Federated Farmers: Reform loses momentum

National MP Nick Smith wanted changes made to the RMA.

The Government has backed off major reform of the Resource Management Act due to lack of numbers of votes in Parliament after the Northland by-election.

How far the reforms would have gone to assist rural economic development was not very clear in the first instance anyway.

None of this makes radical reform any less necessary.

The RMA's purpose is well known, sustainable management. In a general sense, the RMA is made up of three parts -- its purpose, its principles and its processes.

Ultimately, all decisions made under the RMA come down to whether or not the RMA's purpose will be achieved, decisions that are informed by balancing the principles, made according to the prescribed processes.

There is no serious challenge to the RMA's purpose. The courts have developed a clear explanation of what sustainable management means, so there is little to be gained from tinkering with that purpose.

The current set of RMA principles is highly enviro-centric, and it's amongst those principles adjustments to the balance the RMA seeks to achieve can best be made.

The principles are a hierarchy. The Government floated the idea of levelling out that hierarchy and introducing a new set of methods on how the RMA was to be applied.

Yet, had the idea progressed, it would have elevated some of the lower ranked enviro-centric principles in such a way the overall outcome would likely have been adverse to farmers, despite the methods being generally favourable.

Just as there is no momentum for changing the purpose of the RMA, there is none for changing the high level principles. For the moment, meaningful reform of the RMA would best be achieved by leaving the purpose and high level principles alone.

Some serious resource management problems can be addressed by adjusting the lower-ranked principles. The introduction of principles into the RMA to give particular regard to delivering development would go a long way towards better achieving the RMA's sustainable management purpose.

Delivering vitally needed infrastructure has become both an urban and rural problem. Transport links are needed in Auckland, as are water supply dams in rural areas.

Too often the delivery of this infrastructure is thwarted when the balancing of the principles the RMA requires comes down against development.

Horror stories in the delivery of sustainable management abound. Tales of farmers spending many multiples more on resource consent for an activity than the activity costs continue.

Recently it cost an Auckland farmer more than $15,000 to get consent for clearing a waterway, when the cost of the actual clearance was less than $1000.

There is widespread agreement that changes are needed to the RMA's processes to put a stop to this, and addressing the problem at plan preparation time is a way.

Activities that should be permitted often require consent, and the activity status given to the consent is often higher than it needs to be.

Reviving the Government's earlier proposed "methods" would address this, as would requiring the lowest and least arduous activity status reasonable in the circumstances to be applied to activities.

Radical reform of the country's resource management arrangements is needed, but such reform needs to be built around a new ethic, which has yet to be developed and which, given the political environment, looks far away.

There isn't the time to wait for the development of a new system to manage the nation's resources, so we must make do with changes to the existing arrangements. Adjustment to the RMA's lower-ranked principles and modification of some of its processes will have to do for now.