The reforms include binning the Resource Management Act (RMA) and replacing it with a Planning Act and a Natural Environment Act. Councils will slash the number of plans from more than 100 to just 17. The plans will be “spatial plans” looking out 30 years into the future, focusing on enabling infrastructure and development.
There’ll be much more national direction, too.
So far, it all looks very similar to the RMA reforms Labour legislated last term but which were repealed by the coalition (this apparently was news to the Prime Minister, who said on Monday that “no government in the last 30 years has taken on the RMA”, forgetting his predecessor scrapped it and this Government actually brought it back).
There are two areas that are likely to be significant. The first is the controversial proposal for some regulatory relief, meaning that if local government imposes certain restrictions on land, that land’s owners are entitled to compensation, potentially in the form of cash transfers or reduced rates.
The second is the profoundly narrowed scope of the new regime, its specificity and the fact councils in many cases cannot wade into areas outside the explicit scope of the new regime.
The Government describes the new system as like a funnel, with the two acts at the wide top and consent and permit decisions at its narrow base. As the funnel narrows, fewer and fewer things will be able to be litigated, until you get to a consent or permit decision, which will be narrow in scope, requiring little debate.
The new laws have a very specific and prescriptive scope, meaning layers at the bottom of the system will not be able to give themselves broad powers to weigh-in on decisions made further up the chain.
“What this means is that when New Zealanders apply for a consent, the council will no longer be able to refer back up or relitigate any direction made in the instruments that sit higher up in the system,” Bishop said in explaining the laws.
Alongside this are changes that mean only people directly affected by most consents will be able to submit on them, and that many activities that affect no one apart from the person who owns the property (for example, changing the internal layout of an apartment) won’t need a consent at all.
RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop (left) and Under-Secretary Simon Court arrive to announce the new resource consent system. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Combined, the changes create a vastly more permissive planning regime, cutting the number of permits and consents required by 46%.
Councils will have fewer consents to issue, fewer ways to decline a consent and more incentive to grant them.
While councils will still have the power to create environmental regulations or relations that deal with areas of significant Māori importance, the regulatory relief regime means they will now face a strong financial disincentive hold off – let’s not forget the rate-capping regime will mean that even if councils want to give relief to affected property owners, they won’t be able to easily raise rates to pay for it.
Resource management is, by definition, a regulatory regime, but the incentives in that change embed a bias towards de- or non-regulation rather than regulation.
The changes match up to the Government’s decision to politely ask councils to consider amalgamating into larger, regional bodies, while setting criteria that make it clear, in the tones of a frustrated parent, that the Government isn’t really asking – it’s requesting, demanding even.
Councils will still have a role in this system; they’ll still make plans, issue consents and do many of the things they do now, but the Government has made it very, very clear they want councils to be more permissive, and they’ve made it very, very hard for councils to be anything but that.
Councils will gradually become less their own tier of government, and more like the local enforcement arm of the central government executive, implementing and operationalising decisions made in Wellington, with the spatial planning stage being the main point of focus for local input.
Since becoming a minister, Bishop has moaned about the fact that local government planning decisions restricting housing have passed billions of dollars in emergency housing costs on to central government.
“It is an inarguable, and sometimes uncomfortable, fact that local government has been one of the largest barriers to housing growth in New Zealand,” Bishop grizzled to the Wellington Chamber of Commerce earlier this year.
He went on to complain that when local government makes it harder to build new housing, it’s central government that picks up the tab, forking out $5 billion a year in housing support. Local government sees things the opposite way, noting central government forces intensification on some councils without giving them the means to pay for infrastructure.
Perhaps the strongest argument in favour of the reforms is that they give central government powers proportionate to the fiscal cost it wears when local government drops the ball.
That argument is undermined by things like the regulatory relief regime that would force councils to, in some cases, hand over cold, hard cash simply for carrying out the Government’s orders.
It’ll be controversial, very controversial, and that underlines the difference between this Government and our Italian diplomat Varè.
Diplomacy works best when people don’t know that they’re having your way.
The councils and environment groups frustrated by the Government’s changes are not so naive.