Resource Management Amendment Bill

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Thank you. Very pleased to take a call on the Resource Management Amendment Bill. When we were last in the Chamber discussing this, Opposition members were railing against the bill. It is a very important bill and it is the first phase of this Government’s changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA). There is a review panel chaired by Judge Randerson and that is looking at more comprehensive reform. But this bill is important because it removes some of the worst changes that the former National Government made to the RMA with their Resource Legislation Amendment Act.

Some of those key changes are the very Draconian powers which the former environment Minister, the Hon Dr Nick Smith, provided for himself, and they were widely criticised in submissions. Those were the powers in section 360D, where it enabled the Minister to make regulations to either prohibit or remove rules that councils had developed and included in their district plans, if they overlapped with any other subject matter. So these were really Draconian powers allowing the Minister just to come down on top of a district plan which had been through the whole public consultative process, maybe even had been to the Environment Court and had appeals resolved there. These Draconian powers are going, under this bill. Similarly, for the powers that the former National Government put in, in section 360G of the Act, which allowed the Minister the ability to make regulations so that certain resource consent applications had to be considered and processed in 10 days. So a very narrow window of time to consider those applications and no ability to make public submissions.

One of the other Draconian powers that this bill removes from the RMA is section 360H, which was the Minister’s ability to make regulations, again overriding the primary legislation by requiring that there not be public notification on certain activities, cutting right across the ability of councils to set out in their plans what should be notified and what shouldn’t. So those changes in this bill are quite an important removal of the tinkering which the Resource Legislation Amendment Act did.

But more important are the changes that this bill makes to the way in which freshwater planning is done at the regional level through New Zealand. With the new strengthened national policy statement (NPS) on fresh water and the new national environmental standards on fresh water, which this Government has put in place to ensure that our rivers are swimmable both for people and fish and for gathering mahinga kai within a generation, we need a much more nimble process for enacting the changes that the NPS requires in regional plans. So what the bill does is set up a new process by which councils have a panel of freshwater commissioners who consider the submissions on the plan changes which implement the NPS, and those commissioners include people with expertise in tikanga Māori, recognising that mātauranga Māori and te mana o te wai are at the heart of the freshwater NPS.

So people will have the appropriate expertise. There will be a senior judge involved in that, and these freshwater commissioners will come from a centralised pool, highly specialised. There’ll also be a representative from the regional council on that panel of commissioners. It is a process for considering and making changes to the regional freshwater or land and water plan, which is very similar to that which was adopted in Auckland for the development of the unitary plan. So, yes, there will be some restrictions on appeal rights, but that is only if the regional council rejects the recommendations which this panel of commissioners makes. It is a major improvement to regional land and water planning, which has been often controversial around New Zealand, because of the different interests of water users, land users, and those valuing instream values, whether they be for recreation or supporting birds and wildlife.

One of the other major changes that this bill makes is to ensure that it is compatible with the zero carbon Act, which we enacted in the Parliament in December last year. That Act sets out a framework of enduring institutional arrangements with the establishment of the Climate Commission to ensure that New Zealand is on target to mitigate and adapt to climate change. But one of the problems with the RMA at present is it doesn’t allow decision makers to take into account the greenhouse gas emissions of activities. So the bill enables that matching up with the zero carbon Act to occur, and the implementation of these changes will only take place when emissions reduction plans have been done by the Climate Commission and when central government has had an opportunity to provide some national guidance on how that should be implemented under the RMA to ensure that there is national consistency. Ensuring that our climate change targets are reflected in the RMA will help ensure a cohesive approach to climate change, so it’s quite a major change that the bill is making.

In terms of the other areas where the changes are important, in subdivision the National Government with the Resource Legislation Amendment Act (RLA Act) reversed the presumption, the quite restrictive presumption, in the RMA around subdivision to potentially make it a permitted activity. This bill puts it back so that subdivision can’t happen unless it’s allowed by resource consent or a rule in a district plan. That is because in an age of rising sea levels, more intense storm events, and increased floods, we want to make sure that subdivision and housing development occurs outside of areas of natural hazard. Having a very permissive approach to subdivision cuts right across that. So there are some quite substantial changes in the bill.

