Smith's comments went further than his predecessor, Amy Adams, did in the changes to the act's principles, as proposed in a 2013 discussion document. The subsequent bill never saw the light of day as the parliamentary numbers could not be mustered.
But the discussion paper spoke of recognising and providing for a list of 14 things, including the impacts of climate change; the benefits of efficient energy use and renewable energy generation; the availability of land for urban expansion, use and development; the risk and impacts of natural hazards and the efficient provision of infrastructure.
"We are reviewing the proposals drafted two years ago in light of the most recent case law," Smith said.
"We want to ensure the act remains focused on environmental effects but with a better appreciation of the way plans and rules impact on housing affordability, jobs and economic growth, and the development of our cities."
As it stands, the RMA has become a Nimby charter.
It is not just the tales that abound of bureaucratic nightmares and legal delays that only Franz Kafka or Charles Dickens could do justice to.
It is not just about the built environment, building consents, urban planning and the interests of existing property owners.
There is also a kind of Nimbyism in disputes about the natural environment.
When people talk about weighing environmental costs against economic benefits, it is local environmental costs they mean.
There is an implicit assumption that whatever demand the project objected to is intended to meet, that demand will still be satisfied, but the environmental costs of doing so will be met by someone else, somewhere else. Not in our backyard.
Take two examples, not from the RMA but its sibling legislation relating to the exclusive economic zone and continental shelf.
People who go to a beach and protest against offshore drilling are no doubt sincere in their concerns.
But don't they also take for granted that they will be able to pull into a gas station and refill their tanks on the way home if they need to? The environmental costs and risks involved in providing that fuel will be met in some far off land of which we know little.
And that relies on trade. Much of the less-than-adequate living that New Zealand earns as a trading nation comes from pastoral farming, which has for generations relied on applying phosphate fertilisers to pasture.
An entire country, little Nauru, has been laid waste providing it, to the point that it now has to rely on being an outsourced concentration camp for would-be Aussies.
But we must not disturb the marine life of the Chatham rise, in order to mine phosphate there.
The problem is that when we talk in terms of weighing economic benefits against environmental costs, or getting the balance right, we are resorting to a metaphor that does not apply.
There is no common unit of measurement to quantify the opportunity cost of a species threatened, say, on the one hand and livelihoods that don't eventuate on the other.
It is, in philosophical jargon, a category mistake, a kind of nonsense, like asking which is heavier, the square root of three or the colour yellow?
What we expect regional councils or the courts to do is make value judgments - empirically informed, we hope, but nonetheless normative - about what the communities they serve value more.
Presenting them with a long list of things to "recognise and provide for" in their decisions is all well and good, but what are they supposed to do when, for example, "(d) the value of public access to and along the coastal marine areas, wetlands, lakes and rivers" conflicts with "(n) areas of significant aquatic habitats" and the list has no internal hierarchy?
It is a recipe for inconsistency.
To limit it the RMA provides for central government to provide direction and guidance to consenting authorities through national policy statements and national environmental standards.
But only a handful have been promulgated in the 24 years since the RMA was enacted.
Smith says he wants to make the process less cumbersome. "Take a simple issue like requiring all dairy farmers to fence their stock out of rivers," he said. "Under the existing law, the Government would need to write a national policy and consult extensively on it. When passed, each council would then have to change their regional plans with another process of consultation. After even this the council would not be able to implement the policy until each individual farmer's resource consent came up for renewal, a process that is likely to take about 30 years."
He proposes a law change enabling national regulation of these sorts of issues after one round of national consultation and the power to implement immediately, backed up by an instant fine regime.
"Our plan is to have such a rule in place for dairy cows to be banned from streams and rivers by July 2017."
