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- Date published:
12:25 pm, July 16th, 2025 - 23 comments
Categories: Christopher Luxon, coalition of chaos, david seymour, making shit up, spin, the praiseworthy and the pitiful, United Nations, winston peters, you couldn't make this shit up -
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It appears the first thing they teach you at Atlas Training School is that you have to be ultra confident at all times. How else can you hope to persuade ordinary people that the ideas Atlas peddles are the best for everyone.
And one thing they do not teach you is discretion. Trampling in an area which is under the control of the leader of one of your coalition partners is not recommended if you want to give the impression that the coalition is not a coalition of chaos.
But this is what David Seymour has been doing recently.
He is totally obsessed with getting his Regulatory Standards Bill getting passed into law.
It does not matter that 88% of submitters to the consultation document opposed the bill and only 0.33% were in support. Seymour’s rather cute response was to blame computer bots.
It does not matter that Seymour’s own ministry recommended an alternative approach to deal with the perceived problem. He still wants to get the bill passed, even though much of what he is attempting to achieve could be done administratively.
It does not matter that people of the calibre of Anne Salmond, Geoffrey Palmer, Professors Dean Knight and Eddie Clark opposed the bill. According to Seymour they were making completely incorrect statements and were suffering from “Regulatory Standards Derangement Syndrome”. He then used Parliamentary Services resources to post social media attacks on some of them and invited his hordes to attack them.
It does not matter that the Waitangi Tribunal concluded that advancing the bill without special consultation with Maori was a breach of the Treaty of Waitangi, or that it is clear that the Government had manipulated timing of the introduction of the Bill in an attempt to usurp the Tribunal’s ability to issue a judgment.
Seymour just wants to get the bill passed, presumably so that he has something to say he has achieved.
Dean Knight has I believe the best statement about why the bill is bad law:
“[T]he bill seeks to usher in navigation lights for legislative quality and regulatory design that are deeply concerning given the ideological and dogmatic nature of the slated principles.”
Clearly the Government want to smash the bill through. Seymour’s calculated tantrums have clearly rattled National and NZ First and they just want it passed although do not discount the possiblity that NZ First will play games with the progress of the bill.
The rushed nature of the select committee hearing spoke volumes. Only 30 hours of hearing were allowed. By comparison the Treaty Principles Bill had 80 hours of hearings and this was spread across four weeks.
The Select Committee Hearings were accelerated and occurred during school holidays and at the same time that the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Government’s Covid response hearings were happening.
I was shortlisted to make an oral submission. An email arrived on the Wednesday the week before the hearings inviting me to nominate a time. Unfortunately I did not see it but I received a call on the Friday and responded immediately indicating what days next week I could appear. I never heard back. The hearings were clearly crammed through and it is clear to me that the intent was to minimise attention being paid to the bill.
Seymour’s sensitivity to criticism is shown by the outlandish response he had to the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples’ letter to the New Zealand Government about the effect of the bill on the Treaty of Waitangi.
From Thomas Coughlan at the Herald:
Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour has told a United Nations official their views on the Government’s indigenous rights agenda are wrong and “an affront to New Zealand’s sovereignty”.
Last month, the Government received a letter from Geneva-based Albert K. Barume, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, a sort of watchdog for indigenous rights.
The letter addressed to New Zealand’s representative to the UN in Geneva for distribution to Foreign Minister Winston Peters and the wider Government concerns “allegations” Barume had received about the erosion of indigenous rights in New Zealand under the coalition.
Barume said he was “particularly concerned” with the Regulatory Standards Bill, which he said “excludes Māori traditions [tikanga] and fails to uphold the principles of partnership, active protection, and self-protection guaranteed under the Treaty of Waitangi”.
Seymour went on the offensive and said that the response was “presumptive, condescending, and wholly misplaced”. He said:
“As an indigenous New Zealander myself, I am deeply aggrieved by your audacity in presuming to speak on my behalf and that of my fellow Māori regarding legislation that aims solely at ensuring clarity, consistency, and accountability in regulatory processes.”
