wealthy individuals and corporations requires the will of the public to be sacrificed once again on the altar of corporate profits.

We should not go quietly.¹

1. This op-ed was first published in Newsroom