GUEST BLOG: Tadhg Stopford – An open letter to Winston

Rt Hon Winston Peters

Minister of Foreign Affairs

Leader, New Zealand First

Nz first? The Regulatory Standards Bill — A Final Fork in the Road

Dear Mr. Peters,

You have stood in Parliament longer than most, and seen more betrayals than most would ever admit. You remember the Winebox. You remember the asset sell-offs. You remember what sovereignty used to mean. You have been for a long time a hero of mine. Although of late, I must admit, I have started to lose faith.

That’s why this letter is not sent in anger — but in warning, and in hope.

Enclosed is a briefing titled:

“The Regulatory Standards Bill: Rule by Fraud in a Dying Empire”

It is a forensic and principled indictment of the Bill currently before Parliament — a Bill dressed in the robes of reform, but designed to permanently disable Parliament’s power to protect the people from foreign capital, corporate dominance, and bureaucratic cowardice.

As you know it will:

• Codify economic ideology into law
• Elevate corporate ‘persons’ to parity with citizens
• Delegitimize Treaty obligations and collective rights
• Create a veto power against future governments who dare to regulate for the public good

All while choosing to withhold scrutiny from spending and treaty settlements.

It’s neither honourable, transparent, nor public service. It seems set to trample on both public and parliamentary liberty and public service.

In short: it serms the final trap laid by the same ideology that gutted this country from the 1980s onward — the very ideology you once stood against.David Seymour and his allies call this “regulatory improvement.”

But it is nothing less than a lawyer’s coup, executed by stealth, to neutralize sovereignty and enshrine oligarchy.

You are one of the last remaining politicians with the institutional memory, and the proven courage, to name what this is. Not reform. Not neutrality. But submission. Voluntary, permanent, and irreversible.

You know where this ends. And you may be the last man in Parliament able to stop it.

So I ask:

Will you act?

Will you expose this Bill for what it is?

Will you defend the right of Parliament to govern in the people’s interest?

Because make no mistake: this is not just a bad law. It is a systemic betrayal, and history will remember who stood with the people – and who let the trap close.

You are a busy man, I know. But I would appreciate a kōrero with you sometime.

Yours in vigilance,

Tadhg Stopford

Founder, Truth-Based Legal Revolution

Citizen | Researcher | Advocate for Sovereignty and Justice.

The Regulatory Standards Bill: Rule by Fraud in a Dying Empire

By Tadhg Stopford | Truth-Based Legal Revolution

“A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.”

George Orwell

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

George Orwell

Welcome to the Ritual of Reform

The Regulatory Standards Bill (RSB) looks like just another bit of bureaucratic housekeeping — a tidy new checklist for how Parliament should make laws.

But it’s not reform. It’s ritual. A priestly spell designed to make surrender look like order.

Because once you peel back the language of “efficiency” and “good law-making,” here’s what you find:

Laws that protect land, people, or public goods? Deemed risky.

Laws that recognize collective rights or Treaty obligations? Flagged as inconsistent.

Laws that rebalance power away from capital? Challenged, delayed, or buried.

And most critically — it reclassifies people as persons under a legal fiction that dissolves human sovereignty into corporate abstraction.

This is not just semantics. It is the quiet deletion of citizenship.

In the RSB, the term “person” is used throughout — replacing any notion of collective sovereignty, and opening the door to corporate personhood as a constitutional equal to human beings. Legally, “person” includes individuals, corporations, and state agencies — a category so broad that Shell, Pfizer, or BlackRock now stand side by side with tangata whenua, communities, or hapū before the law.

This sleight of language shifts our entire legal footing:

We go from being a people — a nation — to being persons — actors in a deregulated market.

From being sovereigns to being subjects of cost-benefit accounting.

This opens the door to:

Corporations demanding Treaty rights while denying obligations

Private entities challenging regulation under “equal treatment”

The erasure of indigenous status under the guise of “universal law”

This isn’t governance. It’s compliance theatre for a dying ideology.

It’s Strategic Incompetence as Cover for Capture

Let’s name the game: the political class in New Zealand — like much of the West — no longer governs. It manages decline on behalf of capital.

And in doing so, it performs a strange, fragile dance:

Pretend to act — but only within frameworks dictated by the market

Pretend to care — but only in language, not law

Pretend to lead — while outsourcing all real power to unelected boards, foreign investors, or global creditors, The Regulatory Standards Bill is the manual for that performance. It codifies strategic incompetence as the gold standard of modern politics.

“We’d love to help you… but the regulatory standards say we can’t.”

This is not failure. This is design.It is legislative cowardice disguised as process — the public disarmament of Parliament in a world growing darker by the day.

This strategy is made explicit by the likes of Roger Partridge (New Zealand Initiative), whose think tank crafted the RSB to serve capital while masquerading as neutral governance. His ideological heirs — Nicola Willis, David Seymour, Chris Bishop, and Paul Goldsmith — have all parroted its values, protecting donor class privileges under the guise of regulatory improvement.

And let’s not forget Alan Gibbs, godfather of New Zealand’s privatisation regime, whose fingerprints are all over the Winebox generation that still steers policy via proxies in ACT and NZI.

Plato was right. The Decline of the West, Written Into Statute, by Wealth Addicts.

This is how empires end now.

