Source: New Zealand Government
Good morning, everybody.
It’s great to see such a good cross-section of people from local government here today.
Against a backdrop of skyrocketing rates and massive cost of living pressures, a lot has been made recently of the need to go ‘back to basics’ and to ‘go for growth.’
These two things are critically linked.
Moving back to basics means consciously reducing government scope to the bare minimum and avoiding unnecessary intervention in people’s lives.
Reduced intervention frees people to do what they do best, and unlocks potential gains in efficiency, innovation, and productivity – all vital ingredients to deliver economic growth.
With this in mind, it’s heartening to join you on a day focused on showing communities value, and sharpening councils’ value stories.
However, I’m aware that the ability to sharpen value stories is inherently constrained when working with such a blunting instrument as the Resource Management Act.
The RMA’s downfall
There are endless examples of the absurdity that’s ensued under the RMA. Every week I am reading new articles, receiving new letters, and hearing new stories about the obstruction it has delivered.
I think of the letter I received from an Upper Hutt man who was blocked from cutting down a tree on his own property, assessed as dangerous by both his neighbour and an arborist – a generic pin oak not even listed on the plan.
I think of Tracy Fleet in Ashburton who, facing a similar situation, was slapped with a $7000 fine and a criminal conviction for pruning a tree so dangerous insurers were turning away, after a years-long, strung-out saga that was also swallowing up her ratepayer dollars in the process.
I think of Curt and Tricia Zant whose Hawke’s Bay farm was slapped with an ‘Outstanding Natural Feature’ classification in the council’s plan, restricting their ability to invest time, care, and capital into their land to drive the growth we’re seeking, without any compensation for their loss – I’ll come back to this.
I think of Datagrid whose land provides a great location to invest in a data centre and subsea cable network expansion. This would capitalise on the window of opportunity that is the spiking demand for data storage and faster connectivity in the age of artificial intelligence and the cloud. How ironic that this immense growth opportunity has been stalled by the imposition of a so-called ‘highly productive’ classification on their land, tying them up in consenting quicksand to protect a turnip crop.
I think of attempts to build a new McDonald’s, Starbucks, Burger King, or even a supermarket, where the RMA’s breadth has somehow gotten us to a point where vexatious objectors have been able to weaponise any number of irrelevant ‘effects’ to obstruct things they don’t like.
These are just some of the many examples up and down this country where people and organisations, big and small, are facing massive restrictions on the use of their property, too often for tenuous reasons enabled by the RMA that amount to little more than subjective ‘vibe’.
Whether it’s protecting dangerous trees, debating the vibe of landscapes and architecture, pontificating on how a property owner should best use their own land, or having to consider all manner of reckons – from the health profile of food to the competition ‘effects’ of a new business – the current council ‘value’ story is a hard one to tell.
The solution
The good news is that our commitment to replace the RMA with a system based on property rights will reduce the scope of resource management and liberate councils to focus on things that actually deliver value for ratepayers.
Last year, Cabinet agreed the principles and direction that would guide the replacement.
First things first: we must narrow the scope of the system to focus on material effects, and to promote the enjoyment of property rights. As is clear from the examples above, and countless others, the RMA tries to do too many things, and in doing so has become a vehicle to stifle growth.
When the RMA was developed, the key downfall was integrating management of development and the environment into one purpose, which has treated development as a privilege. We’re going to change that by replacing the RMA with two Acts with distinct purposes – one to manage environmental effects arising from activities and another to enable urban development and infrastructure.
Councils will have clarity on what environmental effects and domains need managing, what needs to be considered when setting limits appropriate to their regions, and the tools available to manage resources within those limits. These tools should include innovative methods for things like water allocation and discharges, so scarce resources go to where they’re needed most, and supply can respond to demand.
What is not negotiable, though, is that human needs will be met. Frustrating development to resist growth doesn’t abate the need for it, nor does it change the reality that human existence necessarily has effects on the environment. If development cannot occur within an environmental limit in one place, then it must occur in another. But development must, and will, occur.
Through codifying into standards established and accepted ways of undertaking activities, the new system will liberate councils from the regulatory anxiety which demands consents and treats applications for common activities like road construction as a potential extermination event. When we’ve done most things in most places before, there’s no reason to start from scratch each time.
Spatial planning will be a core feature, with several important roles. It will separate incompatible land uses, provide protection for infrastructure, and identify natural hazards. The separation of incompatible land uses will be a key mechanism for managing potential neighbourhood effects like noise, odour, and the likes.
A stricter effects-based system with a no duplication rule means stripping out regulation and consenting for anything that has no material effects on the natural environment or another property owner, is covered by and complies with another law or national standard, or is subject to a private agreement among all affected parties.
A stricter effects-based system also means limiting who gets a say on what others do with their property if they are not directly affected. Gone will be the days of every Tom, Dick, and Harry sticking their noses into other people’s business at the other end of the country.
All of this will go some way to respecting property rights.
However, for potential situations where management of genuine effects presents residual friction with property rights, we must ask ourselves through this process “who benefits from such a constraint?” and, therefore, “who should bear the cost?”
For example, coming back to the case of the Zants’ issues under the current system – should they be the ones to pay the price of someone else’s decision that the landscape their property sits on is ‘outstanding’ to look at? What incentives does this this create for making sound decisions about what is outstanding when it is costless to the decision maker?
Through all this change to unshackle people from the burdensome approach of up-front consenting, Cabinet has also recognised a corresponding need for a strong compliance monitoring and enforcement regime, ensuring accountability among system participants so this replacement system delivers for both development and the environment.
Conclusion
This is just a sample of some of the key elements to be determined as we shore up the design of the new system, and no doubt there will be interest across other areas – from the role of a planning tribunal type function, to the shift to one plan per region, and beyond.
With the Resource Management Expert Advisory Group now having taken Cabinet’s direction and developed a draft blueprint for RMA replacement, there will be more to share in due course.
One thing that is clear, though, is that engagement of key system participants is important.
Local government is a critical system participant, so I encourage you to take the opportunity to feed into this reform,
Because liberalising resource management is a critical step in helping councils sharpen their value stories and unlocking the innovation and economic growth we so desperately need.