The last of the areas I’d like to comment on was just the increase in public participation, cutting out some of the changes that the RLA Act made that really restricted the rights of the public to get involved. This Government has a different approach and recognises the value that public participation—submissions, appearing before hearing panels—has in providing more information to decision makers. The bill actually restores that, because those changes that the former Government made were widely opposed by submitters.

This is the first in other changes to the RMA to make it more effective, more nimble, to reintroduce public participation rights, to override and remove those very Draconian powers that were given to the Minister by the former Government, and to really make our freshwater planning system more nimble, and to ensure that the RMA aligns with the zero carbon Act. I commend the bill.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. As with previous readings, it is for me to indicate that National opposes this Resource Management Amendment Bill at its second reading, and really to note that what this bill, in effect, does is largely to reverse the changes made to the Resource Management Act (RMA) by the previous Government, under National’s Resource Legislation Amendment Act 2017, which was all about reducing the bureaucracy that simply gets in the way of creating jobs, of building houses, and also of providing for good environmental protection. It is ironic that, at the very time we are in this House debating yet another RMA amendment bill, the Environment Committee is at the very same time considering the Urban Development Bill, which does exactly the opposite of—I’m looking behind me for my colleague Erica Stanford, who sits on the committee with me and who shares, I’m sure, the same dismay at the fact that, on the one hand, the RMA is loading up bureaucracy and proudly doing so, if the last speaker was anything to go back, yet at the same time the Urban Development Bill is doing exactly the opposite. So which way is it for this Government?

💬 Hon Member: It’s incoherent.

Well, it is; thank you for that. It is an incoherent approach to planning in New Zealand. And what, I guess, makes it even more incoherent is the fact that, last November, the Government appointed an expert Resource Management Review Panel to review the RMA and to produce reform proposals. So not only do we have an RMA amendment bill in the House today, which is proposing more bureaucracy, we have an Urban Development Bill cutting down on consultation quite severely. But the third leg to this unfortunate stool is that the Government has a Resource Management Review Panel and something like 300 working groups which this Government is churning through—they call that work. It’s called working groups.

So this Resource Management Review Panel is going to produce a report this month. So that report from the expert panel was due at the end of May. It’s now June. I believe that the chair of the panel is a gentleman with timely habits; so I’m very interested to know where that report is. But I’m also even more interested to know why we are tinkering around the edges of the RMA—and that’s all this is; it’s just reversing changes, and it was acknowledged by the Hon Eugenie Sage. Why is it that the Government is spending this House’s time reversing those changes—it’s mere tinkering—when there is a substantive report due? It defies logic. I would assume that, in doing so, this delay, this confusion, will be causing further disruption to the current users of the Resource Management Act at the very time, in this post-COVID world, when one would hope that a certain amount of certainty and planning were to be desirable.

At the select committee stage, there were a couple of things. One of those reversals of previous decisions made by the previous Government that is occurring in this bill is on the power of councils to consider climate change in RMA decisions with neither public consultation involved nor any degree of costing involved. That provision around climate change provisions has been reinstated into this bill. So the power over emissions is now in the hands of councils, the Environment Court, and boards of inquiry with no consultations, and there’s no costings around that. The previous Minister who spoke did signal national guidance but, in the absence of that, are councils now to make up their own standards and their own policies around climate change? I think we know the answer to that.

So the National Party believes very strongly that any substantial changes to the RMA should be made with a full consideration of the expert panel’s recommendations, and I am at a loss, my colleagues are at a loss, to know why we are ploughing through with, I think, the 19th iteration of the RMA, when in fact both Labour and National have signalled a complete rewrite of the Resource Management Act is, in fact, what is required. So this is a mystifying piece of legislation, but none the less we are obliged to plough on with it, albeit that we are opposing it all the way through.

I just want to raise one other point, which is that there is significant change around fresh water and, if one believes Eugenie Sage, much progress is being made in this regard. But, actually, it’s a switch in power, and it’s a switch in power to the centre, which we have seen several times by this Government, one of them being polytech reforms—and there is some work going on in reticulated three waters, which signals to be yet another switch in power to the centre. So watch that space. But a significant change in the bill is that the new freshwater commissioners will be appointed by the Minister for the Environment rather than the regional council. Now, this is a significant move, and it shouldn’t be underestimated that this removes decision making and the power to appoint from a regional council to the Minister of the day. Are we comfortable with that? Regional councils weren’t very comfortable with that. I’m not very comfortable with that.

