The Plan To De‑Politicise NZ’s Regulators
Wellington lawyer Stephen Franks has moved from criticising professional regulators to offering them the legislative equivalent of child‑proof scissors.
Working with the Free Speech Union, Franks has drafted a “Regulated Professions Neutrality Bill”, an instrument aimed at stopping law societies, medical colleges and others from disciplining members for lawful, off‑duty political or moral views that do not touch competence.
The concept is simple, and as a result will no doubt horrify the modern regulator.
Professional bodies would be required to adhere to their traditional remit of competence, ethics and fitness to practise while also being told in plain language to keep their hands off members’ views on the culture war of the week unless there is a clear, demonstrable impact on the work they do for clients or patients.
In other words, you could still be struck off for incompetence or dishonesty, but not for saying the wrong thing in a letter, a tweet or a submission, provided it is lawful and your day job remains professional.
What the Bill is trying to stop
The Free Speech Union’s campaign material sets out the charge sheet: professional regulators that once fussed over trust accounts and CPD hours now issue sweeping statements on everything from climate politics to gender ideology, and sometimes follow up with disciplinary interest in members who dissent.
Franks’ draft would make that kind of mission creep much harder by codifying political and ideological neutrality as a duty, rather than leaving it to the fluctuating sensibilities of committees. Effectively it seeks to answer the question of whether your regulator a standards‑setter or a speech police?
The Franks move is a demand that statutory bodies stop acting like campaigning NGOs with compulsory membership fees and coercive powers.
Under the proposed Franks framework, a regulator could still warn the profession about issues genuinely tied to practice, for instance due to confidentiality, fraud, or gross incompetence, but it could not treat a lawyer’s or doctor’s private, lawful opinion as “misconduct” simply because it offends current orthodoxy.
The core fight is over that elastic phrase “bringing the profession into disrepute”. Franks wants Parliament to stop it being stretched to cover unpopular ideas rather than actual misconduct.
The Franks backstory – from “Dimwits” to a Draft bill
Franks and his firm, Franks Ogilvie, which he co-founded in 2009, recently spent 15 months in the Law Society’s disciplinary labyrinth over a three‑page client‑instruction letter sent to around 20 doctors about the legal risks of puberty blockers and gender‑affirming care for young people.
Six complaints duly arrived at the Society, but not one from the doctors who actually received the letter, including a couple from colleagues who apparently believe robust advocacy is only acceptable when it flatters their own convictions.
A Standards Committee majority found that Franks had failed to use “legal processes” for a proper purpose, essentially because his letter used firm letterhead and was calculated to “lend weight” to a client’s views.
To which the Legal Complaints Review Officer, Fraser Goldsmith, responded with the weary obviousness of a man explaining to a committee that water is wet: the very point of a lawyer’s letter is to lend weight to a client’s concerns, and doing so lawfully “cannot conceivably be improper in principle”.
Goldsmith quashed the censure and fine; Franks, now vindicated, returned the favour by describing some of those pursuing him as “dimwits” and noting, with lawyerly gallantry, that they were thankfully “not all idiots”.
That saga is the case study behind his neutrality push. If a senior commercial lawyer can be dragged through the system for writing a client letter on a contested issue, lesser‑known practitioners can read the room and keep their heads down.
Why This Matters For Franks
He is principal of Wellington public and commercial law firm Franks Ogilvie, which he founded in 2009 after returning from six years in Parliament and a subsequent stint as a consultant at Chapman Tripp, where he had earlier been a partner and chair of the national board.
Before and after politics, he built a reputation in company and securities law, serving on the Securities Commission, the council of the Institute of Directors, and the NZ Stock Exchange Market Surveillance Panel, and advising on structural reforms including the Electricity Industry Reform Act and the creation of Fonterra.
The current move is a serious attempt by one of the profession’s more battle‑scarred veterans to write into law what many assumed was baked into the idea of a liberal, self‑governing profession.
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