We’ve gone from ‘you can’t’ to ‘you can’ when it comes to development, but new law changes mean environmental protection is the loser<\/p>\n
The two new laws that will rule our land <\/p>\n
Two new Acts have replaced the Resource Management Act, and that split is one of the more contentious aspects of the law change.<\/p>\n
The Planning Act and the Natural Environment Act are the product of years of debate on what should replace the unwieldy RMA, the legislation that covered the country’s environment, natural and built.<\/p>\n
Newsroom political reporter Fox Meyer goes through the changes on The Detail today.<\/p>\n
“Now you have two theoretically competing pieces of legislation that you’re going to need to find out how they engage with one another instead of keeping them all together in one bill,” he says.<\/p>\n
“It really is the same thing. Our natural environment and our built environment are the same environment.”<\/p>\n
Meyer says reform was unquestionably needed, and across the board people agreed it should at least be updated if not replaced.<\/p>\n
“It kind of just bloated out to be this all-involved piece of legislation, it really touches on so many different things. All the different statutes and rules start to overlap and interfere with each other, you know these long drawn-out consenting pipelines as a result. Nobody really wants that, everybody does want a simpler and more straight forward pathway.<\/p>\n
“But I think where people are split on this is, is this the pathway that we had to do? Has this gone too far towards liberalising development and opening up the environment for extraction or agriculture or whatever else you might want to do with it?”<\/p>\n
Meyer says the enjoyment of private property rights is the core philosophy behind the new legislation.<\/p>\n
That means ‘regulatory relief’ is a term councils and ratepayers will have to get used to. It basically means if councils want to continue protecting an aspect of the environment, say a tree specimen or wetlands, against a developer’s wishes, the developer will have to be compensated.<\/p>\n
Meyer says the alternative is to not enforce the protection, and when the cost of reimbursement tallies up to millions of ratepayer dollars, it’s likely a lot of these protections will just go by the wayside.<\/p>\n
“That is a departure from the RMA where the purpose of it was to first and foremost safeguard the environment.”<\/p>\n
Agriculture, development and construction are the sectors most likely to benefit.<\/p>\n
The losers, according to Auckland University planning expert Bill McKay, include M\u0101ori, local consultation, the environment, climate change action and councils – that includes ratepayers who may end up funding council efforts to put the brakes on development.<\/p>\n
The replacement laws have been criticised as hasty and incomplete legislation, and Meyer says just like the Fast Track legislation it’s entirely possible we could see amendments added down the track.<\/p>\n
Labour has said it wouldn’t repeal the legislation but it would revise it, targeting particularly the regulatory relief aspect.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, can we trust New Zealanders to not do anything that would degrade the environment just because the regime is now more permissive?<\/p>\n
Meyer says it’s not individual New Zealanders we should worry about making good decisions about their land.<\/p>\n
“Farmers are not individually going out there and trying to pollute the environment, because that would destroy their livelihood. It’s not the people I’m worried about, it’s when you go up the chain into a systems approach, where you have these big corporations, these big entities that are no longer people making decisions about their back yard. They’re playing these numbers games, they’re trying to increase value for shareholders, and that sort of entity doesn’t have the same connection to the land the everyday New Zealander does.<\/p>\n
“At the same time that sort of entity seems to be exactly the type of entity that’s going to benefit a lot from these changes.”<\/p>\n