Across New Zealand, many professional regulators are drifting beyond their core role of maintaining professional standards and competence.
Increasingly, political and cultural viewpoints are being incorporated into professional codes, training requirements, and disciplinary processes in ways that raise serious questions about freedom of conscience and professional neutrality.
Hobson’s Pledge is supporting a proposed Regulated Professions Neutrality Bill to restore the simple principle that professional bodies should regulate competence, ethics, and public safety, not lawful political belief.
We are calling on political parties across Parliament to support this common-sense reform.
Former MP and lawyer
Stephen Franks was censured and fined by a Law Society Standards Committee after sending a letter on behalf of a client group to health practitioners involved in prescribing puberty blockers.
The letter warned practitioners about potential future legal liability in light of overseas legal developments. Six complaints were made against Franks about this, but none came from the medical practitioners who actually received the letter.
The Standards Committee found that Franks had used legal processes for an “improper purpose”. Franks challenged the ruling, arguing that sending such correspondence on behalf of a client was a normal and lawful part of legal practice.
The Legal Complaints Review Officer ultimately overturned the disciplinary finding, stating: “A lawyer writing a letter on behalf of a lobbyist client expressing the client’s views on a policy issue and on potential future legal developments in the field and asserted legal risks associated with it is a lawful activity.
”The case has become a significant example in the debate over whether professional regulators are increasingly being drawn into policing lawful advocacy and politically contentious viewpoints, rather than focusing strictly on professional competence and misconduct.
Real Estate Agent
Janet Dickson faced the cancellation of her licence by the Real Estate Authority after refusing to complete a compulsory course that had nothing to do with selling houses. The course required agents to engage with and accept contested political ideas around the Treaty of Waitangi.
Dickson objected to aspects of the course content on grounds of conscience and relevance, arguing that the material was unrelated to her ability to practise real estate professionally or ethically.
Her case raised wider concerns about the growing scope of professional regulation, particularly where licensing bodies require adherence to ideological or cultural frameworks as a condition of remaining in a profession. Hobson’s Pledge supported Janet to take her case to court, believing no New Zealander should be forced into ideological indoctrination to earn a living. The court disagreed. An appeal would have taken years, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and still offered no guarantee of fixing the underlying problem. This Bill is the solution to the problem.
Debates about the Treaty of Waitangi and the role of race in public policy are among the most contested questions in modern New Zealand.
Debates about the Treaty of Waitangi and the role of race in public policy are among the most contested questions in modern New Zealand.
Reasonable people hold different views. Yet increasingly, professional regulators are treating one particular interpretation of these issues as if it were settled fact. Instead of remaining neutral, they are embedding ideological positions about the Treaty and race into licensing standards, codes of conduct, and competency requirements.
The result is that professionals can feel pressure to publicly affirm views they may not genuinely hold simply to avoid jeopardising their ability to work.
The solution is not to weaken professional standards. It is to restore neutrality to how those standards are set and enforced.
Our proposed legislation makes clear that regulators must remain impartial on political, cultural, and ideological matters unless they are genuinely necessary for competence or consumer protection. It draws a simple line between ensuring honesty, skill, and safety, and imposing worldviews.
Clear statutory limits would protect consumers while also protecting professionals from overreach. Other democracies have already recognised reminders like this are necessary. New Zealand should not be an outlier.
Neutrality in law is not radical. It is a return to basic principles of impartial regulation, equality before the law, and proper limits on power.
©Hobson’s Pledge 2026