His letter did not go down well with Foreign Minister Winston Peters, whose job it is to respond to UN communications.
And Christopher Luxon decided to show some backbone and chastise Seymour publicly. He stated that he agreed with the substance of Seymour’s letter but that Winston Peters should have responded.
Peters went even further and suggested both his coalition partners were wrong to publicly criticise the letter before he officially responded to it.
The whole incident shows how one minded Seymour is about the bill. It does not matter that numerous Government Departments, experts in law, the Waitangi Tribunal, the United Nations and the vast majority of submitters oppose the Regulatory Standards Bill. They are all wrong and he is right.
Stand by for NZ First’s response. Seymour’s blundering into Winston’s area of responsibility would not have gone down well and NZ First were already looking shaky on the bill.
The report back will be interesting …
Particularly gross is Seymour doing Maori cosplay to somehow alibi himself from the charge of eroding of indigenous rights. Just one Maori's opinion, right?
It's gross because he borrows heavily from Maori with respect to identity, when it suits, but actively undermines Maori identity the other 99% of the time.
Re-submitting this cartoon – goes well with "Everybody is wrong except David Seymour *"
Truly good on you for trying to be heard.
We will urgently need administrative law specialist judges in the High Court to deal with the avalanche of litigating bullshit as every industry contests every Regulatory Commission decision logic.
While I agree with most of what is said, I have to comment on the statistics (88% against) – This is not a good representation of reality. This is exactly how stats can be misused. The average person will not have submitted to this (hence the 300k/5million), and the people who will submit will be the more extreme edges of the distribution. Within this topic this will skew towards against (with the main uproar being 'anti maori'), while not representing the country as a whole. (See euthanasia nz bill for a similar thing in terms of misleading stats). Statistics on the surface can easily be misrepresented, so this isn't a data point for 'one side' as it seems like it is.
[lprent: see my comment below. Read our policy. ]
It is a representation of reality – the submissions to the select committee.
Read what was in the post rather than making shit up and lying about what the author said. The percentages are clearly about the submissions – not a poll of the population which appears to be what you are trying to argue. The first rule of statistics is to be aware of what population you are sampling from – something that you clearly don’t understand.
This is what was written about that stat.
The reality is that you didn’t read the post. Just like the computer illiterate dipshit MP from Epsom didn’t read about the submission process. Bots are checked for in the submission process, the same as we check for and exclude bots on this site.
Idiot trolls who are incapable of reading the actual post before responding about what it says, get handled by humans.
I’ll leave you on probation until we get a rational comment that doesn’t follow the standard Atlas/Act/TU/FSU approach of rewriting what is written and then accumulating a mass of bullshit on their own falsehood as an argument
what's an average person?
You’re a fine example of misrepresenting facts with your “hence the 300k/5million”.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/562990/act-leader-david-seymour-suggested-bots-drove-fake-submissions-against-his-regulatory-standards-bill
So, you got the first number completely wrong and quite likely you’re referring to the Treaty Principles Bill.
The second number presumably refers to a rounded-down estimate of the NZ population, in which case you include babies, toddlers, and children, how ‘representative’ of you.
You seem to be representative of the average apologist shill and supporter of David Seymour & ACT and similar associated fringe groups.
Do you think there are 5 million people in New Zealand that can make a submission? There were 3.8m eligible voters last election and around 2.8 m party votes. In the last election according to the following link https://www.electionresults.govt.nz/electionresults_2023/
These are right wing fringe bills the ACT are proposing. The normies are making the submission in this case as well as the extremes.
If the bills, Act are proposing, were not in the coalition deal they would not be going though.
300k is a heck of alot of submissions. It is more votes than the ACT party received in the Election 246.5k
" The average person will not have submitted to this "
The window to make a submission was only for 4 weeks. Why the rush to push it through?
