Seymour’s gimmick has whiff of a bygone ACT

Unlike the self-serious Rodney Hide, the last ACT leader to lead a proper caucus, David Seymour has always been happy being the butt of jokes. Both men kickstarted their party’s electoral fortunes from almost dead with populist appearances on Dancing With the Stars.

Hide, in 2008, treated the reality show as a personal journey of growth and meaning, even writing a memoir about his experience; Seymour, in fluoro Lycra, smirked and twerked his way into the hearts of voters. Seymour got further in the competition.

So the ACT leader will not mind the gags about his announcement on Sunday that in government ACT intends to cut red tape by creating a new bureaucracy, a Ministry of Regulation. Because ultimately, underneath, the idea revisits some of Hide’s clever but ultimately fruitless ideas from ACT’s last stint in the Beehive to reduce what it sees as the burden of government over-regulation.

Hide sought the new position of minister of regulatory reform and battled vainly for extra checks and balances on regulation-making that would require officials to assess, for example, impacts on property rights.

He succeeded in creating procedural Regulatory Impact Assessments for new legislation, but these are routinely box-ticking exercises or ignored.

Seymour wants to bring the idea back with a vengeance – a team of officials dedicated to vetting new laws and regulations for their impacts on business, property rights and individuals.

Regulation is necessary in an increasingly complex society, of course. But the same rules which give us confidence in, for example, the securities markets, also create compliance costs, such as rummaging around in old boxes for share certificates and account numbers, which can make flogging off a few Auckland Airport stocks insurmountably hard for a busy government minister.

Seeking to cut the burden of red tape by creating a new bureaucracy is not so much an irony as exactly the point. The proposed ministry would, in

ACT’s view, tie up the government in red-tape, as a way of limiting the harm it could do to individuals and business.

There is at least some sense behind the suggestion. Broadly speaking the state delivers things, like social services and infrastructure, and it dictates things, like new rules.

The public is attuned to the government’s delivery problem. Marquee examples are KiwiBuild, which proceeds with the speed of a 1990s internet download and is stuck at 1.5% complete after five years, and Auckland light rail to the airport, which is moving, somehow, even more slowly.

But delivery issues pervade the state. A&E times and surgical waitlists grow despite enormous increases in health funding. Reforms of DHBs and polytechnics do not appear to have delivered little except new organisational wiring diagrams.

On the other hand, ACT would argue, failures from regulation are more opaque. Thanks to legislation, such as the Public Finance Act, the government keeps track of whether its policies are costing it more than expected or not. It can be, however, distinctly incurious about the subsequent costs and impacts of policy on the outside world.

One Beehive joke is that the easiest way to get rid of a bad bill is to pass it into law. Hence the second function of Seymour’s proposed ministry, which would be to roam, sector by sector, through the economy, investigate the impact of government regulation, and recommend reform.

If this sounds familiar, sector-by-sector review was one of the intended functions of the Productivity Commission, established at Hide’s insistence in 2008, when it last had bargaining power in government.

The commission was intended to act as a hard marker, or an economically dry conscience, of the government on productivity issues. While it produced a succession of high-quality reports, its status as an advisory board made it easily ignorable, an error Seymour is at least in part seeking to correct through the proposed status of a new ministry.

A minister of regulation, in a meta sense but also a practical one, can become a de facto minister of everything.

National, which has its own plans to cut red tape, including a one-in-two-out rule for agricultural regulations, may baulk at giving ACT such a prime position. That will be resolved after October 14. But the election will be as tight as one of Seymour’s awful dance outfits. There is no realistic scenario where National can form a government without support from ACT and, on the matter of regulatory reform at least, Seymour is banking on getting the last laugh.

Seeking to cut the burden of red tape by creating a new bureaucracy is not so much an irony as exactly the point.