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 to
defend 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.