He’s obviously trying to fly under the radar the creep.
Consultation on the Regulatory Standards Bill opened 18 Nov 2024 and closed 13 Jan 2025.
https://consultation.regulation.govt.nz/rsb/have-your-say-on-regulatory-standards-bill/
I was referring to the submissions to go before the select committee 26th May 2025 – 23rd June 2025
https://www.parliament.nz/en/pb/sc/make-a-submission/document/54SCFIN_SCF_E22299B3-B67B-4F74-023D-08DD9688D2C5/regulatory-standards-bill
"And Christopher Luxon decided to show some backbone and chastise Seymour publicly."
I don't think he showed any backbone because, as you say in the post, he said he "agreed with the substance" of Seymour's letter.
Showing backbone would have been to withdraw support for this massively contentious bill that, rather than solving a problem, is creating a problem that currently doesn't exist.
Credit to Hipkins for saying it will be gone in the first 100 days if he gets elected as PM.
I agree with you about Luxon not showing any backbone about the withdrawing of the offensive letter. He is so gutless. He confirmed again in the house this afternoon, ' he supported the letter, it had just been sent by the wrong person'.
Winston will reply himself to the letter, giving no indication of the type of reply it will be.
The letter is an affront to Māori, who understandably are upset by Seymour's response.
[I’ve changed your user handle to the one you used most recently that was registered here; please stick to one user handle from now on, thanks – Incognito]
Mod note
Don't forget Seymour "dog whistling" to his deluded supporters to commit verbal or physical violence against those he terms as having "RSB derangement syndrome".
Of course, couched in terms that aviod legal responsibility.
The success of the hate campaign against left wing women has only encouraged him, and others.
GCSB and NZSIS obviously have RSB
"And Christopher Luxon decided to show some backbone and chastise Seymour publicly. "
I didn't see it that way; I just thought Luxon was more scared of Winston than Seymour…
The way to handle the Epsom twerp and various permutations of his Atlas group is to keep on doing what thousands of us have already-political participation, making submissions, organising and speaking up.
The headline reminds me of this: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-donald-trump-learned-from-roy-cohn-robert-ziner-mba-c9mrc/ (What Trump learned from Roy Cohn)
Never be wrong, attack don't defend, discredit your opponents. Reading through this list, Seymour just comes up every time. I think this may be the foundation of Atlas MBA 'training'.
Seymour mirrors and projects the infallible leader figure. He claims to stand for equality and personal freedom & liberty but his actions are blaming others and divisive by fuelling an us-versus-them mentality. His populist language of personal freedom & liberty hides his denial of groups of people expressing their shared identity and consensual freedom to do so; all such freedoms must be subservient to the forces of the market(s) and they must not advocate real pluralism.
Consistent with the above is Seymour criticising officials who do their job, similar to Luxon and Peters criticising experts and journalists, respectively, as if only Seymour speaks on behalf of the NZ people.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/567120/ministry-feared-costs-of-60m-a-year-to-review-laws-under-regulatory-standards-bill
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/top/567191/david-seymour-lashes-officials-after-linz-becomes-latest-agency-raising-concerns-about-his-regulatory-standards-bill
In addition, Seymour pushes for less regulation and more regulation simultaneously. This will increase legal protections for some but not for many others. You can guess to which group Seymour’s supporters belong, who happen to be a small minority.
Combined with the many other stepwise reductions of accountability and transparency, erosion of trust in official institutions and diminishing & dismissing their oversight, and (too) many (other) anti-democratic moves, the Coalition and Seymour exhibit too many proto-fascist tendencies that’s good for NZ.
NAct’s self-interest stinks to high heaven.
Saymour is a perfect example of someone who considers themselves to be far smarter than they are. It is pure comedy that this proposed legislation is exactly the kind of poor quality legislation it is supposedly trying to adress. Stupid is as stupid does.