There is a mass grave not far from the Beehive, tucked away out of sight behind the Bolton Hotel. The construction of the Wellington Urban Motorway in the 1960s and 70s required the exhumation of thousands of graves from the capital’s oldest cemetery, along with the compulsory acquisition and demolition of hundreds of homes. Entire neighbourhoods were flattened. Auckland experienced similar upheavals: much of Newton and Grafton were gouged through for motorways and their interchanges.
It’s hard to imagine either city without this transport infrastructure. At the same time, it’s easy to see why the grand, nation-building mega-projects of the 20th century that swept aside towns, drowned lakes and bulldozed communities generated so much resentment.
With its sweeping new Fast-track Approvals Bill, announced on the last of its first 100 days in office, the coalition government has unearthed that old debate about what gets built where and who decides. The new legislation will allow it to completely bypass the Resource Management Act, along with a host of other laws – the Conservation Act, the Heritage Act, the Wildlife Act and the Public Works Act – at the discretion of the ministers responsible for regional development, infrastructure and transport, portfolios held by Shane Jones, Chris Bishop and Simeon Brown respectively. They can now grant consent to both public and private projects they believe will address the nation’s economic and infrastructure deficits.
The RMA dates back to 1991. It was a delayed reaction to the authoritarianism of Robert Muldoon and his sweeping National Development Act, and it took decision-making on major infrastructure away from central-planning bureaucrats and politicians and cemented it with communities, including councils, environmental groups and iwi.
The RMA’s critics complain that it has turned New Zealand into a “vetocracy” – a system in which no single entity can approve a decision but many parties have the ability to block developments they don’t like. Consent processes, court fees and compliance costs were blamed for creating extra expense, bureaucracy and uncertainty for business. Environmental groups and iwi complained that the act created an uneven playing field that benefits developers, pointing out that very few consents are declined. By the end of the Key administration, everyone agreed the legislation needed fixing. David Parker – one of Labour’s sharpest policy minds – devoted most of his six years in power to drafting its replacements: the Spatial Planning Act and the Natural and Built Environment Act. Parker’s legislation favoured iwi and environmental concerns.
National and Act raged that the bills were lengthy and complex (the NBA was 900 pages) and overly bureaucratic, vowing to knock them down when the government changed. Now, Parker’s intricate framework is gone, replaced again by the old RMA but also by the inclinations of three powerful ministers. They are vetoing the vetocracy.
Chop chop
The Infrastructure Commission recently reported that New Zealand is in the top 20% of OECD nations in terms of infrastructure spending per capita but the bottom 10% in terms of value delivered. National blames much of this on the regulatory environment – it calls it “red and green tape” – and argues that its fast-track regime is more democratic: it’s easier for voters to see ministers approving projects and hold them accountable than it is to observe a sclerotic regulatory regime that slows everything down and blows out costs.
There’s even an argument that the new approach will be good for our climate emissions, making it easier to bring new wind, solar and geothermal plants online.
Environmental groups quickly noted that the approving ministers did not include either the conservation or environment ministers – but it did contain Jones, a senior New Zealand First MP who is an outspoken advocate for mining the seabed and conservation estate and appears to openly relish the prospect of eliminating rare species standing in the way of the extractive sector.
They’ve also observed the fast-track legislation allows the government to allow “prohibited activities” that may have significant impact on the environment or human health: the discharge of wastewater, toxic substances, the burning of hazardous materials.
Former Green co-leader James Shaw warned that companies operating under such consents might see them withdrawn without compensation under a change of government. Jones suggested he would issue bonds to oil and gas companies that they could redeem if such a withdrawal came to pass.
The government doesn’t have to worry about Green Party voters, a constituency that will hate it no matter what it does. But there’s a much larger cohort of non-Green greenies: hunters, boaties, trampers and small businesses in the tourism sector that rely on the natural environment for their income.
They’re indifferent to campaigns against cis-white men but will react with fury if Jones discharges effluent into their favourite fishing spot. In May 2010, an estimated 20,000-50,000 people marched through downtown Auckland protesting against the Key government’s plans to mine conservation land and marine reserves. It quickly backed away from the scheme.
Big fault line
The other great flaw in this approach to decision-making – the vast, opencast fissure in the consent process – is its susceptibility to lobbying and political donations. Bishop and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon have pointed out that nations such as Singapore and Denmark have similar consenting regimes. But those countries also enjoy more robust regulation of their political processes than here. There has already been one lobbying scandal around New Zealand First and its proximity to the tobacco industry.
Luxon and Bishop have aggressively defended their new regime – claiming they’re making themselves accountable, and taking the “tough decisions” previous governments have evaded. But if the torrents of money in our politics merge with a flood of dubious consents streaming from the Beehive, they might find themselves digging up more than coal and lithium and discharging more than wastewater: they could find themselves choking on political toxins, then burying their prospects for re-election in a fast-tracked mass grave.
