Administrative Burden: 267 systems
The Plumbing Made Visible
E hoa mā,
The Ministry for Regulation has published its first comprehensive map of the regulatory landscape. It is called The State of New Zealand’s Regulatory Systems: Revealing the Structure and Scale of Regulation, and it is, in its quiet way, a significant document. Not because it tells practitioners anything they did not already suspect, but because it assembles, for the first time, the system-level evidence that confirms our suspicions.
I have been writing in this administrative burden series about the costs the state imposes on the people it is meant to serve, drawing on Herd and Moynihan’s framework of learning, compliance, and psychological costs. I also wrote, in the Voices from the Centre series, about the Ministry for Regulation itself and about the careful institutional work the senior leaders are doing to build its legitimacy, both because of and beyond the political moment that created it. This report sits at the intersection of both pieces of writing.
A voice from the centre, finding its register
In the Voices from the Centre post, I observed that the Ministry for Regulation was working to build a social licence that transcends its political establishment. This report is evidence of that effort. It is sober, careful, methodologically transparent, and deliberately non-evaluative. It maps rather than judges. It describes rather than prescribes. One can see the institutional logic: a new Ministry, still earning credibility, cannot arrive with a list of failures attributed to named agencies. But it can put a mirror up and say, “Look at this. This is the system people are being asked to navigate.”
That restraint is understandable. Within those constraints, the report itself does genuinely useful work. The finding that we have 267 systems carrying regulatory responsibilities, distributed across departments, Crown entities, statutory bodies, local government, and incorporated societies, is the kind of baseline data that should have existed decades ago. Its three-dimensional analysis of complexity, examining legislative growth, structural distribution, and lifecycle fragmentation, provides a framework for understanding how the system produces its outcomes. The observation that primary legislation has grown substantially in word count while remaining stable in number since 2008 confirms what the Productivity Commission flagged in 2014: we embed ever-greater prescriptive detail in primary legislation rather than delegating to more adaptable and context-dependent instruments. Equally valuable are the data on shared ownership, the prevalence of informal coordination, and the uneven distribution of funding and workforce capacity across the system. The team should be proud of the work.
What does this mean for the administrative burden framework?
This is where the report becomes most useful for the work I have been doing in this series.
Herd and Moynihan gave us three categories of burden: learning costs, compliance costs, and psychological costs. I have been arguing for some time that we need a fourth: the structural cost of navigating systems that are themselves in constant motion. The cost of restructures. The cost of institutional reconfiguration. The cost of having to learn, again, which organisation does what, after the machinery of government has been rearranged.
The Ministry’s report provides the clearest evidence yet for why that fourth category matters.
Consider what 267 regulatory systems with shared, often implicit, ownership mean for learning costs. The citizen must discover which organisations are relevant, understand the relationships between them, and reconcile potentially inconsistent requirements. The report itself notes that organisations dealing with a single issue can have different requirements and give different advice. That is a precise description of a learning cost embedded in institutional design.
Consider what growing legislative detail means for compliance costs. Where regulatory specifics are embedded in primary legislation rather than delegated to more adaptable instruments, the cost of maintaining compliance rises with every parliamentary session. The report’s finding that newer legislation tends to embed more rules directly in primary legislation is a finding about the systematic transfer of adaptation costs from the state to the regulated.
Consider what a system that responds to failure by adding more regulation means in terms of psychological costs. The cumulative effect of encountering a system that, in the report’s own words, becomes more complex over time without becoming more effective is demoralising in ways that structural analysis alone cannot capture.
And consider what constant restructuring means for all three. MCERT inherits responsibility for more than 130 principal Acts from multiple predecessor agencies. Every such reconfiguration resets the learning costs for citizens, businesses, and frontline workers, who must explain the new arrangements to the people in front of them.
The report’s own four priorities, understand, strengthen, reduce cumulative complexity, and reform, map neatly onto the burden framework. But without attention to the distributional question of who bears these costs, those priorities remain incomplete.
What the map does not yet show
This report raises one further question, even if it does not yet answer it: who bears the burden of this regulatory complexity?
That question matters generally, but it matters particularly in relation to Te Tiriti. Regulatory systems do not sit outside the Crown’s constitutional obligations. They are one of the places where those obligations either become real or quietly fall away.
The report does not engage with Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi obligations, settlement obligations, or the growing body of Waitangi Tribunal findings on regulatory failure.
I do not read that as a failure of care by the team that produced it. The report is doing the job it appears to have been asked to do: mapping the visible architecture of the regulatory system. The problem is that the constitutional architecture is also part of that system.
For me, this is the next layer of the work. If the Ministry for Regulation is to develop into a credible steward of the regulatory system, it will at some point need to help the Crown become more specific about how Tiriti obligations, Treaty clauses, and Treaty-informed public policy are translated into rules, guidance, regulatory capability, monitoring, and everyday judgement. Silence is not a credible long-term response, but neither are the performative abstractions we have seen to date. What is needed is practical specificity.
I am not naive about the institutional risk this would carry. But the report has already done something important: it has produced a map viewed from above. That is a discipline worth continuing. The next task is to ask what the map does not yet show.
Ngā mihi nui to the team who pulled it together.
Ps: Minor edits to clarify that the 267 refers to systems, not organisations or entities. I had used “organisations” as shorthand, but I can see that may read as discrete entities, which is not what I intended.