The new system includes two Acts, focusing on land use and environmental protection, with standardised zoning. Video / Mark Mitchell
The Government plans to reduce land use zones from 1175 to about 13 and streamline resource management plans from over 100 to about 16. Economic analysis on the reforms calculates there could be a $14.8 billion benefit
Christopher Luxon, Chris Bishop, and Simon Court announced the reforms, aiming to replace the Resource Management Act with two new laws focused on land use and the environment.
Critics, including Chris Hipkins and Lan Pham, raised concerns about the absence of Treaty principles and environmental protections in the proposed legislation.
“The RMA is broken and everyone knows it. It makes it too hard to build the infrastructure and houses New Zealand desperately needs, too hard to use our abundant natural resources, and hasn’t resulted in better management of our natural environment,” Bishop said.
The Government published a blueprint for the reforms on Monday, with Bishop confirming the reforms would repeal and replace the RMA with two separate pieces of legislation, one focused on land use and development, and another focused on the environment.
The reforms follow the release of a blueprint from the Government’s Expert Advisory Group on RMA reform, appointed last year. A minority report was also released, dissenting from the blueprint on some key areas — in the case of thins like the place of the Treaty, the Government appears to have sided with the minority report.
An independent economic analysis, conducted by Castalia, reckoned that if the EAG’s recommendations were implemented, the benefits would be worth $14.8b in present value terms — this figure is comprised of $11.3b in compliance cost reductions and $3.5b in reduced administrative costs. The consultancy warned the estimates were very uncertain.
The bills will be introduced before the end of the year, passed before the election, and enter into force before the next round of district plans from councils in 2027.
The main changes include a great deal more standardisation at a national level and reducing councils’ remit to interfere with people’s private property. Externalities, the term for something that you do with your property that affects someone else, will be controlled, but otherwise the thrust of the reforms is to allow people to do with their property what they will.
This is a change from the status quo, which allows councils a broad scope to control the effects of something happening on private land. Over time, councils have interpreted effects management very broadly, giving them great scope to dictate how people use their land. Detractors argue this has stifled development, inflated house prices, and caused the housing crisis.
National standardisation
In practical terms, standardisation will mean, to use an example of Bishop’s, that the current rules that enforce maximum building heights in residential zones of 9 metres in Kāpiti and 8m in Dunedin will go in favour of one single national rule.
Councils’ bespoke land zoning has meant New Zealand has 1175 zones. Standardising these at a national level will reduce the overall number. Although Bishop would not say how many the Government would end up with, he said he wanted to get it closer to 13, the number in Japan, than 1175.
Stuart Donovan, senior fellow at Motu Research, said this could encourage developers to branch out of their regional fiefdoms. Currently, zoning is so balkanised that even large developers tend to stick to one or a few main centres because branching out requires reconfiguring to different planning rules.
National standardisation would make this easier, encouraging developers to branch out and ply their trade in multiple councils.
it is not just private developers who are likely to benefit from standardisation, but public entities like Kāinga Ora, which are need to build in councils the length of the country. Currently, they have to contend with the bespoke zoning conditions of each council. Under the new system, this would be streamlined into a smaller number of nationally applicable zones.
James Kirkpatrick Group plans this mass timber office block for 538 Karangahape Rd, but had its consent rejected under the existing rules. Photo / Resource consent application to Auckland Council
Donovan offered another example.
Currently, councils, including Auckland Council, have given themselves the right to “get involved in the weeds of the internal configurations of apartments”.
This means the council concerns itself with things like whether it is possible for someone to see the TV from the likely location of their sofa. Donovan said the emphasis on “externalities” rather than “effects”, which is a focus of the current regime, would change this.
He said that overall, he found the proposals “more enabling” than the status quo.
“From an economic perspective, I’d say that’s good,” Donovan said.
He was also supportive of removing councils’ ability to consider trade competition. Currently, competition is an effect that councils are able to manage. This means councils have the ability to zone in a way that can be anti-competitive, preventing, for example, multiple supermarkets from opening close to each other and competing to reduce prices.
Treaty principles clause ruled out, despite expert group recommendation
Bishop said the bills would honour existing Treaty settlements but would not include a Treaty principles clause.
