Government delays laws to reform Resource Management Act, likely to be introduced later this year

The Government has delayed the introduction of one of the three pieces of legislation that will eventually replace the Resource Management Act (RMA).

Environment Minister David Parker had said the Natural and Built Environments Bill would be introduced in "early 2022".

That has now been pushed back, with the Government saying it still plans to introduce the bill this year. It's possible it will be in the later half of the year.

The Government had considered passing the three pieces of legislation that will replace the RMA separately.

This plan changed late last year, and now it will introduce the Natural and Built Environments Bill, and the Spatial Planning Bill, together. The later the Government leaves introducing the legislation, the more it runs the risk of having to hurry the legislation through Parliament before the election.

The third piece of legislation, which will address problems faced by communities beset by rising sea levels thanks to climate change, is in the hands of Climate Change Minister James Shaw.

The RMA is more than 30 years old. Although lauded in its time for consolidating many disparate resource management regimes into a single piece of legislation, it is now widely blamed for being both hostile to development, while at the same time not doing enough to protect the environment.

Many point to the RMA as a leading cause of the current housing crisis.

Parker began the process of assessing what was wrong with the RMA in 2019, appointing a group to review the legislation. The group released its findings in 2020, including a recommendation to repeal and replace the RMA with three pieces of legislation.

Labour took that recommendation to the 2020 election, and released an exposure draft of the Natural and Built Environments Bill last year, to be scrutinised by the Environment Committee. The committee has published its findings on the exposure draft - that report is in Parker's hands as he hones the final bill to be introduced to Parliament.

"The Environment Committee inquiry into the exposure draft of the Natural and Built Environments Bill received 695 unique submissions from local government, iwi/Māori, NGOs, businesses, and other stakeholders," Parker said.

"The extra time taken is to allow more time to consider these submissions and the report from the Environment Committee, which are critical to the success of the reforms," he said.

Parker said that "good progress" was being made.

The Environment Committee released 37 recommendations on the exposure draft, with National, Act and the Greens releasing minority reports in addition to those recommendations.

The committee recommended the Government clarify the concept of Te Oranga o te Taiao, which is meant to frame the Natural and Built Environments Bill.

The concept of Te Oranga o te Taiao has not been defined in legislation before, and the committee heard from submitters who were concerned that it was not defined clearly enough.

The report said submitters wanted "more clarity and legal certainty on what is required to implement it".

"We think the definition needs to state clearly that everyone has relationships with the natural environment, and responsibilities and obligations to look after it," the report said.

The committee also suggested that some definitions of things already defined under the existing RMA framework be carried over into the new legislation, unless the policy intent "changes in a way that justifies a corresponding change to a definition".

This would mean that the decades of case law built up around the existing regime would carry over, to some extent, into the new system.