Financial Review Debate — Ministry for the Environment (continued)

Tēnā koe, Mr Chairperson. One of the major changes that the Ministry for the Environment is working on as part of its policy under this Government is to change the way in which planning is done under the Resource Management Act so that Ministers would have much more power to intervene and direct councils to amend or change their plans. Instead of the ministry developing policy statements and national environmental standards so that we have consistent environmental policy around New Zealand, we would have the Minister being able to intervene to pick and choose winners—to potentially direct the Northland councils to promote mining in their plans, or Hawke’s Bay to have policies that would make it easier for mega, think-big, risky schemes like Ruataniwha to proceed, or in Auckland for the Minister to be able to smash the metropolitan urban limits in order to allow urban sprawl, when the council had specifically put those limits in place to avoid urban sprawl. As prominent Bluegreens member and former ministerial adviser Guy Salmon has said: “This is what they do in China.”

This is worse than the National Development Act in the Muldoon era. And it is this ministry, under this Government, that is promoting these substantive changes to the Resource Management Act, and also proposing to strip out five of the key environmental principles in the heart of the Act—the purpose section in Part 2. These changes are deeply troubling because they potentially promote the politicisation of the Public Service and the ministry, and the potential for more dodgy backroom deals, as we have seen with Skycity. When you have a ministry that has got only 280-odd staff, and those staff are based in Wellington—the ministry does not have any regional offices in Christchurch or in Auckland any more—it is simply not credible to believe that the ministry would be adding value on the specific challenges that we have on land management, water management, and coastal management in a particular region by giving these powers to the Minister. The powers will not be promoting—

Report noted.

Ministry for Primary Industries