The irony is huge here, because the Government parties so strongly opposed the appointment of commissioners to Environment Canterbury a decade ago, when Environment Canterbury failed to notify a water plan, but are now creating legislation which allows the Government to do that and to appoint commissioners all through New Zealand. So the irony and the policy muddle prevail all through this bill—mostly through this House. The Opposition party is the largest party in Parliament, and so we oppose this bill.

This is a split call. I call Dr Liz Craig.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a real pleasure to speak on this bill because this bill is going to make a real difference down in Southland, where I live. If we look at what’s been happening with our New River Estuary down South and just decades of accumulation of silt coming down the rivers and nutrients, what it basically shows is that if we drop the ball on freshwater management, we end up with what we’ve got down South, which is knee-deep, waist-high—depending on where you’re standing in our estuary—toxic, thick mud. So what this bill will do is create the framework and the consistency for regional councils across the country so that they can do their freshwater planning in a consistent way.

If you look at the previous national policy statement and what happened—and I think the previous speaker, Jacqui Dean, was talking about “muddles”. But looking at it under the previous system, each regional council pretty much did its own thing, and so we get incredible variability across the country in terms of how they’re managing it. So what this is doing is creating a much more strategic framework that sets out how we will be managing this and it sets up freshwater hearing panels. What we’ve got there is some consistency, because we’ve got freshwater commissioners appointed by the Minister who are taken from a common pool, which means they’ve got consistency of view across the country, but we’re also including members from regional councils and also local tangata whenua. So we’ve got the right mix for making decisions.

This is an important bill. It sets up the framework for where we need to go forward on freshwater quality, and I’m really happy to commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m pleased to take a call on the Resource Management Amendment Bill.

I’d just like to start by saying that there was a really interesting comment a couple of debates ago when we were debating the emissions trading scheme (ETS) bill, where James Shaw, the Minister in the chair, said he hoped that the ETS bill wouldn’t end up like the Resource Management Act (RMA). And I thought that was very telling because it indicates that not only Labour and National but also the Greens, and I think most people in this Chamber and in this Parliament, believe that the RMA has become, sort of, unwieldly, difficult, hard to navigate legislation that has had its day and needs to be repealed. It makes planning and building houses more difficult, and it certainly isn’t getting the environmental outcomes that we want.

We all know that significant change is required to the RMA, but this bill, this RMA bill, can be quite well summed up as a delayed and incoherent mess. This is a Government that, remember, campaigned vigorously on building houses and sorting out housing affordability and dramatically increasing supply, and so we got KiwiBuild, which is one of the biggest failures of all time—and I think Megan Woods is realising it’s getting worse by the day as she’s forced to put out fire after fire. And now we have RMA reform.

Here the Government has the opportunity to make some really meaningful changes to the RMA in order to get houses built more quickly and more cheaply. But what we have here, which is their heralded RMA reform, is basically the Government kicking the can down the road; it’s just stage one. In my first reading speech, I said that I suspect it’s a tinkering-around-the-edges bill. After the select committee process what I thought was confirmed, because this is just the entrée—the meaty stuff that they’re planning on doing is coming at some further stage down the track, maybe in the future.

So in a nutshell, this Government have spent three years developing a bill that basically just reverses all of the previous changes to the RMA made by the last National Government, changes that we made to make the process easier, fairer, quicker, and cheaper, so that we could get on and build affordable houses. But this bill just basically undoes all that. It quite clearly will make the process of building houses more complex, more time consuming, and more costly. It won’t go in any way to addressing affordability.

The initial briefing we received from officials in the environment select committee was very telling. They took us through an overview of the changes, including removing regulation-making powers, reversing the changes, repealing the—all the “R” words, I won’t go into in detail; speakers before me have talked about it at length. But the point is that the words “remove”, “reverse”, “repeal” come up a lot in this bill.

