Resources Minister Shane Jones announcing the Government’s Fast-track consenting one-stop-shop regime in March. Photo / Mark Mitchell
THREE KEY FACTS:
Richard Harman is a political journalist and analyst, life member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery and editor of the Politik newsletter.
OPINION
When it comes to the environment, it has been Freddy’s year.
“Freddy the frog” or more correctly, Leiopelma archeyi or Archey’s frog, has been at the centre of the debate over the relative importance of the economy against the environment.
The problem is that some of Freddy, who has been described as a living fossil, has his prime habitat in the Coromandel ranges, where OceanaGold wants to develop a new gold mine.
“If there is a mining opportunity and it’s impeded by a blind frog, goodbye Freddy,” said Shane Jones, shortly after becoming Resources Minister.
Jones is part of a small group of ministers including Infrastructure and Housing Minister Chris Bishop and Transport and Local Government Minister Simeon Brown who see their role as to kickstart economic growth, simply by building things.
They are the shock troops advancing on some of the previous Government’s environmental regulation and legislation. Coming up behind them is a group of Agriculture Ministers led by Todd McClay with associates Andrew Hoggard and Mark Patterson. The ultimate target is the Resource Management Act (RMA).
Labour’s attempts to reform and simplify the RMA were strangled by nearly three years of tortuous consultation.
That ended last year with the passage of Labour’s Natural and Built Environments Act. It ended up being 946 pages long compared with the 897 pages of the old RMA, which it had been supposed to simplify.
Apart from its length, there were widespread objections to its overly prescriptive approach to environmental management.
National promised during the election campaign to get rid of it and replace it with the old RMA as a transition measure while replacement legislation was drafted.
That is where things are at right now, with the Government having brought the old RMA back and having now published the overriding principles for reform.
Minister Chris Bishop and Simon Court promise the two replacement bills that result from the principles will be less complex than Labour’s legislation.
The first bill will be a rewritten Resource Management Act, and the second will be a Spatial Planning Bill designed to set out overall planning parameters for each region.
But there are yawning gaps in the Bishop-Court proposals.
There is no acknowledgment of Maori beyond saying Treaty settlements will be upheld.
In addition, proposals to limit the number of plans to the 11 regional councils could well provoke the same kind of debate we saw over Three Waters about the Government eliminating the local voice.
There is also no specific mention of the environment in the core tasks the ministers are assigning the new legislation to perform.
A big question may also be how much deviation Act will be prepared to allow from those core tasks if there is a public backlash to the proposals.
Those core tasks all have a strong emphasis on enabling development.
These contrast markedly with Labour’s legislation, which had an overriding purpose to uphold “Te Oranga o te Taiao”, the health of the natural environment.
The Government is showing a strong preference for National Policy Standards to deal with specific environmental issues.
But first, it has to deal with Labour’s National Policy Standard on Freshwater Management, which implemented former Environment Minister David Parker’s pledge to make rivers swimmable.
There were also requirements related to intensive winter grazing.
Federated Farmers had been asking for a redraft of the standard, which would control farmers’ discharges into waterways.
Things came to a head with an Appeal Court decision that essentially meant the local council would have to be “satisfied” that a potential discharge would not exceed the limits in the standard before a permit to enable the discharge could be issued.
The upshot of the court’s decision was an understanding that farmers would now require a resource consent to comply with the RMA.
“This impractical decision is a total disaster for Southland farmers and lacks any common sense,” Southland Federated Farmers spokeswoman Bernadette Hunt said.
“If 3000 local farmers were to all apply to Environment Southland for a consent at the same time, it would completely overload the system.”
And so the Government last month tacked on a requirement in a bill, amending part of the RMA to deal with some other rural issues that stopped councils from going ahead with any more freshwater plans.
Along with the postponement of any action on farm greenhouse gas emissions until 2030, the Government has effectively unwound most of the environmental regulations and legislation the previous Government imposed on farming.
The changes to the urban sector are still in the planning phase, but Bishop is promising a second RMA Amendment Bill that will deal with infrastructure, housing and emergencies, and natural hazards.
The tools will be a mixture of direct legislation and policy standards.
There will be a new National Policy Standard on Infrastructure and work has begun on changes to the National Policy Statement on Urban Development and the National Policy Statement on Highly Productive Land.
It is obvious from all this work that the emphasis of the coalition Government has shifted from environmental protection to resource development.
A backlash is starting to build.
At the conclusion in June of the Environmental Defence Society’s annual conference, its chief executive Gary Taylor said it was clear the pace and scale of the unwinding of environmental and climate policies was causing frustration, anger and anxiety across the country, especially among young New Zealanders.
In September, Forest and Bird chief executive Nicola Toki said New Zealanders had a deep love and affinity with the environment.
“Today, this bond is under threat,” she said. “A suite of policies under the coalition Government demonstrates a disconnect from the people they represent. New Zealanders didn’t vote for a war on nature.”
The environmental organisations were particularly incensed by the fast-track planning legislation, which was a New Zealand First project in the first place and which has been accompanied by Jones touring regional New Zealand applauding infrastructure and mining proposals as he has travelled.
At the same time, the Government is in the process of repealing Labour’s ban on offshore petroleum exploration with amendments to the Crown Minerals Act.
Interestingly, those amendments include a substantial change to the purpose of the legislation.
That is now to “promote” the prospecting for and mining of Crown-owned minerals rather than to “manage” prospecting and mining, as it was in Labour’s legislation.
However, if the resource management picture is largely one of a swing back to enabling development rather than protecting the environment, the coalition’s actions on climate change have been more moderate.
The new minister, Simon Watts, who found himself promoted into Cabinet after the Prime Minister moved Melissa Lee out in April has (so far) stuck with the longer-term greenhouse gas reduction targets endorsed by the previous Government.
The Climate Change Commission has just released its assessment of where New Zealand stands on its Paris Agreement commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from 2005—2030 by 50%.
The second wave of specific targets will be based on this report and will be published by the Government by February next year.
“The good news is our latest report shows that it’s possible, both economically and in practical terms, to substantially reduce domestic emissions,” said Climate Change Commission chairman Dr Rod Carr.
“But only if there’s investment and further action in the next six years, for example, to decarbonise energy, industry and transport.
“Our recent emissions monitoring report showed that New Zealand is making progress but could still fall short of meeting the country’s future emissions budgets.
“We need to increase the momentum with rapid and achievable action to get the country on track.”
The report highlights four major areas for reduction: energy, industry, transport and agriculture.
A pricing system for agriculture emissions has been postponed until 2030 but industry studies show dairy is likely to reach its target of a 10% reduction by 2030 anyway due to land use change and a reduction in stock numbers.
While the fast-track legislation has been promoted by the Prime Minister as a facilitator of wind farms, Jones is placing high hopes on geothermal.
Of the 520MW of new generating capacity expected to come on stream next year, 224 will be geothermal, 176 will be wind and 120 will be solar. But the potential may be much greater.
GNS Science, a Crown Research Institute, has recently published a report highlighting the potential for supercritical geothermal development in New Zealand.
It says that it could provide up to 2000MW of electricity generation capacity by 2050, which would be approximately 35% of New Zealand’s energy needs.
Generation on that scale would help achieve the Climate Change Commission’s proposal that 48% of our car fleet be electric vehicles.
The irony is that the fast-track legislation will enable this scale of energy development, including the provision of additional grid pylons and cables.
So while it is enabling energy transformation, it is possibly risking the life of Freddy when it enables economic development.
At this stage, the Government appears to not be on Freddy’s side.
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