Pitched as restoring Parliament's freedom to regulate in the public interest, Labour promises to repeal David Seymour's Regulatory Standards Act 2025 in the first 100 days of a Labour-led government.

The Policy: Labour Repeal Regulatory Standards Act — November 2025 →

What it does:

• Commits to scrapping the Regulatory Standards Act 2025, which passed its third reading 68–55 on 13 November 2025 with National, ACT and NZ First in support and received royal assent on 18 November, commencing 1 January 2026.
• The Act sets principles — covering the rule of law, personal liberties, property rights and cost-benefit analysis — that agencies must measure new and existing law against, and creates a Regulatory Standards Board whose recommendations are non-binding.
• Labour's Duncan Webb lodged a member's bill to repeal the Act on 25 November 2025 and publicly asked NZ First for support to pass it immediately.
• Labour points to opposition scale: the Ministry for Regulation reported 88% of nearly 23,000 submissions opposed the bill and 0.33% supported it, the select committee put opposition at 98.7%, and more than 156,000 people signed a petition against it.
• Labour also cites cost: the Ministry's regulatory impact statement put the Act at a minimum of about $18 million a year across the public service, down from an earlier feared figure of around $60 million.

The result: Repeal is straightforward in principle — a new Parliament can undo an Act — but it depends on numbers Labour does not yet have. Labour's Duncan Webb argues the law puts "our health to clean water and food safety at risk" and should go; ACT leader and Minister for Regulation David Seymour defends it as turning lawmaking from "because we said so" into a justified explanation, and calls the $18m roughly 2% of the government's annual policy budget. Supporters include the New Zealand Initiative's Bryce Wilkinson, who calls it a mild transparency measure, plus Business NZ and the Taxpayers' Union. Critics span the political and legal spectrum: emeritus law professor Jane Kelsey (University of Auckland) warns it locks in a "neoliberal logic", Victoria University law professor Dean Knight and former Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer raised constitutional concerns, and Treasury itself judged the approach "unlikely to be the most efficient". Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi argued Te Tiriti o Waitangi is "the first and the highest regulatory standard", and the Waitangi Tribunal found enacting it without meaningful Māori consultation would breach Treaty principles. The decisive obstacle is NZ First: leader Winston Peters says he will campaign on repeal at the 2026 election but rejected Labour's call for an immediate repeal, saying voters should decide. (Neutrality note: this policy touches the Treaty of Waitangi and property-rights debates; positions here are attributed to the people and bodies who hold them, not asserted as fact.)

The impacts to watch:

• Whether Webb's member's bill is drawn from the ballot and gains NZ First's vote — without it, repeal waits for the 2026 election result.
• The fate of the Regulatory Standards Board, appointed on 20 April 2026, and the Ministry for Regulation resourcing built around the Act.
• How a repeal would interact with regulations already drafted or screened against the Act's principles since it commenced on 1 January 2026.
• Whether repeal becomes a defining 2026 campaign line, given NZ First, Labour and the Greens have all signalled they would unwind it.