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Insights 23: 27 June 2025
NZ Herald: Dr Eric Crampton on prediction markets and Iran's nuclear future
 
Newsroom: Nick Clark on prioritising value in infrastructure decisions
 
Dr Oliver Hartwich and Dr Darwyyn Deyo discuss occupational licensing
For more help and less noise
Dr Eric Crampton | Chief Economist | eric.crampton@nzinitiative.org.nz
Parliament is supreme but it is not infallible.  

Governments often propose policies that are wrong in principle. And even when policy is right in principle, it is easy to make mistakes when drafting legislation.  

Select Committees are where legislators file off the rough edges. Ideally, they will have already consulted with officials and with those affected by the policy earlier in the process.  

But legislative drafting is tricky, even if everyone involved has the best of intentions, and even if no one has been under time pressure. Policy development does not always meet those ideal conditions. 

Policy in general, and specific drafting details, can also have unanticipated consequences. Some aspects are only noticed when the legislation is scrutinised by a broader affected community. 

That process helps Parliament avoid critical, costly errors. Unfortunately, the process has become far noisier.  

The shift to online submissions has enabled much broader participation, which can be to the good. But it has also enabled another kind of shift.  

Interest groups on all sides of political divides encourage supporters to submit on legislation.  

Those groups’ concerns about legislation are mostly genuine. But they may be tempted to use the opportunity to build up their email lists, which are crucial for fundraising. This can lead them to use language that is often stronger and more inflammatory than the legislation at issue warrants. 

There is no civic duty to provide submissions to select committees. But surely submissions should be well-considered.  

Relying on columnists’ views, rather than reading the text of short bills, can be risky. You may have heard claims that the Regulatory Standards Bill enables companies to sue the government if regulation imposes costs. But Subpart 5 would make such suits difficult. It says the Act creates no rights or obligations enforceable in a court of law.  

In the second column in this week’s newsletter, Bryce Wilkinson discusses how Select Committees might respond when faced with tens of thousands of submissions on single pieces of legislation. Assistance from AI might become necessary in triaging submissions and gleaning common themes.  

Select Committee processes matter because legislators and officials are not infallible. Parliament needs help in getting legislation right. 

Thoughtful submissions can point out important details that everyone else has missed. Those submissions, whether in support or opposition, risk being lost in the noise. Legislation will be worse for it. 
Two suggestions for handling a deluge of submissions
Dr Bryce Wilkinson | Senior Fellow | bryce.wilkinson@nzinitiative.org.nz
How should a select committee respond to a deluge of submissions? Does it matter if many submissions are part of a campaign playing on whipped up fears? 

Such questions now confront our select committees. A process-oriented Bill before Parliament has apparently attracted over 133,000 whipped up submissions.  

The Regulatory Standards Bill obliges Ministers to provide Parliament with specified important information when asking Parliament to pass laws and regulations. Parliament can do what it pleases with this information. It would be as free as now to pass, amend or reject any Bill, as it sees fit.  

From this perspective, the Bill is an administrative transparency measure. 

Not so for those opposing it. Hyperbole abounds. To Marama Davidson, Green Party co-leader, the Bill "seeks to destroy the very foundation of who we are". For Bryan Bruce, producer of film documentaries, it is "one of the gravest threats to our democratic life to ever come before our parliament". Last week, Bruce urged readers to "deluge" the select committee with more submissions. 

In my view, submitters' opinions should not be discounted because of misinformation or because they were part of a campaign. Individual dignity should be respected.  
Just as importantly, an orchestrated deluge of one-sided submissions does not measure the balance of public opinion. For that, ask a professional pollster to do a random survey.  

A focus on crude head counts of opinion invites the submission process to become an arms race charade for campaign organisers.  

A prime role of a select committee is to report back to the House on what changes to a Bill it recommends. Its reasons need to focus on what is likely to be best for New Zealanders overall. The House represents all New Zealanders.  

Two things follow. First, select committees should focus on identifying the reasons submitters are giving for their opinions. To do that properly they have to use AI when they have a deluge of submissions. Reporting on the thrust of the reasons needs to focus on tabulations, not the overall head count of opinions. 

Second, select committees must assess the quality of those reasons from an overall public policy perspective. They should tap into relevant expertise.  

In short, select committees should treat submissions respectfully, but focus on the quality of the arguments about each contended aspect of a Bill.  Rational deliberation needs to prevail over crude head counts. 
The Johnston test for human intelligence
Dr Michael Johnston | Senior Fellow | michael.johnston@nzinitiative.org.nz
Philosophers love to dream up strange scenarios to get us thinking. They call these scenarios ‘thought experiments.’  

In 1980, philosopher John Searle published his ‘Chinese room’ thought experiment. Searle asked his readers to imagine someone who understands no Chinese sitting alone in a room with a very large book.  

The book contains instructions for manipulating Chinese symbols, to produce a plausible response to any statement or question written in Chinese.  

A Chinese speaker passes a written message into the room. The person in the room follows the instructions in the book to produce a reply, which they pass back. The Chinese speaker feels understood, even though the person inside the room understood neither the message nor the reply.  

The ‘Chinese room’ was a response to another famous thought experiment, formulated by Alan Turing, the father of digital computing. Under the ‘Turing test’ for machine intelligence, a machine is intelligent if it can converse with a human and convince them it is also human.  

Clearly, modern AI passes the Turing test with flying colours. But, according to Searle, the Turing test is flawed. Just like the person sitting in the Chinese room, AI is simply manipulating symbols without understanding. 

Turing wanted to get people thinking about machine intelligence. But I believe we urgently need to think about human intelligence. More specifically, we need a survival strategy for human intelligence in the age of AI. 

Early this year, the Higher Education Policy Institute in the UK published a survey about university students’ use of AI. About 90% reported using AI for their assessments. Most said they just use AI to help them understand concepts. Let’s be real, though. They are using AI to write their essays for them.  

There is little doubt that many students are passing courses without even trying to learn anything. Meanwhile, academics are increasingly using AI to create courses and grade assessments.  

Soon, humans will be redundant in the educational process. AI will create the courses, set the assessments, complete the assessment tasks, and grade them as well. Meanwhile, human beings will get more and more stupid. 

It will be like a whole lot of Chinese rooms talking to one another. Symbols will be passed from one AI to another, with no human understanding involved.  

In order to think, we need to know things. The real test for human intelligence will be whether we realise that in time. 
 
On The Record
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