A think tank report into unlocking planning obstacles faced by miners says central government needs to fund local councils for handling complex resource applications.
The New Zealand Initiative says boosting the consenting capacity of small councils with little experience in the minerals sector and giving them the financial backing todefend their decisions would help minerals projects that might otherwise have ended up in the too-hard basket.
In the short term, central government should provide a funding stream for local councils to compensate for the costs they incur as consenting agents. This could be done by sharing the royalties from mining developments with local councils, proportionate to the costs of consenting, the organisation says in a report entitled From Red Tape to Green Gold.
The fund would be a stopgap measure while more more permanent reforms of the Resource Management Act were put in place.
The initiative cited a 2013 survey conducted by the Productivity Commission which showed 70 per cent of regional, district, city and unitary councils experienced difficulty with the complexity of regulation, and more critically, they struggled with the process amid a lack of guidance from central government.
Seeking planning permission under the RMA was recognised to be costly, time consuming, and complicated, with little predictability of outcome.
"This is particularly concerning from mining ventures - large capital-intensive projects that are inherently risky even before a high degree of regulatory uncertainty is added to the process."
In a foreword Buller District Council chief executive Paul Wylie said his province was rich in minerals but they couldn't be extracted because of resource consent holdups.
"We want a reasonable future alongside a responsible mining industry that knows that it must look after the environment that we actually live in every day. We want a fair go."