Loonacy and the law student.
The Regulatory Standards Bill gives rise to some pretty loose and loony speculation.
The subject which I’m about to offer commentary on is an example of what may be the scarily low quality of thinking in some of our law students in NZ. Besides the particular brand of ridiculousness I address here, this is also the type of law student whom I’d bet my Maserati on believes that men who say they’re women are really women, and puberty blockers save children’s lives. We can only hope that if their piece of writing - which you can subject yourself to at the end, if you so desire - is the same as the quality of their argument in a court of law, they’ll get laughed out of it. However, these days, I wouldn’t be confident about betting my Maserati on that.
The law student who propelled me to pen this blogpiece is Helen Gilby. By her own admission, she’s a “wildly inconsistent law student”. She only came to my attention because she was a – paid! - guest writer on a Substack called ‘Emily Writes’, which The Substack Post picked up and featured in one of their weekly roundups, and delivered to my inbox. Before that, I had no knowledge of Gilby, so I blame them for exposing me to her 😊 According to her bio, she also writes for The Spinoff, a news platform which leans towards the loony Left. If the little I’ve seen of her writing is any indication, that’s no recommendation for either of them.
Emily Writes is as woke AF, and subscribers, presumably of the same woke-indoctrinated demographic as herself, flock to her - hence Helen Gilby’s presence there. Of course, I didn’t have to read Gilby’s garbage on Emily Writes, but I did. Poor decisions can be made by best of us. Tbh, I thought Emily was one of those who’d blocked me, but I may have mistaken her for someone else.
Featuring periodically in Emily’s blogpieces is ACT Party leader and Deputy Prime Minister, David Seymour, although I get the feeling it’s not with much love attached. However, I have only actually read the latest piece spotted in The Substack Post’s roundup. In that one, Helen Gilby goes amok about his ‘Regulatory Standards Bill’, which in its introductory statement says the aim is “to reduce the amount of unnecessary and poor-quality regulation”.
In line with being a wildly inconsistent law student, Gilby appears to be wildly speculative, too. In her piece¹, she claims that the bill will lead to unreasonable control and/or privatisation of the ports, the highways, transport hubs, food, processing plants, supply chains, telecommunications, energy, infrastructure, water, and rivers, all by unnamed forces. It’s “a legal shift designed to erode protections, override Te Tiriti [the Treaty of Waitangi], and open the door to privatising public goods. It strips power from Māori and frames resistance as obstruction”.
How she arrived at all that is quite the masterpiece of convoluted thinking! None of which is backed up by actual references to any clauses in the bill. My initial impression after reading her piece was that she’s wasting her time as a law student, and that a career in writing fantasy may be more lucrative for her.
Framing Māori as victims is pretty much a standard go-to argument, and currently off limits to question if one doesn’t want to be called a racist, or the ‘wrong’ sort of Māori for doing so. The reality is that iwi (Māori tribe/s) already have commercial interests in many, if not all, all the things Gilby names as being vulnerable to the Regulatory Standards Bill. I simply don’t see them rolling over and letting them be privatised/controlled by other commercial interests, even with greater scrutiny of proposed future legislation.
As far as control and/or privatisation of water goes, the biggest iwi in the South Island, Ngai Tahu, have been in a legal tussle with the Crown to ‘co-manage’ the fresh water in its extensive tribal lands, which cover a large portion of the South Island. The outcome isn’t decided yet, but I wonder if Gilby would be as afraid of the possibility of that water eventually getting controlled/privatised by Ngai Tahu, as she is of her vague unnamed forces controlling it? After all, there’s a greater chance of it happening subsequent to this legal battle, than from the Regulatory Standards Bill.
In order to be sure I wasn’t wrong in my assessment of Gilby’s – paid! – piece being fruitcake, I asked a legal acquaintance’s opinion. No, I wasn’t wrong. Although they consider that the bill needs some refining, as far as Gilby’s piece went the word “petulant” was present in their appraisal. I can only hope that most law students aren’t of Gilby’s ilk, but I fear wokeism may be too rampant at universities to feel very certain about that. I would be more than happy to be wrong, though.
There’s much ado over the Regulatory Standards Bill. I’m no expert, but a lot of it seems to be of little more substance than because it’s David Seymour’s bill. Or, maybe there’s a worry it will cause some proposed regulations to be scrutinised too closely? For those interested, here is a FAQ sheet below which may explain the main points more succinctly than wading through the proposed bill itself. Helen Gilby’s piece on Emily Writes’ Substack is underneath that. You might need a stiff drink afterwards. Whether you agree with the bill, or not, in the words of David Seymour, RSDS - Regulatory Standards Derangement Syndrome - is on full display there, by a future lawyer!
¹Emily Writes blogpiece -
Seymour's Aotearoa: How to Lose a Country in 10 Clauses
My friend Helen Gilby is one of the smartest and funniest people I know. And y’all loved her last post America: Making the Reich great again and her personal essay I'm the 'deserving poor' and you could easily become me. So I asked her to write another piece for us. And she did!
I’m really grateful that because of you I can commission and pay for pieces from other writers in Aotearoa x
[Helen Gilby writes] The Regulatory Standards Bill, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and large-scale international conflict walk into a bar, and the bartender asks what they’re all doing here.
They say they’re here on a blind date to see who ends up with control. Land, water, law, and the future are on the table and David Seymour’s buying the drinks.
At first glance, the Regulatory Standards Bill seems like boring legal housekeeping. But it’s like an ordinary suburban house that’s cover for the local swinger’s club.
Look closer and you’ll find something strategic: an effort to weaken the power of Te Tiriti, strip out Treaty obligations, and smooth the path to deregulating and privatising the things we can’t afford to lose.
