Drawing a Line

Personal Beliefs Should be of no Interest to Professional Regulators

Professional regulatory bodies have very wide powers. Some argue that those powers, including mandatory training in areas not directly related to the profession in question, are too wide.

A Regulated Professions Neutrality Bill, which will shortly be released for discussion, addresses those issues.

This article discusses aspects of the proposed Bill. The proposed Bill may be found here.

Lady Deborah Chambers KC wrote an excellent and significant article in the Herald about the creep of professional regulation into ideological territory.

It focused on a recent case involving Wellington lawyer Stephen Franks which has thrown a spotlight on a deeper flaw in New Zealand’s legal regulatory system — one that arguably threatens the integrity of legal advocacy itself.

Franks sent letters to medical practitioners involved in gender-affirming healthcare, referencing the Cass Report and warning of potential legal exposure around puberty blocker treatments. None of the recipients complained.

Instead, six unrelated outsiders — including a nursing professor, a business academic, and a human rights advocate — filed formal complaints with the New Zealand Law Society.

A standards committee found him guilty of professional misconduct. He appealed, and the Legal Complaints Review Officer ultimately overturned the finding, concluding no professional duty had been breached. The whole process ran for over a year, consuming significant time, money, and stress — for a case that went nowhere.

The Franks episode is troubling in itself, but it is symptomatic of a much larger problem. Under the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act, virtually anyone can lodge a complaint against a lawyer, regardless of whether they have any connection to the matter.

The “sufficient personal interest” provision that is supposed to filter out unaffected complainants operates only as a discretionary afterthought, not a genuine gatekeeping mechanism.

The consequences are serious. Litigation opponents weaponise the process in relationship property and family disputes. Convicted offenders file complaints against prosecutors from prison as a form of collateral attack. In 2024, the Law Society received 1,231 complaints — only 28 reached the Disciplinary Tribunal. The overwhelming majority were meritless, yet each consumed legal resources, insurer involvement, and ultimately cost clients more.

The chilling effect on advocacy may be the most damaging outcome of all. When lawyers must weigh every robust letter against the possibility of a complaint from a complete stranger, they inevitably become more cautious — and it is their clients who pay the price.

New Zealand stands out internationally. In England, Canada, and the United States, tighter standing requirements make it far harder for ideologically motivated bystanders to trigger disciplinary proceedings against lawyers simply for doing their jobs.

The fix is straightforward in principle: complaints should require a meaningful connection to the conduct complained of. Clients, judges, employees within firms, and those directly harmed by a lawyer’s actions have obvious standing. Bystanders with a political objection to a lawyer’s arguments do not.

Until that gate is properly installed, the complaints system will remain — as this case vividly illustrates — a mechanism that anyone with a grievance and spare time can turn against lawyers who dare to advocate for unpopular causes.

Rather than address the complaints system itself there is another direction of travel and that is legislation to ensure that all professional bodies stay in their lane, confine their disciplinary function to the matters that matter and leave ideological issues behind.

What is required is legislation that would draw a firm line between what professional regulators are entitled to demand of their members and what should remain a matter of individual conscience and belief.

A proposed Regulated Professions Neutrality Bill, as it is called, is ambitious in scope and pointed in its targets. It takes inspiration from Alberta’s recently enacted “Peterson Law” and deserves careful examination.

The Problem It Is Trying to Solve

To understand the proposed Bill, it helps to understand the power that professional regulatory bodies hold in New Zealand.

Doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, architects, accountants, real estate agents, social workers, and a host of other practitioners must hold a licence or registration to work in their field.

The bodies that issue and oversee those licences — the Medical Council, the Law Society, the Teaching Council, and their equivalents — can discipline members, suspend them, or strip them of the right to practise altogether.

The traditional justification for granting such bodies this power is consumer protection: ensuring that people who rely on expert services are not harmed by incompetent or dishonest practitioners.

However, many regulatory bodies have drifted well beyond that original purpose. In recent years some bodies have required members to complete training on unconscious bias, cultural competency, and diversity, equity and inclusion where it is not shown as necessary to the profession — and have disciplined members for opinions expressed in their personal lives, even when those opinions had no bearing on their professional work. This is “ideological capture” - a process by which activist-minded people within a profession gain control of its governing body and use that control to impose a particular worldview on all members.

Whether or not one accepts that characterisation, the concern it reflects is a serious one. When holding a licence to practise becomes contingent not just on competence and honesty but on conformity to particular social and political views, the stakes of professional regulation change fundamentally. The Bill is an attempt to reset those stakes.

What the Bill Would Do

At its core, the Bill would impose strict new limits on what professional regulatory bodies can and cannot do. Its provisions fall into several broad categories.

Speech and expression

It is proposed that a professional body would be prohibited from sanctioning a member simply because of something they said or wrote on a contentious issue, whether on or off duty. Initial assessments are proposed so that a body cannot progress complaints about something expressed in a personal capacity — a social media post, a published article, a speech at a public meeting.

