Duncan Garner: Your Job Should Not Require Political Obedience

A professional licence is not a loyalty oath. Yet somehow New Zealand allowed regulators to behave as if earning a living depended on agreeing with their politics.

That is why ACT’s proposed law matters. It would stop professional bodies from forcing workers to affirm politically contested positions or punishing them for lawful opinions expressed outside the workplace. Frankly, it is embarrassing that legislation is required to restore something as basic as freedom of thought.

David Seymour puts the principle plainly: “You should not be forced to affirm politically contested positions.” Correct. Not because every controversial opinion is intelligent, decent or worthy of applause. Some are idiotic. But the answer to an idiotic opinion is argument, not professional exile.

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The real estate case exposed how badly the system had lost perspective. An experienced agent with a clean record faced career-ending consequences because she refused compulsory cultural training linked to the Treaty. Not because she defrauded a client. Not because she lied about a property. Not because she was incompetent. She would not submit to a course the regulator had decided was necessary.

Selling a house is already full of serious responsibilities. Agents should understand contracts, disclosure, council records, building problems, zoning, flooding, insurance and the legal obligations involved in shifting an asset worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those are matters that can financially ruin a family. Regulators should be obsessed with competence in those areas.

Instead, they wandered into political education.

That does not make Treaty history unimportant. It does not make Māori language or culture irrelevant to New Zealand. It means a regulator must show a direct, practical connection between compulsory training and the safe performance of the job. Otherwise it is using a person’s livelihood as leverage to enforce a worldview.

Seymour says people want to become doctors to heal patients, “not [to be] recruited to someone else’s ideological crusade”. That sentence reaches well beyond medicine. Nurses should nurse. Teachers should teach. Dentists should fix teeth. Real estate agents should sell property honestly and competently. Their professional bodies should deal with harm, fraud, negligence and safety, not roam around checking whether members have the approved political settings.

This regulatory mission creep happened because almost nobody inside these organisations was prepared to challenge it. A small group wrote the rules, everyone else nodded, and soon ideological compliance was dressed up as professional development. Those who objected were portrayed as difficult, unsafe or culturally deficient. It was groupthink with a certificate at the end.

The same cowardice infected corporate New Zealand. Executives became terrified of criticism, so they forced staff through programmes designed less to improve performance than to display virtue. Employees learned to sit quietly, repeat the approved language and get back to work. That is not inclusion. It is workplace theatre.

There must still be limits. A doctor publicly spreading dangerous medical falsehoods may create legitimate questions about professional fitness. A teacher harassing students cannot hide behind free speech. Conduct that damages clients, patients or public safety must remain punishable.

But the connection must be real, provable and relevant. Regulators cannot simply declare every fashionable political belief a professional standard. As Seymour said, “people’s political freedom comes first”.

That should never have become controversial. New Zealanders are entitled to hold lawful opinions, decline ideological instruction and still earn a living. A regulator’s job is to protect the public from professional misconduct, not protect its ideology from public disagreement.

Judge people on how they do their jobs. Keep the thought police out of it.