Minister responsible for RMA reform Chris Bishop. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Most people agree the Resource Management Act needs reform, but the government is doing more than just tinker with Labour's changes - they're throwing the whole thing out
"The RMA is broken, and everyone knows it."
"The RMA is akin to a gale-force head wind, battling any attempts to develop anything, anywhere."
"The RMA has enabled a cottage industry of lawyers and consultants, drafting thousands of pages of papers and reports, all designed to block new roads, new wind farms, new apartments in our central cities, and farming in rural New Zealand."
"It tangles progress in a web of process and absurd conditions."
The government is reforming the cursed and convoluted Resource Management Act, and those quotes from a Beehive news conference held by the Prime Minster Christopher Luxon, minister responsible for RMA reform Chris Bishop, and under-secretary Simon Court, explain why.
Court talks about "every Tom, Dick and Harry...objecting to things and weaponising the planning system to block progress."
But Labour also reformed the Act, replacing it with two different Acts.
National has repealed that legislation, fallen back on the old RMA, and is now amending it for a couple of quick fixes and then will repeal it (again) to (again) be replaced with two more pieces of legislation.
"So the RMA is a very rare piece of legislation that has actually been repealed twice," says the deputy political editor for the New Zealand Herald, Thomas Coughlan, who has followed the progress of reform for years.
He talks The Detail through the history of the Act which is integral to how New Zealand treats the environment and its resources.
"It's one of these pieces of legislation that emerged out of that great period of reform in the 1980s and early 1990s... when a bunch of politicians came in and really swept the decks of the statute books, and set the economic and regulatory settings that we're still living with today," he says.
"Basically all the resources that we use - you think about the land that your house sits on, the air that you breathe, the forest and the countryside, the land that our farms occupy - all of those are resources that we use to some extent, and we need laws to govern how those resources are used, and the effects that the use of those resources has on ourselves and other people.
"If I turn my house into a pizza restaurant for example, that's great for me, but the smoke from my pizza oven that's going all the time is not going to be great for my neighbours. And so we need laws to govern the effect my action has on me, the environment and other people."
The RMA was enacted in 1991 by a National government which was building on work done by Labour before it.
Before then there were a host of different statutes and regulations - more than 70 of them - that did the same job but in a very piecemeal way.
Think the Hawke's Bay Rivers Amendment Act, the Geothermal Energy Amendment Act, The Town and Country Planning Act.
"The RMA consolidated it all in once place," says Coughlan, "so that there would be national laws governing how our resources would be used, it was going to be very simple, it would be very easy, it would protect the environment... you'd have National Policy Statements which would be rigorous guidelines about what councils could and couldn't do.
"Fast forward 30 years and the RMA has grown in size through multiple amendments. Governments have not really issued as many National Policy Statements as they should have done, which means that governments have kind of vacated the field in terms of telling councils how to do resource management.
"That means that across the whole country you sort of have a repeat of what was the problem before... which is that you've got different rules in Bluff to Napier to Auckland to wherever."
That's the problem that these new moves are trying to solve.
There's always been rough bi-partisan agreement on resource management - because it's so important. However this time National says that while it will talk to the opposition about the changes, it's going to go ahead regardless. It also has no intention of including any Treaty of Waitangi clauses, but will honour existing settlements with iwi.
Bishop says the RMA is a disaster and is a direct cause of the housing crisis, and it's why it's impossible to build infrastructure in this country.
"It has been a millstone around the neck of the New Zealand economy for far too long," he says.
He says Labour's reforms were a disaster, replacing the RMA with longer legislation in a system that was designed to be simpler.
The government estimates its reforms will slash compliance costs by 45 percent, saving 14.8 billion dollars.
It plans to have the two new bills into the house by the end of the year, to select committee in 2026 and in place before the next election. The aim is to have the rules in place before councils have to start their new long term plans in 2027.
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