The RSB Has Changed — But the Minister Didn’t Say How

A closer look at what quietly changed between the RSB’s public proposal and the Minister’s Cabinet paper — and why that matters.

The Regulatory Standards Bill (RSB) is a government bill which will be finalised and introduced to the House in just over a week. It would create a set of libertarian principles which legislation should align with, establish a Regulatory Standards Board to assess legislation against those principles and give new powers to the Ministry for Regulation. For previous articles on its contents and background see here, here and here.

On paper, some of the policies Cabinet approved for the RSB appear narrower than originally proposed. In the 2024 discussion document, the proposed RSB was to cover all "regulation" – broadly defined to include not just Acts and regulations, but also the wider regulatory systems underpinning them, including codes of practice, licensing regimes, guidance, and discretionary decisions, and all other forms of regulation.

Agencies would have been required to review and justify their entire regulatory systems against a fixed set of principles — including equality before the law, limits on administrative discretion, protection of liberties and property, and standards for proportionate and justified law-making. And complaints could have been made to the Board that existing legislation or regulatory systems were inconsistent with any of these principles.

Regulation, Reframed as Legislation

But the Cabinet paper setting out the final policy decisions now tells a different story. The formal scope of some aspects of the Bill have been trimmed, and others even further expanded. Now, the requirements for consistency assessments apply only to legislation: primary and secondary. Agencies must still review the legislation they create or administer and report on whether those laws align with the RSB's principles. However, the broader regulatory practices that sit underneath the legislation are no longer subject to the same formal oversight.

Or so it seems.

Because while the Bill's legal scope has narrowed, the ideological reach hasn’t budged. The same principles remain. Similar oversight machinery is being built. And the same Minister for Regulation—ACT’s leader, David Seymour—still holds the levers to shape how those principles are applied.

Where Principles Become Practice

The Ministry for Regulation will be empowered to oversee the performance of the entire Regulatory Management System. It can gather information from ministries, agencies, Crown entities, third party providers, and even local government. It can report publicly on system performance. It can use the RSB principles as a yardstick—even where those principles aren’t legally binding.

This is where things start to slip.

Even without a legal obligation, many agencies are likely to bring their wider regulatory systems into line with the RSB principles anyway. Why? Because it avoids inconsistency. Because changes to legislation ripple through entire systems. Because public reporting creates pressure. And because the Minister for Regulation is likely to use every available lever—guidance, performance reviews, influence—to extend the ideological reach of the principles well beyond what’s on the page.

What’s Been Removed — and What Still Applies

The shift from regulatory systems to legislation looks significant. But in effect, the same principles will now be embedded as the default standard of "good regulation" across the public service. Seymour has compared the RSB to the Public Finance Act: a discipline-setting tool, not just a rulebook.

That’s telling.

Even non-legislative aspects of regulation—how services are delivered, how licensing decisions are made, what discretion regulators exercise—may be reshaped in line with the RSB principles. Not because the Bill says so. But because the new regulatory culture will increasingly expect it.

A Quiet Expansion of Power

Some of the Bill’s most consequential changes aren’t acknowledged as changes at all. The Cabinet paper only identifies one dropped provision — the requirement for all primary and secondary legislation to be reviewed within ten years. That was removed — officially due to cost and administrative burden. But other major shifts have been introduced quietly, without explanation.

The Regulatory Standards Board, originally a tentative idea with a limited role, has been formalised and its role significantly expanded. A previously suggested function — the Board being able to review how regulation is implemented — is not included in the final design due to the change in terminology and scope from regulation to legislation. Yet the Board will now have the power to scrutinise both existing and proposed legislation and report directly to Select Committees and the Minister. This represents a clear departure from the earlier framing, where such proactive scrutiny by the Board of proposed legislation was not envisaged. The Board now functions as a visible and sustained mechanism for embedding the RSB principles across both new and existing law.

Now, the inclusion of secondary legislation depends on ministerial notice. And while agencies are responsible for stewardship of the legislation they administer, there is no longer any requirement for existing legislation to be reviewed within a set timeframe.

Together, these changes shift the Bill from a purported neutral quality-control framework to one that concentrates interpretive and agenda-setting power in the hands of the Minister for Regulation. That selective discretion and Ministerial influence paired with a powerful oversight Board and soft political pressure, allows the RSB to reshape New Zealand’s regulatory state — without quite saying so outright.

Where This Lands: Discretion, Relationships, and Rights

This shift has real consequences for areas of regulation that depend on context, judgement, and relationships. Treaty-based engagement. Environmental consents. Professional licensing and discipline. These domains rely on context, judgement, and flexibility — not everything fits within a fixed rule.

But the RSB is openly hostile to discretion—particularly the kind that allows public servants, professionals, or local authorities to apply judgement in specific contexts. This includes discretion used in resource consenting decisions where the significance of effects on the environment, ecosystem or community are assessed; in Treaty-based decision-making, where engagement must be tailored and relational; and in professional regulation, where boards determine whether a practitioner’s conduct meets contextual standards. The RSB’s preference for rule-bound clarity risks crowding out these legitimate, and often necessary, forms of judgement.

It promotes rule-bound formulations that favour uniformity and predictability over responsiveness to context. In narrowing the scope to legislation, the Bill could appear to step back from these spaces. But by setting the tone and values basis for what counts as "good regulation", it continues to constrain these aspects of how our country functions.

A narrowed Bill with the same reach

Let’s not be fooled by the supposed narrowing. It may well be strategic—designed to make the Bill look moderate and manageable.

But paired with soft power—oversight, reporting, funding signals, and political pressure—the RSB still threatens to reshape how regulation works across the board, alongside its more visible non-binding but significant constraints on primary and secondary legislation.

This is not just a Bill about how laws are written. It’s a bid to redefine how the regulatory state thinks, acts, and justifies itself. And it may succeed—quietly, systemically, and without ever having to say so.

Next Steps

The Select Committee process is the public’s final opportunity to have a say. An urgent Waitangi Tribunal hearing will be held on Wednesday 14th May. The RSB legislation is currently being drafted, will be approved by Cabinet on 19^th May and introduced to the House on the same day. The date has not yet been confirmed for the first reading, but it has been noted that following its first reading the RSB will proceed to select committee.