How to make your submission on the Regulatory Standards Bill

This is a handy guide to help you make your submission before 1pm Monday 23 June. It covers what the bill is, why you should make a submission and how you can do it.

Here’s our quick submission generator if you want to get straight to it!

What is the regulatory standards bill?

David Seymour’s Regulatory Standards Bill is a dangerous attack on nature and Te Tiriti. It attempts to lock ACT’s far-right principles into law, making sure that corporate property and profits trump the public good, environmental protection and our founding document.  

The Regulatory Standards Bill tries to make all future governments follow a set of ACT’s principles when they’re making laws. These principles would:

  • Create a new unprecedented expectation that the government pays corporations taxpayer money if new rules impact their property, even if those rules are to stop pollution, protect nature, or prevent harm to people and communities.
  • Exclude Te Tiriti o Waitangi entirely.
  • Prioritise corporate property and “individual freedom” over environmental protection, public safety, and indigenous rights.

This is the fourth time ACT has tried to pass a bill like this. It’s failed not once, not twice, but three times already. We have to make sure it fails again. 

What’s at stake here is the ability of any future government to respond to the very real crises we face – climate change, inequality, freshwater pollution, biodiversity loss – without being tied down by legal threats, corporate claims, and Seymour’s rigid neoliberal ideology.

And if the bill passes, then for the first time ever in Aotearoa, corporations like ExxonMobil, Fonterra and Monsanto would expect taxpayer handouts when the government introduces basic environmental, public or worker protections. 

Why should you bother submitting?

Why make a submission? Because it works. Submissions are a key way we show the strength of public opposition – and how we make it impossible for politicians to ignore us. They might not stop a bill on their own, but they are a powerful tool we have in the wider fight to defend nature, Te Tiriti and our future. Together, we’ve kicked oil giants out of our oceans, stopped native forest logging, and we absolutely buried David Seymour’s last attack on Te Tiriti o Waitangi. So let’s bury this bill too.

Three easy ways to make your submission now

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Oppose the Regulatory Standards Bill

Make a submission opposing the Regulatory Standards Bill today using our quick submission builder.

Take Action
  1. Use our speedy submission generator tool here. Just follow the prompts and you’ll be done in a few minutes.
  1. Head straight to the Government website. All you need to do is fill in the contact details they ask for, and then on the next page, make sure you write:

    I oppose the Regulatory Standards Bill.  It should be thrown out immediately.
  1. Want to do a longer submission? Great! There’s lots of information out there to help you learn more. We’ve compiled a list of some key points you could include in your submission below, and some links you can explore at the bottom of this page.

Key statements you could include in your submission

  • The Regulatory Standards Bill is an attack on nature and on Te Tiriti.
  • The Regulatory Standards Bill puts corporate property rights above the rights of nature and communities.
  • The Regulatory Standards Bill would create a new expectation that companies get paid compensation by the Government when they bring in laws to protect environmental and human health, workers’ rights, indigenous rights, or the climate.
  • The Regulatory Standards Bill fundamentally breaches Te Tiriti o Waitangi and tries to essentially remove our founding document from future lawmaking.
  • The Regulatory Standards Bill is an attempt by a minor party to unilaterally rewrite the constitutional and legal foundations of Aotearoa with no public mandate to do so.

Learn more about the regulatory Standards Bill

  • Open letter against the Bill from Forest & Bird, Greenpeace Aotearoa, the Environmental Defence Society (EDS), and WWF-New Zealand 
  • A list of statements you can copy into your submission by Lawyer Tania Waikato
  • Waitangi Tribunal interim report on the bill
  • Submission against the Bill by Emeritus Professor of Law Jane Kelsey,
  • Evidence to the Waitangi Tribunal by constitutional expert Professor Andrew Geddis, 
  • The Bill itself.

And you can register to attend the upcoming Webinar by Tiriti Action group on 5 June.

Beehive
Oppose the Regulatory Standards Bill

Make a submission opposing the Regulatory Standards Bill today using our quick submission builder.

Take Action