The Government will repeal the Resource Management Act (RMA) and replace it with a Planning Act and a Natural Environment Act.
The two laws will usher in a vastly more permissive regime, cutting consent and permit numbers by 46% and slashing the number of council plans from more than 100 to just 17.
An economic analysis by Infometrics said the changes would boost GDP by 0.56% a year by the year 2050, worth up to $3.1 billion annually. A cost-benefit analysis reckoned the reduction in administrative and compliance costs would save $13 billion over 30 years.
RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop described the changes as the “single largest economic reform in a generation”, saying it would pivot the country towards a system that embraced “choice, freedom and opportunity”.
The changes are not without controversy; the changes include “regulatory relief” provisions.
These provisions will mean that if a person or company’s property is negatively affected by planning regulations, they may be able to claim relief from the council for that impact.
The relief could come in the form of cash transfers or lower rates and could apply if a council declares a property a Significant Natural Area (SNA) or a heritage area. Relief is only mandatory in cases where the regulations relate to heritage, outstanding landscapes or features, sites of significance to Māori or matters high in national character.
Act’s Simon Court, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Minister for Infrastructure said the changes may encourage councils not to pass these types of regulations in the first place, forcing them to “right-size” their regulations by forcing them to “confront the real cost”.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said the reforms would mean “less ‘no’ and a lot more ‘yes’”, while Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour channelled Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk’s famous misquote, saying the reforms would deliver a place to work, a place to live, and something to hope for “as was promised so long ago”.
The Resource Management Act dictates what New Zealanders can do with almost every part of the environment: from houses and sections, to streets, rivers, parks, public spaces - even the air Kiwis breathe is touched on by the RMA.
It determines what can be built, where it can be built, and in some cases, how it must be built. It determines how and if New Zealanders are allowed to use and abuse the environment.
The Government is overhauling the approach the RMA takes, which puts all of this into one law, and breaks it up into two laws - an approach taken in Scotland and South Australia.
The planning law will dictate how councils set out their plans for what is allowed to happen in their regions.
The environment law will set national environmental standards that dictate, in clear terms, environmental limits and rules, which will inform council plans.
The planning law will set out regulations and national policy directions for councils - including the different zones councils can use for their plans.
Councils currently take a bespoke approach to zoning, meaning there are more than 1000 types of zone in New Zealand, compared to 13 in Japan. The new system reduces the number of zones to a figure in the tens.
Bishop said this would make life easier for developers because they would not have to deal with bespoke zones in different council areas.
Councils will take these national directions, including nationally standardised zones, and incorporate them into 17 region-wide plans. This approach was very similar to the last Labour Government’s RMA reforms, which were repealed by the coalition.
Each territorial authority will have its own chapter in these plans. The plans will look 30 years into the future, setting aside corridors for infrastructure investment and growth.
Bishop said these plans would be shorter and simpler than current plans, which can run to thousands of pages.
The Government compares the new system to a funnel, which starts with the two laws at the wide mouth of the funnel and consents and permits, which come out of the narrow bottom.
The two laws at the top of the funnel determine everything that the new resource management system controls. If something is not specified in the two laws, or provided for in the documents they enable, the new planning system does not substantially regulate it.
In plain English, that means that the Government has decided it has no business regulating the aesthetic quality of your balcony, whether you should or shouldn’t have a balcony, or the internal layout of your apartment.
Councils will no longer be able to stick their noses into this type of business. The ability of others to be consulted on a consent will also be severely curtailed.
The Government says “in most cases only affected people” can take part in the consent process. A new planning tribunal will resolve disputes “at low cost”.
This means that the days of a large numbers of people submitting on consents that don’t affect them are over.
Some prescriptions are preserved however. Councils will still be able to consider the impacts of development on traffic, meaning a large development in an area with poor infrastructure might have difficulty getting consented. Likewise, some viewshafts will be protected.
Court suggested that these viewshafts would be more directly applied than currently. The view from Auckland’s Mt Eden to Rangitoto would probably be protected. The view of other maunga from the road, however, may not be - Court joked the only view people needed while driving was of the road itself.
Many Treaty settlements have a component that councils give effect to via that RMA. Bishop said it was a “bottom line” that the new laws do not breach these settlements.
The legislation carries these over to the new system “in an equivalent way”.
The laws will go to a full select committee, meaning they will take roughly six months to become law.
In the interim, the Government will introduce and Parliament will pass a law under urgency to extend the expiry date on consents to two years after a likely three-year transition period to the new system.
That means most consents will be extended to about 2031.
New consents can be made during the transition period.
Bishop did not give a definitive answer when asked about well-known plans for his mega-ministry, a merger of the Ministry for the Environment, Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, and Ministry of Transport.
He did say that a problem with the current scheme is that councils both set rules and enforce them and suggested a new regulator, separate from councils may be required.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins said Labour was “still digesting” the two new laws.
He said the new laws had a “heck of a lot of similarity” with what Labour legislated when it was in Government, particularly the consolidation of plans.
He said the regulatory relief provisions were “something we’re going to want to get into the detail of”.
The Environmental Defence Society’s Greg Severinsen said the RMA was “broken and needs to change”.
However he said he was concerned with the regulatory relief proposals because he believed councils would not be able to afford the regulatory relief required and many would simply forgo environmental regulations.
“We’re going to see a regulatory retreat from some very important environmental safeguards,” he said.
Wellington City Mayor Andrew Little told the Herald there was a “potential contradiction” in the Government’s plans.
Central government will still require councils to ensure some environmental outcomes, however if councils imposed some forms of regulation to achieve these outcomes they would have to pay for regulatory relief, however their ability to pay for this relief will be constrained by the Government’s proposed rate caps.
“That circle needs to be squared somehow,” he said, warning the system created incentives for “those with deep pockets” to use the courts to have their way.
“If local government now faces a risk of compensation for regulation or standardisation, then the incentive is for local government to do little or nothing and that won’t be helpful either,” he said.
Little said the greater standardisation of this approach had the potential to save councils cost.