The exceptions are narrow but sensible: threatening violence, sexual misconduct involving clients or minors, disclosing confidential client information without consent, or conduct that directly calls the practitioner’s professional honesty or competence into question (such as a fraud conviction).

Absent those circumstances, a doctor who posts a controversial political opinion on their personal Facebook page could not, under this Bill, be brought before the Medical Council for it.

Conscientious objection

It is further proposed that there should be protection for a professional’s right to decline to perform a specific task that conflicts with their deeply held beliefs — a service that offends their religious or ethical convictions, for example.

The protection is not unconditional. The professional must notify the relevant parties as early as possible and take reasonable steps to ensure the client can obtain the service from someone else. Where those conditions are met, however, the regulatory body could not punish them for the refusal.

Compulsory training

This is perhaps the most substantive and contentious of the proposal.

Mandatory continuing education — the training that professionals must complete to maintain their registration — would, under the Bill, be required to be directly and demonstrably necessary for doing the job and protecting consumers. Nothing more.

Cultural competency, equity and inclusion, or Treaty of Waitangi training would be permissible only where it is genuinely necessary for consumer safety, not merely because it is considered good practice or socially beneficial.

There is a thoughtful carve-out for professions that require a university degree as a prerequisite. Where a degree programme includes courses touching on social or cultural topics, the professional body is not responsible for that content — provided it did not specifically direct the university to include it. The focus is on what regulators compel, not on what educators choose to teach.

Where a professional objects on grounds of conscience to specific mandatory training, the regulatory body must, where reasonably practicable, offer an alternative path to demonstrating the relevant competency.

If a professional takes that path, the regulator may require them to disclose to clients that they have not completed the standard training — but only if a client would reasonably regard that as a material fact.

Ideological neutrality

The proposal would impose a positive duty of political and ideological neutrality on regulatory bodies. They would be barred from making decisions premised on the view that a person’s worth is determined by their race, religion, gender, or other personal characteristics; that some groups are inherently biased or oppressive because of who they are; that preferential treatment is warranted to achieve diversity or equity outcomes; or that individuals bear responsibility for the historical conduct of others who share their background.

The neutrality obligation cuts in both directions: a regulatory body could no more act on ideas associated with reactionary or discriminatory politics than on those associated with progressive identity politics.

Legal recourse and cost consequences

The proposal provides professionals with a clear legal avenue to challenge regulatory decisions that breach its requirements. Significantly, if a court or appeal body finds in the professional’s favour, the regulatory body would be liable for their full legal costs — not a partial contribution but full indemnity costs.

The intent is to rebalance the practical power dynamic: at present, an individual professional who wishes to contest a decision by a well-resourced regulatory body faces considerable financial risk in doing so. The full costs provision is designed to make that challenge less daunting.

The Arguments For and Against

Supporters of the proposal would argue that professional bodies have systematically overstepped the mandate that justifies their existence. Using the threat of losing one’s licence to enforce conformity to particular social and political views is, on this view, a serious abuse of state-delegated power.

The proper purpose of professional regulation is consumer protection, and anything that cannot be justified by reference to that purpose has no business being imposed on practitioners.

Free and open debate within professions, including debate about contested social questions, is healthy and should be protected rather than suppressed.

Critics would push back on several fronts. Some of the training targetted, they would argue, genuinely serves a professional purpose. A doctor who understands the cultural context of a patient’s life may provide more effective care. A social worker who appreciates patterns of systemic disadvantage may be better equipped to help those they serve.

The line between “ideological” content and legitimately useful professional education is not always as clear as the Bill implies, and the task of drawing it in practice may fall to courts in ways that produce uneven and unpredictable results.

Others would make a more pointed observation: that while the Bill uses broad language to restrict mandatory training on “political, historical, social or cultural issues,” this will inevitably impact many contemporary professional development programs. They might argue that presenting the Bill as an exercise in ideological neutrality, while placing broad limitations on such training, is itself a politically motivated act, as it would effectively curtail professional development in areas some deem essential for modern practice.

Neutrality, on this view, is doing a great deal of rhetorical work. Whether that charge sticks will depend on how one reads the proposal’s intent and how its provisions operate in practice.

The Underlying Question

The proposal is, at its core, an attempt to answer a question that sounds simple but is not: what should professional regulation actually be for? The answer is clear — protecting consumers from incompetent or dishonest practitioners, and nothing beyond that.

Everything else, including training professionals to hold particular views about culture, identity, or society, is outside the scope of what a professional body has any legitimate authority to require.

Whether that framing is correct, and whether the proposal strikes the right balance between protecting professional autonomy and ensuring that regulation serves the public interest, are questions that deserve serious debate. The ideas it contains are worth engaging with, whatever conclusions one ultimately reaches.

If it proceeds through Parliament, it will force a long-overdue conversation about the proper limits of regulatory power in New Zealand.