Why Is Seymour’s Red Tape Ministry So Huge and Expensive?

Seymour’s Ministry for Regulation was built to slash bureaucracy, yet BusinessDesk reports it now has 93 staff, more than four times the size of the Productivity Commission it replaced. The red tape crusader has somehow built himself a Red Tape Ministry Palace.

Ministry uncovers 267 different regulators, Seymour urges consolidation

David Seymour has unveiled a report from his Ministry for Regulation showing there are 267 regulators across New Zealand, but offering no specific solution.

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The Regulations Minister says the analysis shows a “twisted spaghetti of regulators who don’t just cost money to fund, but suck up people’s time and force others to give up completely”.

But 43% of the regulators get no government funding, compared to 33% that are mostly government funded, and 19% funded mostly by fees and registrations.

The report also finds other OECD countries typically face similar challenges.

The State of New Zealand’s Regulatory Systems report maps out:

• 96 in central government (36%), including 50 departments, 36 Crown entities, three departmental agencies, two non-Public-Service departments, a statutory corporation and three “others”
• 79 in local government (30%), including 61 territorial councils, 11 regional councils, five unitary councils, the Chatham Islands council, three Outlying Islands and the Department of Internal Affairs and Minister of Local Government
• 60 statutory bodies, committees and tribunals (30%), including 56 statutory bodies and four independent tribunals
• 32 charities and companies with regulatory functions (12%), including 29 companies or incorporated societies, two state-owned enterprises, and one statutory monopoly 

  RNZ

These are bullshit numbers being used to make a problem that doesn’t really exist defend an insane budget!

Here’s the crux…

But 43% of the regulators get no government funding, compared to 33% that are mostly government funded, and 19% funded mostly by fees and registrations.

…exactly, it’s not Government red tape, much of this is generated by professional bodies, industry bodies and state-owned enterprises for crying out loud!

So why is Seymour’s Ministry for Regulation getting bigger?

The real issue is why David Seymour’s new Red Tape Ministry Palace is more than four times the size of the agency it replaced???

Seymour’s red tape ministry now four times bigger than agency it replaced

David Seymour established the Ministry for Regulation in 2024 with the goal of slashing red tape, improving the scrutiny of new laws and boosting the skills of the country’s regulators.Two years on, while most Government departments are contracting, and Seymour called again this week for “less Wellington bloat, fewer government departments, and less government spending”, his own ministry’s headcount has swelled to over four times the size of the agency it replaced.

BusinessDesk

How come his vanity project can cost an arm and a leg but everyone else has to have their budget cut?

Why are we allowing property rights to be put above human rights inside the workings of our Parliament?

Over at the Wellington blog that no one reads, Gordon Campbell makes the point…

Like many bean counters before them, the officials in the Regulations Ministry have recently counted the number of agencies with regulatory powers. Yes we do have lots of agencies (267) that have the power to issue/enforce regulations. Yet that figure tells us sweet nothing about the worth of the regulations, who they protect, and how many people they affect, annually. No, the world didn’t have quite so many regulations 30 years ago, back in the glory days of de-regulation that led directly to the Global Financial Crisis (caused by banking de-regulation) and the Pike River tragedy here (caused by labour market de-regulation.) Most us would call that “progress.”

That’s largely because most of us would prefer to live in a modern society, with modern standards of care. Is there some duplication to be found in our regulatory system? Of course. Yet should it be a government priority to spend vast sums of money to build and staff an entire new Ministry to re-invent the regulatory wheel? Of course not. The Regulations Ministry would surely fail the kind of rigorous cost benefit analysis that it seeks to impose on everyone else. More than anything, ACT’s ideological brainchild looks a lot like Elon Musk’s hare-brained DOGE cost-cutting project, which ended up doing more harm than good.

Moreover, far from choking on red tape, the vast majority of us will never, ever encounter many of the regulations currently on the books. As Jack Tame recently pointed out by way of example on TVNZ’s Q&A programme, most dog owners never let their dogs loose in kiwi sanctuaries. But IMO, it is still good to know that there is a regulation on the books to discourage and punish anyone who does.

Back to Seymour’s folly. It is not as if regulations and red tape have never been subject to scrutiny and revision before the coming of David Seymour. In effect, the Ministry for Regulation has added another layer of administration to the work of evaluating/renewing/revoking regulations that the likes of Treasury, MBIE and DIA have always done before, as a matter of course.

That being so, the new body looks like nothing more than a bog standard bureaucratic power play. Seymour and his pet Ministry aim to become the arm of central government to which all others must eventually bend the knee, lest they embark on anything that protects the consumer, at the expense of corporate profit.

Finally, while railing against the evils of bureaucrats sitting around on fat salaries doing nothing worthwhile…the lucky libertarians at the Regulations Ministry have been enjoying salaries well in excess of the public service average, in order that the Ministry can continue to cosplay as a feisty crusader against the very same waste and duplication that it embodies in spades.

…what I never understand about the Right screaming about regulations is that NZ constantly tops lists showing setting up a business is easier in NZ than anywhere else, so how they have managed to con you that we are downing in red tape honestly amazes me.