The Bureaucrats Who Cried Wolf: Why the Regulatory Standards Bill Terrifies the Wellington Priesthood

Heaven forbid politicians should actually have to justify their decisions to the public

There is a peculiar scent that lingers whenever the Wellington set begin howling in unison: the stench of self-preservation. One whiff of accountability and the entire public health-industrial complex recoils like a possum in torchlight. The latest outburst of institutional hysteria? The Regulatory Standards Bill (RSB) - a modest, methodical attempt to reintroduce sanity, transparency, and adult judgment into New Zealand's lawmaking process.

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Yet if one were to read the panicked screeds of Messrs Boston, Baker, Geddis, Jones and Sir Geoffrey Palmer, you’d be forgiven for thinking Parliament had voted to reintroduce the plague. Their collective tantrum, issued under the increasingly partisan guise of the "Public Health Communication Centre," does not merely oppose the bill – it denounces it as a constitutional apocalypse. A regulatory coup. An act of libertarian terrorism, no less.

What is this supposed atrocity? The bill merely proposes that, should government wish to tax you, take your property, trample your liberties, or impose endless regulation – it should be required to state its reasons, clearly and publicly. That is not radicalism. That is called democracy. One suspects this is precisely the problem.

The unspoken truth is this: the Wellington intelligentsia have grown drunk on unchallenged authority. For decades, they have ruled by fiat, immune from public scrutiny, cocooned within the taxpayer-funded comfort of their own ideological bubble. The RSB punctures that cocoon. It exposes the priesthood. And naturally, the clergy are incensed.

Let's now take a scalpel to their complaints.

Their central objection is that the bill enshrines a set of "narrow" principles. Yes – and thank God it does. Among these scandalous principles are that laws should be predictable, proportionate, and not diminish individual liberty without cause. Heaven forbid! The most outrageous of all? That every person is equal before the law.

This, apparently, is a threat to "Maori rights." The authors who repeat this lie do not say which rights. They do not explain why Maori alone are endangered by legislative transparency. They simply invoke the phrase like a holy relic, expecting all rational critique to dissolve before it. But invoke it they do – again, and again, and again – until it becomes clear: their entire worldview depends upon the sacred notion that Maori are a special class of citizen, entitled to bespoke treatment, insulated from scrutiny, immune from equality.

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Let's not mince words here: this is racial exceptionalism, dressed up as justice.

Only in this country could a principle as benign as legal equality be denounced as an attack. Only here do "progressive" academics argue that asking all New Zealanders to justify laws under the same standard is somehow discriminatory. This is the moral perversion the RSB seeks to correct.

But of course, this goes far beyond race. This is a clash of worldviews: adult sovereignty versus infantilised ideology. The bill’s opponents do not believe the public can be trusted. They believe the State must coddle, manage, direct. They see citizens not as free individuals, but as twitching wards of the Crown, to be nudged and controlled by PhDs and "equity frameworks."

In their cosseted universe, every restriction is justified, every tax noble, every failure someone else's fault. What they fear – deeply and viscerally – is that the RSB might demand that they explain themselves. That they might be held to account. That some scruffy pleb in Tokoroa or Dargaville might ask: "Why exactly are you regulating my farm, my speech, my property, my industry?" And horror of horrors: that they might not have an answer.

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The Briefing warns that the bill will allow businesses to challenge laws. Good. It warns that regulations may have to be costed, justified, and disclosed. Good. It warns that public health zealots may need to actually prove their lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, and bans achieve something other than headlines and misery. Excellent.

It is no accident that this storm of outrage erupts whenever the State is asked to explain itself. The modern bureaucrat is not a humble servant. He is a priest, and his rituals must not be questioned. His intentions are pure. His failures are always the fault of underfunding, or the Treaty, or capitalism, or racism, or something else conveniently unmeasurable.

The RSB is not a threat to governance. It is a threat to bad governance – to rule by decree, to regulation by stealth, to a Parliament so craven it allows technocrats to run the country in the name of the "public good."

And on that phrase – "public good" – let us reflect. How often is it invoked to justify the unjustifiable? In the name of the public good we have witnessed the erosion of speech, the seizure of land, the redistribution of rights based on bloodlines. We have seen "public health" used as a cudgel to crush dissent and centralise control. We have seen the word "Maori" affixed to every grievance, every funding bid, every attempt to avoid standard, lawful scrutiny.

Enough.

This country was not built on special rights. It was not built on grievance. It was built on the idea that laws apply equally. That property is sacred. That governments serve citizens – not the reverse. The Regulatory Standards Bill is not perfect. But it is a beginning. A line in the sand. A declaration that the adults have returned.

And that the children – cloaked in their academic gowns and flanked by bureaucratic flunkies – may whimper as they wish.

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