Not in fire.

In forms.

In frameworks.

In non-binding principles enforced with total obedience.

The Regulatory Standards Bill is exactly what you’d expect from a post-sovereign government in a decomposing West:

Too captured to protect its people

Too cowardly to defy its funders

Too proud to admit it is a vessel state. A colony not of another nation, but of global capital itself

Just as Europe gutted its manufacturing base to serve the euro, and America sacrificed its workers for Wall Street, Aotearoa now prepares to preemptively disable its democracy — so that future governments cannot interfere with finance, property, or corporate power.

This is not a national policy.

It is a colonial protocol — one written by cowards, on behalf of kings they’ll never meet.

This logic was explained in Richard Werner’s Princes of the Yen, where the post-war Japanese elite imposed artificial scarcity and bureaucratic discipline to control economic direction. Today, our elites do the same — but in reverse: using austerity, deregulation, and false constraints to hand over power to private finance.We see it again in Treasury’s 2010 Code of Conduct, which forbids the government from directing its own SOEs, and in the LGFA’s debt contracts, which prevent councils from creating credit alternatives.

This is what Michael Hudson calls superimperialism — a global system where sovereignty I nullified through economic dependency, enforced by debt, law, and deceit.

Hidden Clauses, Open Threats

The real danger of the RSB lies not in what it says — but in how it works. It creates a permanent legal scaffold that will silently hang future reformers who try to govern in the public interest. Clause 6 lists the “principles of responsible regulation.” They appear neutral — but they embed market ideology as law.

6(a): “Legislation should not be made unless the Minister is satisfied that it is necessary to achieve an identified and justified objective.”

Translation: precautionary and preventative laws become almost impossible. The burden shifts to the public to justify basic protections.

6(b): “Legislation should not unduly restrict the liberty of individuals.”

Translation: Corporate ‘liberty’ is now indistinguishable from human freedom — and can be invoked to fight environmental, Treaty, or health regulation.

6(c): “Legislation should not take or impair property unless it is necessary in the public interest and there is no more proportionate response.”

➤ Translation: This is the end of proactive land, housing, or environmental reform. Property rights are absolutized; public good becomes conditional.

6(d): “Legislation should produce benefits that outweigh costs.”

➤ Translation: All laws now judged by Treasury’s economic models — which ignore cultural, ecological, and intergenerational value. Justice is now “too expensive.”

6(e): “Legislation should be consistent with New Zealand’s international obligations…”

➤ Translation: WTO and investor-state treaties become de facto constitutional constraints.Free trade trumps democracy.

6(f): “Legislation should be technically feasible and reasonably practical.”

➤ Translation: Radical ideas — even with public support — can be rejected as “unrealistic.”

This protects the status quo, not the future.

Clause 7 introduces “disclosure statements” its compliance (or not) with these principles.

— reports that accompany every new law, detailing

They are non-binding in name — but binding in effect. Every progressive reform will come pre-stamped with warnings — fodder for lobbyists, legal challenges, and future rollbacks.

This is not a quality check.

It is a kill switch — to be pulled any time someone tries to govern for the people.

The True Danger: What It Prevents

The RSB won’t just outlaw just laws.

It will delegitimize the very ideas that could make a just society possible:

That we might build affordable homes

That we might own our own banks

That we might control our energy, transport, and land as national commons

That we might tax the parasites and subsidize the healers

That we might protect taonga over short-term yield

That we might honour Te Tiriti — not as PR, but as living constitutional law

These will all be reframed as “regulatory risks.”

And so, the future itself becomes non-compliant.

What Must Replace It, is a Sovereign, Strategic State

We are not calling for better bureaucrats.

We are calling for post-neoliberal, meritocratic leadership — grounded in strategic responsibility, not ideological obedience.

That means leadership committed to:Regenerative national wealth (not speculative GDP)

Energy independence (geothermal, solar, wind, battery sovereignty)

Strategic autonomy (in food, finance, health, tech)

Economic sovereignty (with public finance nurturing strategic champions)

Public dignity (housing, education, water, nutrition — as rights, not markets)

Even Warren Buffett has said: “Private equity? Basically a total fraud.”

Yet the RSB treats these extractors as legal equals to citizens — even as they dismantle the very conditions of national wellbeing.

This is not a government of the people.

It’s a legal costume for economic colonisation.

The Truth is our only Weapon

So let’s speak plainly:

The RSB is not technical. It is tactical.

It is not about good law. It is about disabling law as an instrument of justice.

It is not about helping Parliament. It is about hollowing it out so that it can never again be used to protect the people from the market.

And so:

It must be exposed.

It must be refused.

And it must be replaced — by a movement, and a generation, that remembers what sovereigntymeans.

Because let’s be honest:

David Seymour’s wet dream is a nightmare made flesh for New Zealand.

A country run by markets.

Governed by algorithms.

Owned by offshore funds.

And policed by process instead of principle.That’s not liberty.

That’s liquefaction — where the ground of democracy gives way under the weight of corporate personhood and colonial finance.

And the Regulatory Standards Bill?

It’s the operating manual for that collapse.

 

 

Tadhg Stopford is a Historian and Teacher. Join him at www.thehempfoundation.org.nz. Support change by purchasing at www.tigerdrops.co.nz