Ruining future without consent

Some National MPs now openly acknowledge that burning fossil fuels is causing climate change. PHOTO/THINKSTOCK

Internationally our Resource Management Act (RMA) was considered a groundbreaking piece of legislation to retain a healthy and viable environment as well as allowing appropriate development. This National government has used the fact that a few resource consents have caused "uncertainty, cost and delay" to try and hobble dissension to their pet projects.

Submissions to resource consents are our right, and haven't hobbled projects - probably more often helped them become more sustainable.

Very few have been appealed (about 1 per cent) and fewer than 0.6 per cent have been denied.

The RMA was the first statutory planning regime to incorporate the principle of sustainability. To remind those who think sustainable is just a word to bandy about, it means, in this case, being able to maintain an environment capable of providing all the services it currently does for the foreseeable future.

To the members of Act and the Business Round Table, the foreseeable future seems to be only as far as next year's balance sheet.

Increased profits rely on continuous growth which, as I have mentioned before, requires exponentially increasing the use of resources - the opposite of sustainability.

Any thought or concern that future generations ought to be able to pursue a lifestyle similar to today's seems to have eluded those in the Act party who, as part of their election campaign, have proposed that the RMA be scrapped. Perhaps replacing it with the Resources for Me Act.

Joking aside, do they not have any children or grandchildren? It's obvious that future generations are too far into the future for Act to even be able to visualise or worry about.

Similarly the forward vision of the What Lives Down Under? roadshow was about 65 million years less than their balance sheet, but these same oil moguls are quite happy to waste resources that had taken millions of years to create.

The oil company's What Lives Down Under? roadshow was their propagandists using dinosaurs to allay genuine concerns about off shore oil drilling. They were intent on convincing visitors that life would be unliveable without oil and its products with no mention of the consequences of continuing to use fossil fuels and what living with climate change might be like.

Climate change is another area where Act is still way behind even the National party, who have finally acknowledged that burning fossil fuels is causing climate change. Well, most National MPs have, except Simon Bridges appears still unable to make the connection that you can't extract oil without it adding to climate change.

The RMA is specifically about "managing the use, development and protection of natural and physical resources in a way, or at a rate which enables people and communities to provide for their social, economic, and cultural well-being" - that is, sustainable.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Jan Wright, has commented that the RMA must not become an economic development act.

The removal of the RMA as proposed by Act would do just.

John Milnes is an appreciator of the natural world and continually in awe of its inter-related complexity - also a grandparent.