A guest post by Luis Arevalo
In 2018 Steve Bannon, who was once Trump’s chief strategist, described the act of overwhelming the opposition political party, the media, and society in general with copious amounts of information and noise as ‘Flooding the Zone’. The simple act of overwhelming the online and print media sectors with an enormous amount of ‘stuff’ has left society so inundated that they have given up trying to digest and understand what is going on.
And while Bannon and Trump went their separate ways – 2 huge egos cannot inhabit the same suburb for long – the strategy not only continued into Trump’s second term, he doubled down on it and supercharged the process through his signing of 111 executive orders since coming into office.
The strategy is seen as so successful that it has leaked into UK politics and has now reared its ugly head across the pond. As that adage goes, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
However, this has been a tactic of the hard right in Aotearoa all the way back to Rogernomics. Sir Roger Douglas spells out the formula for structural reform in this piece where he says that reform should be implemented in “quantum leaps”, that “speed is essential”, and that one should keep the pace until the work is completed.
Unfortunately, I’d argue that we’re now seeing this strategy being implemented here again in Aotearoa, albeit in a more subtle way.
The speed of change is helping to divert our attention from some of the more insidious, long-term policy changes that, I fear, WILL be implemented and secure far-reaching and decades-long changes to the New Zealand environmental, political, and policy landscape.
Off the top of my head, let’s go through some of the proposed and implemented changes of this coalition Government over the last 12 months:
- Treaty Principles Bill
- The new school’s lunch menu
- Fast-track Approvals Bill
- The Repeal of 7AA
- Changes to the use of Te Reo
- Work check-ins
- Emergency Housing changes
- Repealing the Smokefree Generation law
- Regulatory Standards Bill (RSB)
I am sure I may have missed a few; however, going through this list, I can safely say there wouldn’t be too many social workers who agree with these changes. They will, arguably, make the lives of our clients and those who depend on the state for help that much harder. This Government has undone more than it created, and all of these changes seemed to come in rapid fire.
Now what I am about to say isn’t in any way meant to dilute or diminish the magnitude of any on the list however, through all the ‘flooding of zone’ that has been happening in the last 12 months or so, this Coalition Government has been silently sliding a major piece of policy into position. One that will have major ramifications for generations to come and will bring a rather large slice of American apple pie into our country. What is it you say?
It’s called Regulatory Takings, and it is hidden among the proposed changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA), which is an Act so large that it can be used to ‘flood the zone’ itself with acronyms, weasel words, and blinding double speak.
In short, “Regulatory takings is the idea that when a government regulation limits what someone can do with their property — even without seizing it outright — the property owner should be compensated. For example, if a council restricts development to protect a wetland or manage climate risk, a landowner could argue that their property’s value has been diminished, and they deserve a payout”.
This is very much like the ISDS process in trade deals that had thousands of us protesting on the streets all those years ago when the TPPA (now called the CPTPP) was coming towards us. The very same trade deal that the ANZASW opposed back in 2016.
However, while part of Regulatory Takings is about individual property rights, this is more about Corporate property rights over the rights of society, the natural world, the environment, and the common good. Simply having a mechanism by which a corporation can litigate against something/someone that would limit its expansion through good and proper regulation would send a clear chilling message to those wanting to protect the greater good.
While this topic is as dry as a mouth full of sawdust, the changes this new RMA has hidden inside it will fundamentally change who benefits from Aotearoa’s planning and regulation laws.
In the context of our group’s fight for safe drinking water (arguably something we should all be fighting for), this could lead to local, regional, and central Governments being chilled into keeping quiet when faced with protecting the environment and society versus corporate expansion.
And if we don’t think drinking water and a clean natural environment should be something social workers need to be fighting for, think again.
While society is flooded with 24-hour information, I would like to think that a sector that makes a living from thinking critically can pick out the important bits and fight for what is right.
Submissions on the Regulatory Standard Bill close at 1pm on 23rd June 2025.