Resource Management Reform Bill

This is the title and commencement clauses stage. Much of the Resource Management Reform Bill is focused on addressing perceived problems with the Resource Management Act in terms of timeliness and costs associated with processes under the Act, but when the Ministry for the Environment survey of local authorities showed that 95 percent of resource consent applications were processed on time and only 6 percent were notified, the bill is a solution looking for a problem. This bill, in my submission, should be called the “Resource Management (Implement Ideology and Ignore the Evidence) Amendment Bill”.

Councils, in making submissions to the Local Government and Environment Committee, were concerned that the bill introduced a number of measures that would increase the cost and complexity of decision making under the Act with both resource consents and policy and plan making. As the Hamilton City Council said: “Many of the changes proposed by the Bill would result in more complex processes, which appear to contradict the ‘streamlining’ that is the purpose of the changes. Many of the proposed changes [in the bill] are too complicated, too prescriptive and will involve substantially more administration by council staff.” Of course, it is the councils that will bear the additional cost of administering these processes, and it will be the councils that will get blamed for that, not the Minister for the Environment. The bill is making it much more complex through things like the 6-month deadline for submissions on medium-sized consents to be decided and the very complex system of deadlines that is now part of the bill. It ignores the fact that in the existing Act we already have penalty provisions for councils where they have to repay a portion of the application fees to the applicants if certain time frames are not met. It is going to mean that this bill ignores that. It means that council processes, by getting more complicated, potentially impose extra costs on ratepayers.

It will also be ignoring the evidence, because the select committee heard that it is often the applicants who are responsible for the delays, not the council. Councils like the Palmerston North City Council looked at and compared the processes for considering an application to the board of inquiry—in that case, the Turitea wind farm, where the board was called in. That took well over the 9-month deadline that the Act provides for. It became a very legalistic, adversarial, and expensive formal hearing process. When you get hearings happening at the council level, that is more informal. The community can be more involved. The Motorimu wind farm, which was considered by the Palmerston North City Council rather than a board of inquiry, took about the same length of time, but it was much less legalistic, less stressful for the community, less intimidatory, and a better result was reached. It is provisions like clause 88, which impose these time-management provisions, that make the bill unduly complex and cumbersome, which is why we think it should be called the “Resource Management (More Prescription, Cost, and Complexity for Councils) Amendment Bill”.

As Sir Geoffrey Palmer has noted, the Resource Management Act, at 796 pages, is already twice the length of the Act when it was introduced in 1991. The additional provisions in this bill, which is a very thick bill, will actually add to that complexity. They are not about simplifying and streamlining. They are anti-environment, anti-community, and anti-democratic. That is why it is a bill that is about ideology rather than the smoke screen that the Minister and the Government have put up around it being about simplicity. It is tilting the playing field in favour of development. It is making it more complex. Two titles for the bill would be the “Resource Management (Implement Ideology and Ignore the Evidence) Amendment Bill” or the “Resource Management (More Prescription, Cost, and Complexity for Councils) Amendment Bill”.