Source: ACT Party
The Haps
At least one left wing chat room went ballistic about last week’s Free Press. The idea that men are oppressed seemed to trigger them so badly they missed the central point: The world is not made up of groups oppressing each other, but individuals trying to make the most of their time on earth.
The most important thing the Government will do
New Zealand in a nutshell is the best land in the world that you can’t build a home (or a quarry, or a road, or a water treatment plant, or a power station) on. Nearly every major problem we face begins with the difficulty in getting consent to build things.
Why are young people disillusioned and leaving the country? Why are poor households spending over half their income on housing? Why is the Government spending billions on rental subsidies? Why are a worrying number of people facing retirement still paying rent? Why is the economy infamously imbalanced towards housing? It’s too hard to build houses and the services that connect them together.
In this area ACT’s, and especially Simon Court’s, hard work in opposition is paying off for the whole country. Late last year Cabinet signed off on the engine room work Simon has been doing with RMA reform Minister Chris Bishop.
The work started in 2022 with ACT’s paper Building New Zealand and Conserving Nature. The paper contains the details that Cabinet signed off as shaping the Government’s new Resource Management laws.
It begins, “ACT proposes a shift in principle on Resource Management. At present the underlying principle is the 1980s paradigm of ‘sustainable development.’ This has never been defined in a way that is practical to implement… Instead, the principle of resource management should be to preserve the enjoyment of property… On a property rights basis, they can do anything that does not harm others’ enjoyment of property. It dramatically reduces the range of people who have an interest in someone else’s use of their own property.”
Therein lies the heart of the Government’s reforms, based on ACT’s Coalition commitment to “replace the Resource Management Act 1991 with new resource management laws premised on the enjoyment of property rights as a guiding principle.”
It says laws plural and there will be two laws under the Government’s reforms. One to guide urban development and planning, and another to guide environmental protection. As ACT has long said, it’s never made sense that the same law protecting Fiordland governs whether a horse paddock in Henderson can have two homes built on it.
Building and Conserving Nature carries on to set out other principles; how water should be taken, how discharges to land and water should be managed within environmental limits, and how nationwide codes would replace every council reinventing every wheel for basic activities. These ideas also shine through in the Government’s plans, and they will make an enormous difference to the future of this country.
Reforms like this make us proud to support ACT. The basic ideas of less regulation and more respect for private property rights are core party philosophy. They’re also becoming real with the Government’s reforms. Most importantly they are the solution to our country’s deepest problems.
When the next generation can see their pathway to living in a property-owning democracy, the whole society changes. People who are physically invested in the community, with the security to build a life and start a family if they choose, are different types of citizens.
Making it easier to build a water treatment plant, a road, a subdivision, and a home at the end of it may be the most important change this country can make, and it’s ACT what did that.
