The tool New Zealand already had and never touched
David Seymour’s pitch to the Canterbury Club on 16 July 2026 has a detail buried in it that reframes the whole announcement. The ACT leader wants ministers to grant time-limited suspensions of specific regulations so companies can test technologies such as autonomous vehicles, agricultural drones and AI in defined regions. He calls them innovation trials. The rest of the world calls them regulatory sandboxes.
The catch is that the legal mechanism already exists. ACT’s own statement confirmed that no government minister has yet taken up the opportunity to run a trial. So this is not a new power. It is a commitment to actually use one that has sat dormant. The barrier was never legislative. It was cultural.
The line that captures the problem
Seymour’s sharpest anecdote came from conversations with Uber about bringing driverless cars here. The company’s response, as 1News reported, was that they wouldn’t be trialling their technology, they would be trialling the New Zealand Government. Autonomous vehicle firms are, in Seymour’s words, burning through billions of dollars trying to find the right regulatory environment to test at scale, and New Zealand simply isn’t in the running.
That is the cost of lost regulatory credibility. When the process itself is the risk a company has to price in, it doesn’t matter how stable, English-speaking or contained your jurisdiction is. Firms go where the framework is predictable and the timeline is guaranteed.
The drone example makes the drag concrete
The clearest illustration is agricultural drones. In New Zealand, drones over 25kg require Part 102 certification that can cost up to $2,000 and take more than 12 months to obtain. In Australia, drones up to 150kg operate on farmland under simple licensing. This is not experimental kit. It is in daily commercial use across the Tasman.
And demand here is building fast. The number of large agricultural spray drones in the country doubled from 80 to 160 in the past year. Seymour’s own Ministry for Regulation flagged drones as an ideal trial candidate and proposed suspending weight limits on defined farmland while collecting data. The Civil Aviation Authority’s answer was to add it to a two-year work programme.
Seymour’s response was pointed: “Two years. For something we already know works, that our competitors already do, that our own officials agree poses manageable risks. That is exactly the gap this framework is designed to close.”
Why the regulator can just say wait
The drone stalemate is a symptom of a fragmented system. The May 2026 Ministry for Regulation report found that at least 267 organisations are involved in making, administering or delivering regulation in New Zealand, and that Parliament has enacted more than a million words of legislation on average for each of the past 10 years. Financial markets regulation alone is split across five agencies with no single body holding complete oversight.
In that environment, no one has to say no. An agency can simply defer, and a Ministry for Regulation recommendation carries no weight against a CAA work queue. A published, permanent pathway that any company anywhere can apply to, what Seymour calls “a front door for innovation, not a back door”, is the attempt to break that reflex.
The model is proven. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority pioneered the sandbox in 2016 and has accepted 191 firms since 2015. Singapore actively recruits companies into its programme. New Zealand’s Financial Markets Authority has piloted its own fintech version, but there is no whole-of-government framework.
The design is the whole game
The business case is genuinely strong, and the instinct is right. Business groups have consistently backed tighter, better regulation. Presenting to the Finance and Expenditure Select Committee in July 2025, BusinessNZ argued that sound law-making is needed to attract investment and achieve growth, while managing expectations that it was “not a silver bullet.”
But formalising a ministerial power to suspend regulations, even temporarily, raises real questions. Who bears liability if a trial goes wrong? Does the assessment process favour large, well-resourced firms over smaller domestic ones? A published pathway only helps if agencies like the CAA engage with it rather than routing around it. The fact that the mechanism has existed and never been used should be the warning: the fix is behavioural, and behaviour is harder to legislate than a form.
Seymour’s wider deregulation agenda is contested. The related Regulatory Standards Bill drew around 23,000 submissions in 2025, roughly 88 percent opposed. Innovation trials are a narrower, more targeted tool and less likely to attract that breadth of opposition. If ministers actually use the power now that it’s been dressed up as policy, New Zealand’s smallness becomes an asset. If they don’t, the next Uber will keep telling us we’re the experiment.
Sources
- ACT proposes ‘innovation trials’ to pause regulations on new tech (2026-07-16)
- Seymour pitches NZ as global testing ground for new technology (2026-07-16)
- Seymour calls for innovation trials to cut through red tape in Christchurch speech (2026-07-16)
- The state of New Zealand’s regulatory systems (2026-05)
- Sound law-making needed – BusinessNZ (2025-07-08)
- Information Release: Policy Approvals for Progressing a Regulatory Standards Bill (2025-05)