But what makes these changes completely incoherent and, frankly, a joke is that while this bill increases costs and delays and does nothing for housing affordability, there are two other major pieces of reform that are doing exactly the opposite. Jacqui Dean stated, before me, that already the Urban Development Bill, currently before the Environment Committee, gives the Government the power to fast track development by removing barriers to planning constraints or having to deal with the RMA. And the Minister, in May, took a paper to Cabinet proposing the COVID-19 Recovery (Fast-track Consenting) Bill, which, again, is basically designed to bypass the RMA. It proposes a non-notified consenting and designation process in the main for Government-led projects. So the Government knows very well the constraints of the RMA in building and development, and they threw these two very bills that they are proposing to carve out RMA exemptions for themselves. But in this bill they make it far more difficult to get on with building houses for everybody else by undoing the changes that we made to make things easier.

It’s, like I said, an incoherent mess. Minister Parker needs to explain. He said in this Chamber quite recently—I remember him saying—that the RMA causes delays and it causes costs. So why is he bringing a bill to this House that adds more delay and more cost? And to add to more of the chaos, we’ve got this working group, this RMA working group, that’s been under way and was supposed to be reporting back this month; we hear it’s another two months away. That’s supposed to give the Government all the answers. So why is it that this is all backwards, that they’re introducing a bill that makes minor tinkering changes around the edges, making things far worse for building houses, but they’re still waiting on this big chunky report to tell them how to do it properly? It’s an incoherent mess, and we cannot support this bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I support this bill absolutely. It does four fundamental things. It ensures that the Environmental Protection Authority has the ability to support the regional councils on enforcement action. It enables faster and better nationally consistent water management. Time is short, so I’m going to just jump to the final thing that I love the most, and that is that it enables climate change to be brought into the Resource Management Act. I think this is a fundamentally wonderful bill. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to this bill. I should first just assist the member Angie Warren-Clark, who’s just resumed her seat, and say climate change considerations have been in the Resource Management Act (RMA) for a long time. It’s actually a mistake, because, if the emissions trading scheme (ETS) legislation we debated last night is truly putting a proper price on carbon, then people will be able to make decisions about emitting carbon based on that price and we actually don’t need a second layer of legislation in the Resource Management Act, because people would already be considering it because the ETS is working. So either last night’s legislation is working and this is not necessary or this is necessary and last night’s legislation doesn’t work. That’s the simple logic of it, but we don’t get that sort of critical thinking and analysis from the Government benches. So much for rebuttal.

The reason for opposing this bill is that, frankly, it’s pathetic. I mean that in the proper sense of the word. In comparison to the problems that this country faces under the Resource Management Act and the level and scale of reform that is necessary and possible, this bill is pathetic. It is like setting a capuchin monkey of a solution on a gorilla of a problem. Let me tell you what those problems are—something that one might think the Labour Party would care about deeply.

Under the Resource Management Act, over the past 30 years, we have had inflation in New Zealand—consumers price index inflation of 61 percent. The cost per metre of building a home has gone up a lot more than that—260 percent. But the price of the median section in Auckland has gone up 900 percent over those 30 years. That is what this piece of law, the Resource Management Act, has delivered.

I’ve just seen Clayton Mitchell hold up a sign with a 7½ on it. I can only guess that he was scoring my speech so far out of five, because, by the standards of his party speaking in Parliament, that’s about what it deserves—150 percent. There we go, it is out of five. Thank you, Clayton Mitchell, for that adulation. I hope he learns something, because the New Zealand First Party in the previous Parliament postured politically that it was prepared to cross the floor and work with ACT and National to pass real Resource Management Act reform. Now the possibility exists to do just that—to cross the floor and work with National and ACT to pass real Resource Management Act reform—and where is New Zealand First? Nowhere. As per usual, throughout their history, they’re more than happy to take the baubles of office and leave no lasting policy improvements for New Zealand. What a shame. All he can do is sit in the corner of the House and hold up silly signs. What a shame. No wonder New Zealand First is on the way out, and the great tragedy is they’ll leave nothing behind.