Submissions on the Bill have now closed but that doesn’t mean the work is over. This is when it counts. We push our MPs to oppose it. We keep naming what this bill actually is – a legal blueprint for selling off our future. We speak clearly about why David Seymour isn’t defending it with facts or substance. He’s shitposting, because that’s all he’s got.
We like to think Aotearoa is safe. That we are tucked away at the edge of the world. But in the context of international conflict, that distance doesn’t protect us – it makes us valuable. You don’t need to invade a country to control it anymore. You just need to own the ports, the highways, the water systems and the food supply chains.
Logistics win wars. Ownership decides logistics. This isn’t just theory, it’s historical fact (and we all know how much I love to share random WW2 history facts). Eisenhower knew logistics won wars, it’s supply chains, not speeches, that decide outcomes. He understood that fuel, food and infrastructure mattered more than ideology. Control the routes, control the outcome.
That’s why global powers are now investing heavily in strategic public-private partnerships across the Pacific. Especially in ports, transport hubs, telecommunications and energy infrastructure. These investments aren’t just about economic development. They quietly serve long-term logistical and military interests.
The same shipping route or fibre cable that supports trade today could become a controlled asset in a future conflict.
If things get any spicier than they already are, no one’s flying down here for a tour of Hobbiton. They’ll be after the water, the food, the infrastructure.
We’ll be expected to feed them, hydrate them and keep the logistical machine humming. Not because it benefits us, but because it benefits them. Our resources, their war effort.
And if we’ve already sold off the ports, the supply chains, the processing plants? We won’t even get a say. We’ll be the pantry, not the people at the table.
This bill isn’t harmless or neutral. It’s a legal shift designed to erode protections, override Te Tiriti, and open the door to privatising public goods. It strips power from Māori and frames resistance as obstruction.
If you want to know where that road ends, look at Gaza – denied land, food, water, and movement. Not just war but engineered dependence. It starts with law. With control.
And none of this will matter to David Seymour. He’ll be off on a cruise ship somewhere, rediscovering his love of ballroom dancing, maybe even slipping back into that infamous twerking outfit, while the rest of us are figuring out how to ration drinking water.
Because here’s the thing. It’s not just the bill that’s dangerous. It’s the way Seymour is responding to criticism.
David Seymour has just discovered memes and now he’s all in. His feed has gone full ministerial meme dump, aimed at anyone criticising his bill. With no regard for their safety, he is taking aim at academics, researchers and MPs who oppose the Bill with childish labels like “Regulatory Standards Derangement Syndrome.” It’s less strategy, more distraction.
Dame Anne Salmond, who was one of his targets, called his behaviour unethical, unprofessional and dangerous. She’s right. This isn’t banter. It’s a deliberate public attack from a government minister, aimed at shutting people down and making others think twice before speaking up.
When someone in power uses their platform to mock people holding them to account, that’s not democratic leadership, it’s a warning. In a democratic country, we’re supposed to be able to criticise legislation and elected officials. That’s not radical, that’s basic.
When mockery is used to delegitimise that right, it starts to feel less like debate and more like the kind of theatre you’d expect in Russia, where critics don’t just get ridiculed, they fall out of windows, end up poisoned, or quietly disappear on a very long holiday.
That’s where Te Tiriti matters. It’s not a relic, it’s a boundary. It says this is our home, these are our rivers, these are our people. They’re not for sale.
Māori leadership, grounded in whakapapa and collective responsibility, isn’t about exclusion. It’s about care. It’s not about controlling the pie. It’s about making sure there’s enough pie for everyone, long into the future.
“But doesn’t it give Māori all the power?” Only if you think power, is a zero-sum game. Only if you’re afraid of someone saying no. Because when Māori say no – to privatisation, to deregulation, to exploitation – that “no” isn’t a threat to peace. It’s a threat to profit.
And that’s why it’s being undermined.
Co-governance isn’t chaotic. It’s a threat to the status quo because it keeps saying no you can’t buy this when everything else is up for sale. It’s a threat because it holds the line. It doesn’t bend. That’s where its strength lies.
That’s why we need to keep pushing. Not just with submissions, but with pressure, presence and clarity.
Militarisation won’t help. Not with climate breakdown, food insecurity, or corporate control. What will help, is sovereignty, kaitiakitanga, local control, and real constitutional protection.
When things get hard, it won’t be the private equity fund or the policy wonk turning up to defend the river or your right to drinking water. It’ll be the people who never stopped caring for the land and the collective good. We need to stand beside them, not silence them.
Because when the bartender asks what they’re all doing here, the answer is simple: fighting over who gets to own the place.”
Helen Gilby is a writer, solo mum, and wildly inconsistent law student. She’s better at arguing in essays than exams, and far more fluent in grief, class warfare, and bureaucratic nonsense than in torts. Her writing appears in The Spinoff and Rere Takitahi: Flying Solo, where she trades footnotes for feelings.
LoL 'when Maori say 'no' it's a threat to profit'. Some iwi have MILLIONs salted away while their people continue to languish in the crime stats, homelessness, baby-killing, so much winning!
If only the 'elite' scummy brownclowns would say 'NO' to killing babies, 'NO' to gang membership, 'NO' to malfeasance and grift with public money.
Really the longer all this crap goes on for, the more age sensitive I get, as in "are you old enough to have been trained in facts or in fantastic visions of a new world order that will be created through destroying the world as it is now?".
I do not want to be treated by any doctor who prioritises gender identity over sex or one who doesn't even believe in sex as a factor that impacts on health and disease. I am not interested in paying big money to a lawyer who prides herself on being "inconsistent", unless perhaps she is also happy with being paid inconsistently.
I also don't believe that everything is a zero-sum game, that's it's every man for himself (or every woman for herself; there is no such thing as a nonbinary mammal), or any of the other mantras so beloved by the current crop of SJW.