The Human Face of Regulatory Overreach

The Haps

The House sat until 10:30pm on Friday, and ACT had another bumper week of passing legislation to improve New Zealand. Nicole McKee simplified ID requirements for AML, David Seymour passed a law to give Early Childhood operators more rights against red tape, and the crazy ‘Clean Car Standard’ got a serious haircut (although the whole thing really needs to go). Andrew Hoggard launched a trial of QR codes for labelling foreign food. If it works it will give consumers more choice and better prices at the checkout.

The Human Face of Regulatory Overreach

This week Free Press shares a piece by David Seymour about the madness of the 2016 earthquake regulations, and why the Regulatory Standards Act is necessary.

There are things nobody tells you about running for Parliament. For example, your electorate office needs a supply of tissue boxes. That’s because people come to their local MP at their wits’ end, ground down and exhausted to tears.

These stories are confidential, and 99.9 per cent will never be told, but one from last week put a human face on a problem so well I nearly needed tissues myself. We can call my constituent Robin. She had written out her story in a letter and she wanted to read it to me in person.

Robin had done everything anyone’s asked. She worked 45 years, mostly in public service, raised a family, and paid off an apartment. She saved enough for a good retirement and to spoil her grandchildren. Now a huge chunk of those savings has evaporated, through no fault of her own.

It all started when her apartment block’s body corporate decided to knock off some routine maintenance tasks that triggered obligations under the Earthquake Prone Buildings law. The extensive, unexpected earthquake strengthening works decimated her savings, and “I will have to leave the community that the residents of our building have developed over the last twenty years, just at a time when my opportunities to meet people are diminishing.”

Her letter was poignant. She said “It is not only for the money that I grieve. I now have a changed place in the world, one where I am not able to contribute as I had planned, to my family, friends, clubs and community and in fact I will probably be one who has to ask for the support of others. My plan was for generous, financially independent living, socialising, travelling, volunteering. It is now constrained and I am disempowered.”

The Government is now removing the earthquake strengthening requirements for Auckland, among other changes. Robin is crushed at having spent so much of her retirement savings on works that the Government now deems never to have been necessary. “And finally, it is not fair. The causes of my despair are actions by Government.” Robin was angry and disappointed, but her strongest feeling was betrayal. “I believed in this country.”

There will be some who say, “So what, she’ll still have a place to live and a pension and savings, by the sounds of it, don’t you know how tough others have it.” That would be self-defeating because if you care for those with less you should want a country where they can get more. The point of this story is that you can do everything right and still have the fruits of your labour snatched from you.

Auckland should simply never have been subject to the earthquake strengthening requirements in the first place. For other regions, they needen’t have been as stringent. The fact I was the only MP to vote against the earthquake strengthening law back in 2016 didn’t help.

What would have helped is if Parliament had taken seriously the advice, that was available in 2016 but ignored, on the earthquake strengthening law. It was always clear that the law would cost building owners tens of billions of dollars, and save almost no lives. It would take up resources that could have saved many, many more lives if they’d been put into more pressing concerns like cancer and road safety.

It's about that time I moved from thinking the Regulatory Standards Bill was an interesting idea to a desperate need. How can Parliament so breezily ruin people’s livelihoods by impairing their property rights, only to breezily reverse its mistake nine years and many billions of wasted dollars later?

If it’s too late for Robin, how can we ensure things like this don’t happen again? We need to make it normal that the impacts on individuals’ freedom and property rights are put up in lights when Parliament passes a law. That is the point of the Regulatory Standards Bill. It doesn’t stop Parliament passing laws, but it will make impacts on freedom and property rights much harder to ignore.

No matter how noble the cause, the impacts on ordinary people need to be understood. Yes, the Canterbury earthquakes were a tragedy, but we should have asked more questions before legislating away livelihoods for little to no gain in lives.

I’m sorry, Robin, your country did let you down here, and it’s physically impossible to go back. I thank you, though, for putting a human face on regulatory overreach, a problem we’ve ignored for too long.