The Act Party’s Regulatory Standards Bill focuses on individual rights and property, raising concerns about its benefit to the rich.
Critics argue it limits Parliament’s sovereignty and neglects issues such as child poverty and education.
New Zealand’s wealth disparity is growing, with the rich accumulating wealth faster than the rest of society.
“In a lake stocked with minnows and minnow-eating pike, freedom for the pike means death to the minnows.” So said 20th-century philosopher Isaiah Berlin.
He was warning us to be wary of occasions when the rich and powerful argue for greater freedom. They already have a great deal offreedom, usually a lot more than the rest of us.
The Act Party’s proposed Regulatory Standards Bill appears to be one of these occasions.
The bill states that any proposed legislation will have to be held up to certain principles. However, they are a very limited number of principles, mostly based around individual rights and property.
Why just the principles important to Act? Why not hold legislation accountable to how it will affect child poverty? How it will impact on rights to education and health? Whether it will lead to increases in crime or unemployment?
There are any number of principles they could align legislation to and yet individual and property rights is where they are focused.
Why have principles that primarily benefit the rich and powerful? Why not have principles that benefit the majority, especially those in these unending crises we have had since the Global Financial Crisis in 2008?
One of the main objections to the Regulations Standards Bill is that it puts limitations on Parliament’s sovereignty, and it is beyond ironic that one of Act’s objections to the way that the Treaty of Waitangi was being applied was that it encroached on Parliament’s sovereignty.
We have a system that has created a lot of wealth for certain individuals, and some of those who have accumulated that wealth want to ensure they keep it and are also able to accumulate it at an even faster rate.
Graham Hart, pictured with wife Robyn, is New Zealand's richest person. Photo / Supplied
This month the National Business Review (NBR) announced that the total valuation of New Zealand’s rich list had risen from $95.55 billion last year to $102.1b this year.
Their wealth has gone up by 6.8% and this is not an outlier. In 2023 the valuation of the rich list was $72.79b, meaning their combined wealth had gone up 50% in the two years that included a recession and a cost of living crisis.
The annual inflation rate is currently 2.5%. The New Zealand cash rate is 3.25%, Kiwi Bonds are around 3.5%, and one-year term deposits are less than 4%. The very wealthy are accumulating wealth at a much faster pace than the rest of society.
Some of the money the very rich make is ploughed back into their businesses to make them more efficient and productive, and some is used to look for further business opportunities.
Sometimes these are very risky opportunities, and sometimes that riskiness brings surprises, such as earthquakes, cyclones and their close cousin, presidentially declared tariffs. However, a lot of their wealth appears to go into purchasing assets.
United Kingdom pop economist Gary Stevenson claims the super wealthy live in an economic black hole that sucks in wealth.
If you have $100 million and your wealth conservatively goes up 6%, that is $6m a year. That is a lot of money to try to spend on holidays, food and clothes.
They can’t spend that much and so what they do, according to Stephenson, is buy assets. They are always ahead of inflation so their money just grows and the value of the assets they have, and the assets they buy, goes up.
It is his explanation as to why it is so much tougher to buy a house than 20 years ago and why real estate, gold and the sharemarket continually trend upwards.
Structurally, if it is true that our current system is tailor-made to shift wealth from one part of society to a very small minority, it is no wonder they want to lock it all in place before the rest of us find out. At the same time as our small population of very wealthy are growing ... wealthier, the number of homeless people is skyrocketing.
Stats NZ claimed at the 2023 census over 112,000 New Zealanders were “severely housing deprived”, with 61% of those people living in what was classed as “uninhabitable housing”. This did not include any of the 396,000 people they had no information on.
Change needs to come, but not in legislation that locks in the gains of the top 5% and locks in the losses of the majority. We don’t have to worry about the rich, they will be okay.
Even if they lose their fortunes, they have the skills and networks to bounce back up again.
Anaru Eketone. Photo / Supplied
We need an economy that rewards risk and innovation but at the same time provides affordable housing and health, education and social services. Parliament is perfectly able to do all this without passing the Regulatory Standards Bill.
Submissions on the Regulatory Standards Bill close on June 23.
