Source: ACT Party
The Haps
ACT MP Todd Stephenson has picked up the End of Life Choice baton. David Seymour’s original bill did not restrict access to people terminal within six months, but he would have had no bill without adding the restriction. That political compromise has meant some of the people who suffer most – especially those with long, slow, degenerative diseases like Motor Neurone Disease – are denied choice and control. Stephenson explains how his new bill would put this compromise right on Q&A, here.
Three cheers for Simon Court
The most important thing this Government does in three years may be what’s happening quietly in the background of resource management reform. Last week Court announced, beside Chris Bishop, that the Government is replacing the RMA with two laws based on property rights.
If you’re a long-term Free Press reader, all of this will sound very familiar. The difference is that this time it is happening. It is now official Government policy with a series of dates by when legislation will be drafted, introduced to Parliament, and passed into law.
At the heart of New Zealand’s problem is that it’s a beautiful, isolated piece of land. It has a mild climate that beats Canada’s skin-freezing cold or Australia’s blood-boiling heat any day. It’s filled with resources that make it one of the richest per-capita in the world. Climate change will probably actually make New Zealand even better off compared with the rest of the world.
When a group of people have such a wonderful inheritance, they have two choices. Either make the most of it, or pull up the drawbridge.
Making the most of it would mean making it easy for each generation to build a home. That would mean making it easy to build the infrastructure that connects homes together, forming towns and cities. It should be easy to farm the land, and extract resources that make human life long and happy (just not while they’re left in the ground).
This seems like an obvious choice, but enter human nature. For the last few decades, the net result has been pulling up the drawbridge. You can’t do bloody anything, home building has only once reached the levels of the 1970s, when there were only three million people. There are probably more Kiwis working in Australian mines than New Zealand ones.
The result is a generation who feel hopeless. Born into the best place on the planet where it’s needlessly hard to get a place of your own. Why not vote for a politician who promises to tax the rich? Better still, cut out the middle man, join a gang, and do it yourself. Then there’s those who leave.
That is the result of the RMA. The simple diagnosis is that it’s a bureaucratic nightmare, but it’s more than that. It is the legislative expression of a people’s desire to enjoy what they have and bugger anyone else.
The central concept in the RMA is sustainable development, to provide for current generations without taking from future ones. Because nobody knows what future generations want, or what technology they’ll have to achieve it, the best way to achieve this is to do as little as possible, which is pretty much what’s happened.
Too many people have too many grounds to object to too many activities meaning nothing gets done. It’s not unusual for it to take longer to get permission to do something than to actually do it. The range of criteria Councils must consider under the RMA is everything from climate change (but you already pay under the ETS for whatever you do) to the ‘intrinsic values of ecosystems’ (how can you know them if they’re intrinsic)?
David Parker’s RMA reforms, replacing it with three acts, introduced a new central concept ‘te oranga o te taiao.’ Nobody knows what that means in the context of resource management decisions. By the time the Courts figured it out, Indonesia would have overtaken us in GDP per capita.
So that’s gone and the Resource Management Act is being replaced with a law whose central concept is the enjoyment of private property. The starting point is that you have a right to use and develop your own property. The second result is that you have a right to object only if your own property is affected.
The result is a switch back to the pioneering vision of New Zealand. A nation of people who can instead of a nation of people who are not allowed.
The law will also make many processes standard. If you have a water treatment plant that spits out water with less than x parts per million of E. Coli, congratulations. You’ve met the standard and can just build it.
The Government will now listen to an expert advisory group, people with real experience of development, as the law itself is developed for introduction to Parliament. It will be passed before the next election, and New Zealand will have taken a massive step forward to achieving its potential.
Much of this is owed to Simon Court, one of only two engineers in Parliament (David Seymour is the other one). Court has been working away since he entered Parliament, releasing ACT’s detailed RMA policy in 2022, and making it real in Government. A very good example of how ACT keeps the Government in place, and makes it better.
