Taranaki Cathedral's Submission on the Regulatory Standards Bill

To the Finance & Expenditure Subcommittee,

Tēnā koutou kātoa.

He mihi mahana ki a koutou. A very warm greeting to you all.

1. Ko Jay Ruka tēnei, he uri nō Taranaki Maunga. Ko Te Ātiawa me Ngāti Mutunga ōku iwi. My name is Jay Ruka, I am a descendant of Taranaki Maunga and connected to Te Ātiawa and Ngāti Mutunga. I am the Manuhautū/Dean of Taranaki Cathedral, and I would like to voice my opposition to the Regulatory Standards Bill (RSB).

2. I ask that the Subcommittee recommend that the bill not pass any further readings in the House. My reasons are outlined below.

3. First, there is the matter of principles. It was the Hon David Seymour who previously presented the Treaty Principles Bill (TPB). The proposed bill offered a set of principles to interpret Te Tiriti o Waitangi, which were far removed from the principles of Te Tiriti itself. In the New Zealand Law Society’s submission against the TPB, they noted in paragraph 2.2 (a) that Mr Seymour’s principles bore “no resemblance to te Tiriti/the Treaty or the existing principles.” The fact that those proposed principles were a clear violation of trustworthy, honourable, and historically sound interpretation raises suspicions that the principles proposed in the Regulatory Standards Bill could possess a similar disquality.

4. The Treaty Principles Bill presented principles that, when read in conjunction with the Bill of Rights, conveyed a perception of democratic nobility. However, to assert to the New Zealand public that those principles were what Te Tiriti O Waitangi said or meant, moved democratic nobility towards complicit duplicity. To the reasoned, rational and discerning mind, this should cause an acute sense of reservation towards any principles authored by the writers of the Treaty Principles Bill, such as those proposed in the Regulatory Standards Bill. The authorship connections between these two bills should prompt this Subcommittee to examine the Regulatory Standards principles and, therefore, the intention of the bill, with a hermeneutic of suspicion.

5. For example, the second principle in Subpart 1 of the proposed RSB legislation states:

“legislation should not unduly diminish a person’s liberty, personal security, freedom of choice or action, or various property rights, except as is necessary to provide for, or protect, any such liberty, freedom, or right of another person”.

6. The fact that this idea is as old as the Magna Carta itself should cause people to ask why this bill is even necessary. However, the quoted principle carries the characteristics of the Act Party’s raison d'être. In the Constitution and Rules of Act New Zealand, the Act Party principles state:

7. “The principal object of the Party is to promote an open and benevolent society in which individuals are free…

a) That it is inherent in the nature of human beings as individuals that they are the owners of their own lives…

c) That the proper purpose of government is to enact and enforce laws, and to take such action as may be necessary to secure freedom of the individual from the actions of others, including those others who constitute the government, which could constrain individuals from exercising ownership of their own lives.”

8. First, it needs to be asked, how can the Act Party’s constitutional principles be elevated as the lens through which all law and regulation are viewed? Or put another way, why should the constitution of a political party with only 8% support be accepted as the framework that governs 100% of New Zealand jurisprudence? Wisdom would observe the subterfuge.

9. Secondly, there is a fallacy in the Act Party constitution: “it is inherent in the nature of human beings as individuals”. How Cartesian of them. Individuality is not nature, but culture. Individuality exists because of parents. That is the

10. nature, the born environment of an individual. Individuals exist because of the social relationships of others. It takes a village to raise an individual. Only a particular cultural framework elevates the individual above the community. Naturally, both perspectives can be taken to extremes. Therefore, it is not misplaced to say that the principles of the Act Party constitution embedded in the principles of the Regulatory Standards Bill emerge from an extreme Eurocentric premise and, by extension, are principles that lend to extremism. Wisdom would suggest legislating Eurocentric extremism is unsafe and destabilising for a multicultural country.

11. Next, on the issue of culture, it is necessary to point out that The Crown did not enter into a statehood Treaty with the Act Party. The Crown did not agree to enshrine Act Party cultural individuality. The Crown entered into a statehood Treaty with Te Wakameinga, the United Tribes of Aotearoa, as expressed in Te Tiriti O Waitangi. If there is any cultural lens that needs to be applied to strengthen both jurisprudent legitimacy and economic integrity, it is the lens of the indigenous imagination. Enshrining Act Party individualism in our laws displaces yet again the social and communal lens the Māori world operates in and therefore, yet again, demonstrates the Crown’s habit of operating in bad faith in its Treaty obligations.

12. Finally, I close by drawing the Subcommittee’s attention to the New Zealand Coat of Arms, our national ensign as a sovereign nation. From a Māori perspective, it is not a profoundly motivating symbol, as the statehood’s emblem glorifies farming, agriculture, and mining, economies of extraction born from the legislative usurping of indigenous land. I am concerned that the Regulatory Standards Bill continues to extract resources into private hands and companies unduly, and continues to extract Māori from the place our Coat of Arms portrays.

13. There stands a Rangatira, a Māori chief, facing Zealandia, the daughter of Britannia, not with anger, fear, disdain, disrespect or hatred, but with mana and strength. This Subcommittee has the ability to recommend legislation that is typical of Crown colonial practice or consider the Rangatira on the Coat of Arms, and ask, “Does this legislation reflect our indigenous leader? Is his voice represented in this legislation?”

14. For a piece of legislation that governs our laws and how we generate economic wellbeing, we must be reminded that the Māori mind and voice are not just enshrined in Te Tiriti, but etched on our Coat of Arms.

15. It is the right of our united nation that principles reflecting tikanga Māori and mātauranga Māori are equally applied to our farming, agriculture, and mining, in other words, that the laws of industry are empowered out of a Pākehā and Māori social cohesion that nurtures and flourishes individual freedom. The Regulatory Standards Bill does not reflect this. To prioritise individualism as the source of a benevolent society is to oppose nature. It is my view that the Regulatory Standards Bill, as presented, reflects the reverse of nature; in fact, it is adversarial to the sociability inherent in nature. The principles are narrow. They are not principled enough. They do not bring to light, in any reflection, the lens of our Coat of Arms Rangatira.

16. For these reasons, and for the sense of sitting with historical sensitivity, I implore the Finance and Expenditure Subcommittee not to recommend the Regulatory Standards Bill in its current, narrow and philosophically Eurocentric form.

Kua mutu

The Very Reverend Jay Ruka

Manuhautū/Dean of Taranaki Cathedral