Red tape being cut and allowing people to get on with their lives is the promise that Act party leader, David Seymour is making after his appointment to a specialty role to tackle regulation issues.

The new Minister for Regulation spoke to the Mike Hosking Breakfast today about his new portfolio and how he envisions using it to improve the lives and workforces of people around the country.

"I think a lot of what's holding New Zealand back in terms of productivity and getting the things we want is, we spend more of our time getting permission to do stuff and less time actually doing it," he told Hosking.

"We can change the way Government makes the rules so people can spend more time producing and less time complying, that will make us wealthier right across the board."

He explained the role would work via a post-regulatory analysis of the problem a regulatory initiative or law was trying to solve and weighing up the costs and benefits.

"The problem is that while successive Governments have paid lip service to that, they haven't done it very well," said Seymour.

"My job is to improve the quality of that and ensure that when laws are passed there's actually some idea of what cost-benefit is and so on."

Seymour said this looked like going through each sector - whether it was early childhood education, finance or farming and asking people in the workforce what regulation and red tape was "eating" them.

He said these issues would then be put together into a bill that would delete or change the regulation and be handed to the relevant minister.

"[I'd say] 'Look, we think all these things should go but it's your turn to bake the cake'," the Act leader said.

"It shifts the onus from making more laws every time there's a political problem, to actually having to justify incursions on people's properties, lives and freedom."

Seymour also commented on the assumption the National Party would kill his strongly pushed Treaty referendum.

"Actually, I think what is important is we start having the debate," he said.

"I believe it's about time we started debating democratically the principles of the Treaty because they are the lens through which we look back to 1840 and see what our founding document means today."

He believes once the debate begins, people might see "more come to light" and there might be a more welcome reception to the referendum than previously expected.

"We can do that and persuade National and NZ First to keep supporting it. I think it's well overdue to keep bringing democracy into our constitution settings regarding the Treaty."