A recently introduced Bill looks to reform the way New Zealand looks after its old treasures. The Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Bill, among other things, renames a restructured Historic Places Trust and aligns processes for protecting heritage more closely with the Resource Management Act.
By world standards, even the oldest human influences in Aotearoa are very recent, but that does not make our history of human occupation any less important.
It is critical to look after the evidence of early human occupation and continue to retain special living pieces of our progression throughout history.
Looking after historical buildings and sites is important, but there has to be some priority placed on what we look after, who should manage it and how and, equally importantly, who should pay for it.
Federated Farmers' submission on the Bill asks for no statutory advocacy role for Heritage New Zealand. The Bill's purpose is to set a platform for a more balanced conversation between protection and the economic use of particular sites and more transparent processes for determining whether a site is worthy to be categorised as a historic place.
There were key threads in our submission tied closely to recurring issues landowners face during resource management processes and the implementation of the Resource Management Act.
One of those is about legislation empowering partnership-based approaches to protection, not litigation. This might sound familiar to those who have worked closely and positively with government departments to look after a stretch of river or bush only to find other staff in the same department advocating for district or regional plan rules on that area.
Federated Farmers is concerned the Bill effectively sets up the same scenario with Heritage New Zealand, requiring it to be both a statutory advocate in the planning process and a legislated administrator and protector of historic places and things.
This scenario immediately sets up a tension between working with the owners of historic sites to protect and manage them and advocating for rules to say owners cannot make changes to that place.
An emerging trend around the country is for advocates in the planning process, such as landscape architects and, in response, councils, to identify and seek to manage amenity landscapes through rules.
These 'second tier' landscapes supposedly contain cultural and heritage aspects.
The Historic Places Trust currently also has a role advocating for heritage. Recently it has become an active player in resource management processes, asking for rules to protect rural landscapes which give 'context' to historic sites or that were home to important events in New Zealand's brief human history.
Federated Farmers considers it critical that the Heritage New Zealand Bill sets the platform for these conversations to happen directly between landowners and the organisation responsible for managing them, not through advocacy which will put yet more lines on maps and more rules in plans.