As Parliament’s Environment Committee begins what is likely to be a big job, hearing submissions on the two new resource management bills, it has called in Simon Upton, a frequent critic of Government environmental policies, to give advice.
Upton is the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment.
It is not unusual for officers of Parliament like him to advise Select Committees. The Auditor General does so frequently.
But Upton is more than a watchdog; he is also an advocate for the environment and the best practices to manage it.
Already, he has been a strong critic of aspects of the current Government’s Fast Track Approvals legislation.
However, his advice has largely been ignored by the Resource Management Reforms Minister, Chris Bishop.
That has been most notable with his criticism of the centralisation of powers in the Fast Track legislation, particularly an amendment Bill which would allow the Minister to issue a “Government Policy Statement” on any particular application.
A headline in Upton’s list of preliminary questions that the Committee might ask reads: “Greater emphasis on top-down direction and decision-making.”
“One of the policy intentions behind the Bills is to constrain, more tightly than is the case in the RMA, the discretion available to decision makers at both the plan making and consenting levels,” he said.
“The proposed system seeks to achieve this by providing greater emphasis on legislated goals and new or revised directive ‘national instruments’, including standards, from which lower order documents and decisions are given restricted scope to deviate.”
Before the election, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon was a strong advocate of “localism”, which he had picked up from Oliver Hartwich, the CEO of the centre-right think tank, the New Zealand Initiative.
Hartwich was confident that Luxon would go down the localism path in Government.
“Whatever you want to call it – decentralisation, localism or subsidiarity – there is plenty of it in our emerging three-party coalition,” he said.
“They all want to shift responsibility from Wellington to local communities.”
But though Luxon might still believe in localism, his RMA Reform Minister, Chris Bishop, clearly does not.
“The changes that are included in these two bills are designed to create a greater sense of coherence and synthesis at the national level, particularly around planning because doing things different ways around the country has driven up cost and had all those time issues that we’ve talked about previously that I know you’ll be very familiar with,” he told Committee on Monday.
Upton recommends that the Committee ask submitters whether the emphasis on top-down direction would leave sufficient scope for “bottom-up” or community-led approaches to managing environmental pressures.
“The new system proposes to focus public participation on the development of national instruments and the development of the combined regional plan (made up of the spatial plan, district land-use plans and a regional environment plan),” he said.
“Where councils use the nationally standardised zones and overlays, the public will not be able submit on the details of any rules that apply to those zones.
“This is a significant shift from the existing RMA approach.
“People have got used to being able to ‘have a say’ about things that they feel affect them or shape their neighbourhoods, cities, districts and regions, even if they are not directly affected.
“Public participation on consents and permits in the new system appears mostly limited to those directly affected, presumably, in most cases, immediate neighbours.
“Appeal rights may also be very limited.”
He said that, therefore, a key question the Committee should ask would be whether there would be sufficient opportunities and representation under the new legislation for people to shape the communities in which they live.
But Upton’s concerns go further than where the planning decisions should be made.
It seems he and Bishop have a fundamental philosophical difference on what the role of resource management legislation is.
On Monday, Bishop was quite blunt.
“Do you want a planning system that facilitates the great problem of New Zealand public life for the last 30 years, which is a lack of growth, which is the root cause of so many social problems in New Zealand? “ he said.
“The answer is yes.
“So, we’ve put economic growth in the goals.
“And you can argue against it if you want.”
The legislation proposes to deal with overall environmental protection goals by setting environmental limits.
Upton said these were expected to protect the natural environment, but where these limits would be set, and how they would be implemented and enforced, has been left to Ministers to develop after enactment through national instruments.
“Protection of the environment is just one goal to be balanced or weighed against other system goals (e.g. enable use and development), and councils can dial back the limits if they can issue a justification report,” he said.
Again, he warns about the centralisation of the setting of the limits.
“Is it appropriate for ministers to have discretion over the activities to be exempt from complying with limits?” he said.
“Is it clear what those activities will be or what the process for granting those exemptions includes?
“Are there provisions in the legislation sufficient to ensure that ecological limits have appropriate levels of protection or ambition for improvement, and do not just bed in, or worsen, existing pollution and stresses from human activity?”
He said the new system would require significantly more resources from central Government for it to function properly.
“In particular, the setting and monitoring of environmental limits will require considerably more information,” he said.
He said the Committee should be asking what investments in environmental information were planned.
“Will these investments be made by central government and will they be on a scale and within a timeframe that can meaningfully feed into the transition to a new system?” he said.
Ironically, one of the country’s leading environmental organisations, the Environmental Defence Society, approves of the central Government having more powers under the new legislation.
“A retreat from national involvement in setting limits for ecosystem health is also philosophically unsound,” it says in its submission.
“Although it took many years to occur, the RMA envisaged from the outset that national direction would be promulgated for matters having national significance.
“Preventing national minima for things like freshwater quality/flows and indigenous biodiversity is essentially saying that the people who live in (or own property in) a region are the only ones to whom decision-makers should be accountable for environmental outcomes having national significance.
“This creates a postcode lottery approach that would now be unthinkable for other nationally important outcomes.
“It also threatens nationally important economic and social interests, because locally set limits may not sufficiently recognise the importance of the environment to sectors like tourism or outcomes like physical and mental wellbeing that have national costs and benefits.”
Upton, on the other hand, takes a more philosophical approach.
He said the Committee should be asking whether the legislation allowed sufficient opportunities and representation for people to shape the communities in which they lived.
It is this philosophical divide, between the centre and the local, which will be one of the key debates as the Committee hears the submissions on it.
But the very fact that the Committee has called Upton in suggests that Bishop might yet have to convince it of the merits of his proposed legisaltion.
