Source: New Zealand Government
It’s great to be here today on what has been a momentous week for resource management reform.
As you’ve heard, Minister Bishop and I have been working hard to reset resource management in New Zealand.
Today I want to talk to you about the broader step change and what that is going to mean.
Among the many problems the RMA has caused is a playing field of skewed incentives for decision makers that has led to a culture of risk aversion and restriction.
As policy makers, we must expect people to follow the incentives they face. That is rational.
This is why it is important our reforms get the incentives right, to minimise distortion and incentivise optimal outcomes.
There are several elements of the reform that are particularly important in achieving this; in transforming this culture of planners first saying “no, but…” to one of “yes, and…” We must do away this culture of regulatory anxiety.
Regulatory anxiety
Good decisions rest on benefits outweighing costs, and on decision-makers facing the right incentives to adequately assess these costs and benefits in full.
Yet, planners working under the RMA are trapped in an asymmetric system.
The risks of saying yes—public backlash, political fallout, legal challenge and cost—are much more direct and salient to those making the decisions.
The costs of excessive caution—housing shortages, infrastructure deficits, wasted economic opportunity, and infringements on people’s property rights—not so much.
Many of these costs are spread across society and felt over decades, some just shovelled onto private property owners to cop. This system rewards planners for avoiding risk, not for enabling growth, and it enables the undermining of property rights in the process.
The result? A culture of “no” and a bias toward excessive caution; caution that ties us down and squanders the great opportunity we have to cement our spot as the best country on the planet.
We’re making several moves to drive change.
Fixing the problem
Descoping
I have been beating the drum about the RMA’s absurdly broad scope for a while now, and we’ve talked about descoping as principle number one of the reform, so I will spare you the further noise beyond saying this: descoping the ‘effects’ the system manages will play a core role in liberating planners from the regulatory anxiety with respect to so many things currently managed.
There will simply be less to do, and less to worry about.
The right to plan
The reforms will reinforce that districts and cities have the right to plan. Your city, your district, will have democratic accountability for choosing where to grow from standardised zones set at a national level, providing a high level of regulatory assurance to planners.
By closing the door to anyone who doesn’t like their specific height to boundary ratio to agitate for some bespoke zoning rules, this will necessarily ease pressure facing planners who currently must defend these things.
Communities will still get to have their say at the planning phase—and, in fact, they will be incentivised to do so—but we do intend for the ability for appeals to be greatly reduced which will go a long way toward reducing regulatory anxiety. This is an area we will firm up over the coming months.
National standards for common activities
Similarly, national standards for common activities will reduce anxiety that planners and decision makers currently have when it comes to forming up defensible consent conditions for what are relatively common and necessary activities.
Under the current system, decision makers must assess a wide range of potential effects, which often drives disproportionality between the consent conditions and the effect they are trying to manage, for the sake of appeasing noisy NIMBYs who don’t like things like quarrying, and who may be motivated to appeal otherwise reasonable decisions.
This often leads to a “ratcheting up” effect on consent conditions in an attempt by both applicants and decision makers to ward off pesky appeals.
Codifying practice for common activities, like earthworks and working in a water course, into regular standards will liberate the anxiety planners face to set ever more stringent conditions and give development a mandate to certainly and sensibly occur, from Cape Reinga to Bluff.
Environment
The current system presumes that developers and infrastructure must avoid sensitive environments and that only by a torturous and often litigious process can an outcome which benefits the environment overall be arrived at.
Instead of spending weeks and months and years and tens of millions of dollars arguing with any Tom, Dick or Harry in various hearings, wouldn’t it be better that experts direct their energy into win-wins? Biodiversity offsetting springs to mind as a particular area of opportunity to help deliver both better development and environmental results.
Offsetting and compensation should be a starting point for conversations beginning with “yes, and”, because for someone like me who thinks an ideal date is an eco-adventure to see creatures like lizards, bats, and Freddie the frog, that could equally be a constructed wetland at an active or rehabilitated mine site, as much as it could be to Zealandia.
Planning Tribunal
While these anxiety-reducing steps we’re taking will go some way to restoring balance and proportionality in decisions, there is a need for additional tension in the system to offset the distortion towards regulatory overreach and too much “no” in planning and decision-making.
This is a key focus of the Planning Tribunal.
By providing an accountability mechanism against scope creep and unjustified regulation, the Planning Tribunal will provide the tension in the system necessary to ensure the system is delivering as intended.
No longer will it be the easy way out to default into decision making that appeases salient interests and pressures at the expense of growth and progress.
Compensation for takings
Further tension will be introduced through compensation for regulatory takings to ensure decision makers are confronted with the costs of decisions to infringe on property rights.
Morally, it is simply not fair to force people to privately cop the cost of decisions supposedly made in the public interest—if the public has an interest, the public should pay.
Compensation for regulatory takings is akin to a congestion charge on regulation.
Without a price on congestion, there is too much traffic. Without a price on protecting trees, or ‘outstanding’ or ‘highly productive’ land, there is a risk of too much regulation on people who want nothing to do with it.
We pay people for their losses from compulsory acquisition under the Public Works Act, and there’s no reason the same principle should not apply for partial takings for the public good under resource management legislation.
Moral case aside, this will lead to more careful consideration with respect to decisions that would restrict property rights, and ensure they occur only where there is a genuine net public good.
Conclusion
We are clear on the problems we intend to solve through the new planning system for people and the environment.
We are clear this requires a culture change.
We are clear that this culture change rests on a reset of the incentives for decision makers.
This requires a fundamental shift in the values and behaviours of the planning workforce which must align with our nation’s ambitions for the new system.
A culture change means planners and decision makers share the ambition of property owners to maximise enjoyment of their property, of developers to deliver affordable homes, and of the infrastructure guardians to provide efficient and safe infrastructure.
To enhance overall performance, a culture change from “no, but” to ”yes, and” is a must-have, not a nice to have.
The new system will be designed to enable this culture change, and to enforce it where old habits persist.
I look forward to working with planning professionals on this necessary evolution.