But we should come back to this piece of legislation. This piece of legislation is introduced into a context where the inflation in the price of a section in our largest city has gone up 900 percent—10 times inflation over the period that we have been trying to build more homes. In that same period, the amount of income that the lower quintile—that’s the bottom 20 percent—of households spend on housing has doubled. Thirty years ago, the poorest people in New Zealand spent a quarter of their income on housing. Now they spend half their income on housing. Now, that’s something that a good social justice warrior like Iain Lees-Galloway should care about. You’d think he’d care about it. But, instead, the Labour Party comes down to Parliament and introduces Resource Management Act reform that does nothing to fix the problem of land supply and housing, and that is one of the greatest shames of this current Labour Government. That’s our history. We’ll see it: nothing to improve the Resource Management Act, under which the price of housing for the poorest New Zealanders has doubled as a share of their income.

The fundamental problem with the Resource Management Act that should be getting fixed but isn’t, is that it has no regard for property rights. You look for property rights—the right of people to use their property in the way that they see fit—and you try and find it in the 900 pages that make up the contemporary Resource Management Act, and those words cannot be found. One of the results of that is that people that want to develop their property, people who want to subdivide—do you know the words “inappropriate subdivision” appear in the RMA dozens and dozens of times. That’s why it’s so hard to subdivide—because the councils won’t allow it, because the RMA won’t allow them. What people find when they try to use their property to build new homes and expand the supply of housing for the poorest New Zealanders is the RMA stops them doing it, time and time again.

What does this piece of legislation do about that? Absolutely nothing. It introduces a new freshwater commissioner—yet another bureaucrat empowered by legislation passed by this Government and this House. That doesn’t help the poorest New Zealanders. It introduces climate change legislation, which should be dealt with by the emissions trading scheme but instead will become another way that disinterested persons can stop the owners of property from developing their property.

What else does this bill do? It strengthens public consultation. Do you know what that means? That means that people who have no interest in your property are able to tell you what to do with it and come along and submit and obstruct, and that means fewer houses get built. That’s going to be, historically, the great failing of this Government: that it promised so much on—I would say it won an election on—housing, and then it gave us KiwiBuild.

If this Government was serious, it would be reforming the Resource Management Act and making it about property rights. Do you know why it would do that? Well, another good reason is that one of the reasons there’s so much opposition to development is that people whose property is actually affected often have no say. So I see people in Central Auckland who find that they’re able to have property seven stories high up against their single-story home in their back yard, right up against their back fence. That’s OK under a Resource Management Act that says nothing about people’s rights of peaceful enjoyment of their property. But, at the same time, someone that lives in another suburb can come along and tell you that you can’t develop your property even if your neighbours are quite happy with it. That’s what this bill should be alleviating.

In the Part 2 principles sections, sections 5, 6, and 7, it should be saying this bill exists so that people have the peaceful enjoyment of their property. You can’t damage the environment in that regime, because to damage other people’s property environmentally would be forbidden. You can’t impinge on your neighbour’s enjoyment of their property under that regime, but you can develop your property so long as you’re not harming anyone else. That’s the regime that should be debated tonight, but, tragically, it is not.

The result of that is, when the historians come around and say, “What sort of Government was this?”, they’ll say it was a Government that came into office promising to deliver on housing and failed epically because it wasn’t prepared to do the real work and reform the Resource Management Act properly, even when it had the mandate. Instead, it gave us KiwiBuild; instead, it let down the poorest New Zealanders, whose biggest cost is housing; and, instead, it lost the moral authority to govern and be respected for its success because it couldn’t deal with the most important issue on its books. I have to oppose this bill because, frankly, it’s pathetic.

Well, I’m quite happy to support this bill, in contrast to the previous speaker, David Seymour, because this bill is actually what is needed in terms of approaching a very particular and specifically important issue for New Zealand, and, in part, that is around the two-stage approach to addressing our water management system.

Now, healthy waterways are vitally important to this country. There is a birthright to all New Zealanders: that many of us believe that we should be able to swim in our rivers. Now, that is quite an emotive argument, but it is one that resonates with most people in this country. But there is a strong economic argument for why we need clean rivers and waterways and to ensure the wetlands and lakes remain pristine where they are, or get back to that point where they can be. And that is that we rely on our competitive advantage to sell our products overseas, and if we continue to let those degrade, we undermine that. I commend this bill to the House.

The question was put that the amendments recommended by the Environment Committee by majority be agreed to.