by Karen William, Federated Farmers Vice-President and RMA spokesperson
Federated Farmers is urging the Government to rethink its radical reform of the Resource Management Act (RMA).
In August Federated Farmers submitted to Parliament’s Environment Select Committee on the draft Natural and Built Environment Bill (oddly shortened to ‘NBA’).
Almost everyone agrees that all is not well with one of our most important pieces of legislation. It has been amended almost every year since it was enacted in 1991 with no fix ever seeming to do the trick.
The RMA has been a much-maligned handbrake on growth and development, it has imposed significant compliance costs on businesses and farms, it has been a big cost (and rates) driver for local government, and is criticised for failing to protect the environment. The only beneficiaries seem to be an ever-growing army of council staff and another growing army of planners, lawyers, and other experts.
Federated Farmers has for many years been at the sharp end of RMA processes and we’ve long called for meaningful reform of the legislation. The Government’s first principles review of the RMA, led by an eminent QC Tony Randerson, was a golden opportunity.
But before we replace the RMA, we need to make sure the new legislation will drive better outcomes and we should keep what isn’t broken.
From what we can see in the skeleton of the Bill available so far, things have the potential to be much worse. The draft Bill is heavily ideological with a strong centralising bias. There is the potential for communities to be robbed of their ability to have a say on matters that affect them, there will be more costs on the economy, and for all the rhetoric to the contrary the environment may be no better off.
Big problem
A big problem is not just with what we have seen to date but what is yet to come. We’ve only seen the bare bones of the proposed NBA and nothing of the other two pivotal Acts that are proposed to replace the RMA – the Strategic Planning Act and the Climate Change Adaption Act.
We are effectively running blind at the moment due to a lack of detail.
At this stage there is no guarantee at all that the NBA will generate more benefits than costs – and indeed there is a significant risk of the reverse.
Uncertainty about what the purpose statement in the draft NBA actually means will flow down and impact plan decisions, consent reviews and potentially the issuing of new consents.
We must not under-estimate the costs of delay and the risk of drawn-out litigation that could stem from that lack of clarity. Large chunks of the economy are underpinned by consents and related resource management processes.
Our submission
Federated Farmers’ submission on the draft NBA included suggested changes to Part 2 of the Bill (the purpose and related provisions) to turn it back to the tried and tested terminology and concepts contained in the RMA.
We want to ensure that 30 years of case law and jurisprudence is not lost. We don’t want to spend the next 30 years trying to work out what Part 2 of the NBA actually means.
We are also concerned that current RMA regulatory instruments (such as National Environment Standards (NESs) and National Policy Statements (NPSs)) may not survive intact under the proposed new Act – particularly if key parts of the RMA, to which they relate, have been substantially altered or no longer exist.
Uncertainty
The effects of frequent and ongoing changes to environmental legislation (we are now on the fourth iteration of the NPS Freshwater Management (NPS-FM)) are beginning to show with some regional councils considering abandoning proposed changes to their Regional Plans (that were already well advanced) as they are not compliant with the requirements of the current NPS. Submitters are struggling with how much effort to put into plans that are expected to be completed close to when they will need be to be revised in accordance with the latest NPS-FM.
On top of this is the uncertainty regarding the life of all District and Regional Plans if the RMA is replaced as planned. It’s proposed that district planning will be moved from district councils to regional planning committees, removing a key role for district councils and making such planning much less local.
We think any replacement legislation needs to keep local democracy, community stewardship and local identity. They belong at the heart of resource management.
While the Government has made it clear the RMA will be scrapped and replaced, it needs to slow down, rethink its approach, and give people time to consider a more fully fleshed out Bill.