Resource Management Amendment Bill

I move, That the Resource Management Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

Can I begin by thanking the Environment Committee for its consideration of many detailed submissions that were made on the bill and thank them for reporting an improved bill back to the House.

This bill is a first step in the Government’s approach to reforming the resource management legislation to ensure that we have a system that delivers better outcomes for the environment, people, and our economy. It includes changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA) that reduce complexity, that increase certainty, that restore public participation opportunities, and that improve processes. In my opinion, one of the important parts of the bill is new provisions relating to implementation of the essential freshwater reform package that we announced earlier today. The bill as reported back will also contribute to progress in this country on making progress on climate change.

On fresh water, we’ve got a problem in New Zealand. We know that on a lot of the indicators—E. coli, total nitrogen content, and macroinvertebrates—we’ve still got more rivers getting worse than getting better, and, in respect of macroinvertebrates, it’s about twice as many getting worse as are improving. Our promise to the electorate was to stop further degradation of our rivers, lakes, and wetlands; to make significant improvements within five years; and to return them to health in a generation. This bill helps that by enabling a faster, more nationally consistent preparation of water plans.

We do this by introducing a new process for the creation of those plans. It’s notable that the plans that are to be created under the last Government’s national policy statement in most cases actually aren’t going to be completed until after 2025 and, in many cases, not until 2030, which shows that we’ve got a few problems with plan-making processes currently in the country. This new process will give effect to the new National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management. In response to COVID-19, we propose to move the date by which councils must notify these new freshwater plans from 31 December 2023 to 31 December 2024, and I’ll be introducing a Supplementary Order Paper at committee stage to achieve that.

These new freshwater plan changes will be reviewed and tested by panels of freshwater commissioners. There’ll also be a regional council representative and a person nominated by tangata whenua. Public submissions will be heard. Freshwater commissioners will have specialist skills, and the Chief Freshwater Commissioner will be a current or retired Environment Court judge. Existing Treaty settlements will of course be honoured. The panel will make recommendations to the relevant local authority for decision, and, as occurred with the Auckland Plan process on which this process is largely modelled, appeal rights will depend on whether a local authority accepts or rejects the hearing panel’s recommendations. We think this is undoubtedly going to produce higher-quality water plans in a shorter period.

The committee also introduced further provisions to enable regulations to restrict stock access to water-body margins, which will allow for efficient protection against erosion and sedimentation of our rivers and estuaries. The bill will also allow changes to regional policy statements to be called in and directed to a board of inquiry or the Environment Court for a decision—that’s been an anomaly in the current Act.

The committee has reported back a number of technical improvements in light of submissions to ensure that processes are robust, fair, and efficient. In terms of another thing that we need in the system, mandatory and enforceable freshwater farm plans are also desired by both the agricultural sector and regional councils. They’re one of the things that we announced today, and at the committee stage I’ll be introducing a Supplementary Order Paper to give some legislative backing to those farm environment plans. These plans enable localised measures that really aren’t appropriate for centrally set regulations but are none the less necessary—and an example could be the identification of what is the source of sediment on a farm that should be fenced; you can’t deal with that in a rule, in a plan, but you do need to have some enforceable rule in a farm plan. Another example is stock exclusion measures that are more granular in the higher country—better managed through farm plans.

In respect of climate change, members will be aware that a comprehensive review of the resource management system was started in July last year and is nearing completion with the review panel led by retired Court of Appeal judge Tony Randerson QC, due to report in the next couple of months. Amongst other things, that review panel is considering how climate change should be dealt with in the resource management system. At the moment, the RMA as it stands doesn’t allow local authorities to consider greenhouse gas emissions in plan making or consenting. About 60 percent of the submissions on the bill raised this as an issue. After the bill was introduced and given its first reading, the zero carbon Act was enacted in December 2019, and it changed New Zealand’s climate change legal architecture and set out a framework of institutional arrangements. There’s now a mismatch between the RMA and the zero carbon Act’s mitigation measures, including its 2050 target, emissions budgets, and emission reduction plans, none of which have explicit recognition under the RMA.

As reported back from the Environment Committee, this bill fixes that problem by including amendments that establish a formal link between the zero carbon Act and decision making under the RMA. The timing of these changes will align with time frames included in the zero carbon Act, such as the publication of the first emissions reduction plan. That timing delay, if you like, or timing alignment, allows time for the Government to develop national direction under the RMA to ensure that councils are supported in making sensible and consistent decisions across the country. Not every individual active greenhouse gas emission should be covered by the RMA, but some should be.

The climate change national direction on controlling greenhouse gas discharges was intended to be prepared following the 2004 RMA amendments that removed the ability of local authorities to consider the impacts of greenhouse gas discharges. Sixteen years later, it’s time to get on with this national direction.

The Government will work to ensure that that national direction is developed in a way that adequately supports decision makers and provides certainty to applicants, and we need to make sure that the climate change targets that we have under the zero carbon Act are reflected in the RMA and that we have a cohesive response to climate change and to ensure that across the country we’re all working towards that same goal. I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Notwithstanding the hour or the time available to me, I listened carefully to the Minister’s contribution, and I want to thank him for expanding a little bit on some of the climate change issues that the Environment Committee had to confront in the course of its deliberations on the bill. It was a matter that came as something of a surprise, because, as the Minister said, at the bill’s first reading and introduction, the matters that the committee ended up considering weren’t sort of within the purview of the committee’s scope, but the passing of the zero carbon Act has changed all that.

So when we went through it as a committee, we discovered, of course—well, as many of us already knew—that by way of a much earlier amendment to the Resource Management Act back in 2004, councils, when issuing consents under the Act, were specifically excluded, for instance, from considering climate change issues or climate change matters in their deliberations on the issuing of consents, and that now seems to be something of an old-fashioned view. But, notwithstanding that, the situation arose where, without really much in the way of opportunity for members of the public or interested groups, stakeholders, or people who are concerned on these sorts of matters—they didn’t really have an opportunity to get a heads-up about what the Government’s intention was in terms of solving this conundrum that came before the committee.

So, yes, there were a large number of people who chose to raise the matter in terms of their submissions, and the Minister referred to that in his speech just a moment or two ago. But we don’t think, on this side of the House, that that’s been a very good process in terms of public scrutiny, in terms of public debate, and in terms of an opportunity for people who do have an interest to participate in the process fully, openly, and transparently, and in our minority view, we have made it clear that we think that this is a bill that is a further tinkering to the Resource Management Act.

This will be, I think, the 19th significant amendment to that piece of legislation, that now runs to something close to 800 pages, and it’s an Act now that is largely incomprehensible to laypeople. It’s expensive, it’s slow, it’s time-consuming, and, amongst many New Zealanders, it’s a source of ridicule and derision. I don’t think that that’s appropriate—

💬 Hon Damien O’Connor: You had nine years to do something; you did nothing.

—and the Minister of Agriculture says we had nine years. Every attempt—every single attempt—that the National Party made during nine years, that member and his party opposed. That member and his party opposed every single opportunity to improve the Resource Management Act over those years. So that member, who’s suddenly woken up—

Order! Thank you. The Government has indicated that it’s not going to continue with the urgency, and the time has come for me to leave the Chair.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 12 a.m. (Friday)