This is a significant departure from the RMA, with includes a Treaty principles clause. This clause has been responsible for a great deal of litigation.
This went against the recommendations of the Government’s RMA Expert Advisory Group, which recommended the new regime should “retain” the Treaty principles clause of the RMA, which requires “persons exercising powers and functions under the RMA to take into account the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi”.
They said this should be supplemented with more proscriptive guidance on how to give effect to the principles.
Bishop said Cabinet had “ruled this out”.
A minority report by one of the members of the group, Paul Melville, who works for Federated Farmers, and who formerly worked for National’s research unit, proposed a “[d]escriptive Treaty of Waitangi clause outlining how existing Treaty settlements are to be provided for”.
The report said decisions made by councils regarding the Treaty should be made by councils alone, rather than jointly. Those decisions would be constrained by a descriptive Treaty clause included in the primary legislation.
Former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Environment Minister David Parker also repealed and replaced the RMA. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Labour leader Chris Hipkins took aim at the fact the bills will not include a Treaty principles clause.
“Ultimately, the Treaty itself creates some guarantees for Māori and non-Māori when it comes to New Zealand’s natural resources. The fact they are talking about a law that dictates how natural resources can be used in New Zealand without any reference to the Treaty is a step backwards,” he said
He added that Labour had itself repealed and replaced the RMA with two new laws. Those laws were repealed by the coalition and replaced by the reinstated RMA, which will be repealed again and replaced by the coalition’s two replacements.
“They’ve just been running round in circles for the last year and a half,” Hipkins said.
Fewer plans
Some of the coalition’s proposals pick up from Labour’s. Under the RMA, councils are required to put together more than 100 separate plans. Labour’s reforms streamlined this to 15 plans, roughly corresponding to each of New Zealand’s 16 regions.
Court said the “intention” of these reforms would be to reduce the number of plans to “one per region”. This plan would include plans for environmental management and chapters for each district or city.
“Rather than having it as a hierarchy, as it currently is, with the regional council developing their own policy and plans and every city and district having to work out how to comply with the regional council as well as national rules, there will be one plan per region – it will be far simpler,” Court said.
Court and Bishop said this would front-load planning, creating a far less burdensome regime for developers.
This was the intent of Labour’s regime, shepherded into law by then-Environment Minister David Parker.
Court said there was a major difference, which was that Labour’s regimes outsourced planning to regional committees, but the coalition’s will require councils themselves to “plan and get democratic sign-off for their plans”.
Labour’s rules also required a minimum of two Māori representatives on planning committees, which caused controversy from some who argued it was too many and others who were concerned it did not go far enough – the Waitangi Tribunal suggested the committees should be co-governed.
Labour’s Environment Spokeswoman Rachel Brooking told the Herald that strong parts of Labour’s regime look to have been replicated in the new approach.
She added that splitting the planning and environmental rules into two different pieces of legislation “will lead to complexities and it is unclear how these Acts will ‘speak’ to each other” and that it was unclear how the environment would be considered in an urban setting, for example, sediment runoff.
Brooking said she wrote to Bishop in December 2023 offering to work in a bipartisan fashion on resource management reform and that offer still stood.
The Greens’ environment spokeswoman Lan Pham called the announcement “vague”, and said she wanted to see promises of environmental protection in the bill.
Pham said the Government’s environmental record cast doubt on the sincerity of its claims.
“We know what ‘continuing to protect the environment’ means to this Government. It means removing freshwater protections, bulldozing over our biodiversity, mining on conservation land, and fast-tracking the already rapid deterioration of our natural world,” she said.
EDS Chief Executive Gary Taylor gave the proposal a mixed review.
Taylor was pleased to see a commitment to spatial planning, which will give people certainty about what development can go where, as well as a “commitment to environmental limits” and “bottom lines”.
“Setting environmental bottom lines across all domains is a key outcome that we need. There’s a clear focus needed to get quality environmental outcomes,” he said.
However he was concerned about the “hyperbolic language” of the announcement.
“[S]ome of the ideological drivers around property rights and regulatory takings are cause for concern,” he said in a statement.
Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.
