A new ministry to regulate… regulations. To draw up laws around drawing up laws.
Act leader David Seymour is in charge of his pet project, a ministry for regulation, and its first target will be an area he is also responsible for – the early childhood education sector.
He is being true to his Act Party’s mantra of minimalist governance and making life easier for businesses.
But unless he wants to oversee another disaster of the leaky buildings magnitude, he can’t ride through the wild west of red tape like a cowboy.
“All of these regulations are in place for a reason,” says Newsroom’s gallery reporter Emma Hatton.
“So whether that reason is still legitimate needs to be carefully considered.”
Hatton has talked to Seymour at length about this new ministry, and tells The Detail what it’s all about.
“As part of government central agencies it’s alongside Treasury and DPMC [Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet] and the Public Service Commission.
“As minister for regulation he sits alongside the minister of finance and things like that, so it’s a very grand position to hold. So he will certainly want to make sure it’s achieving what he thinks it should be achieving, and has something to show for it.”
The leaky buildings disaster, where a freeing up of regulation in the construction industry led to billions of dollars of repair bills for the country, is front of mind in this area.
“You ask anybody about deregulating or having a light-handed approach towards regulation, the building and construction sector is certainly the one that’s going to spring to everybody’s mind,” says Hatton.
“Seymour would push back on the idea that this work seeks to undermine good, solid regulations that are there for proper health and safety, or environmental [reasons], but certainly there is the risk that by stripping out regulations or simplifying processes, or whatever it is that happens as a result of these reviews, that we do end up with so called ‘unintended consequences’ from things like what we saw with the leaky buildings example.”
The new ministry would both look at regulation that is already in place, and strip away anything that is hindering progress or “basically wasting people’s time”, says Hatton, and set up a new piece of legislation that would essentially guide how future legislation and regulations are created.
Also on The Detail today we look at the first target of this deregulation – the early childhood education sector.
Mira Mautner and her husband Ira run and own the Pukeko Preschool Group, consisting of six day care centres in Auckland and Hamilton.
They welcome the review and are hopeful that some of the tiny, petty rules that have piled up on them over the past six to eight years in particular will go.
In the podcast Mira Mautner spells out a host of examples that are proving frustrating and time-wasting, and have made the job quite complex.
“I don’t see how these rules are making things better for children,” she says, describing it as “paperwork for the sake of paperwork”.
There are the constant reviews and health and safety checks, often with the Education Review Office and the Ministry of Education checking the same things within months of each other.
She says they’re constantly on the back foot with authorities over tiny details.
But one of the things that was music to her ears was Seymour’s intention to take the conversation back to ‘Are we educating the kids?’ rather than just government agencies concentrating on compliance.
“Every time somebody’s doing paperwork, they can’t be teaching the children,” she says.
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Young vulnerable preschoolers are more than vulnerable . Their still developing language cannot properly signal to their parents and guardians the distress even trauma the circumstances of where they are put to be cared for , often for many hours each day , has on them . What is there to be concerned about when this sector is regulated ? Those regulations are still not stopping harm in this sector even abuse of children by the very nature of an often chaotic understaffed environment . Early childhood teachers are reporting this dysfunction themselves !
We are in luck. The Australian competition and consumer organisation has just released a report on the child care sector. One of the key things if found was that fees for parents reduced when subsidies increased, but then they went up again as centre owners clawed back more of the government subsidy. The ACCC, far from reducing regulation, has suggested a new stewardship responsibility because the markets in different socioeconomic areas are so variable. In some disadvantaged areas there are hardly any centres and those that are there struggle. Advantaged areas are well served and charge their clients higher fees. Here’s the media release – https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/changes-proposed-to-make-childcare-affordable-and-accessible-for-all-families. Of course there will be different structural and regulatory requirements in New Zealand, but the nice thing about the ACCC study is that it was not prompted by centre owners complaining about red tape, but what it focused on increasing accessibility and affordability in this area. In other words, the ACCC tried to serve the otherwise fragmented and diverse parent constituency, rather than just the owners.