When Rimmer pushed his Regulatory Standards bill though its first reading back in May, he recommended a report-back date of 23 December. That was subsequently brought forward to November, but that doesn't seem to have been quick enough. So now it has unexpectedly been reported back, with of course a select-committee rubberstamp recommending its passage. it's almost as if the "independent" select committee took their marching orders from National's quarterly KPI list or something...
166,300 people submitted on the bill. 98.7% of them were opposed, and only 0.7% in favour. That's 5% of the people who voted last election - a huge amount, and you'd think a democratic government would pay attention to it, given how hard it is to mobilise people to submit normally. But of course they haven't. Instead, the committee majority seeks to minimise the number of submissions, saying that
from additional analysis, 1,317 submissions were identified as containing detail or unique arguments, and were considered to be “substantive” on this basis.So apparently 165,000 people - 5% of the electorate - don't count. Hopefully the regime will learn the error of that at the next election.
Labour has already committed to repealing this shithouse bill in its first hundred days. So its basically a dead letter, ideological posturing by a dying regime. If ACT is successful in ramming it through, then I look forward to its immediate repeal by the next, democratic, government.
