Both the Prime Minister and Economic Growth Minister Nicola Willis have made it pretty clear they are not interested in bipartisan solutions to the major environmental issues confronting New Zealand if that means compromise.
They outlined their positions at the recent National Party Blue Greens conference.
As far as the Prime Minister was concerned, the Resource Management Act stood in the way of growth. When Willis was asked about a possible bipartisan approach, she replied that the last Government was anti-farmer and the current Government was going to rebalance that approach.
That is consistent with the way the Luxon Government conducts itself.
Luxon himself and Ministers like Willis and Simeon Brown embrace every opportunity to bag the previous Labour Government and to criticise its legislation.
But in a Select Committee room this week hearing submissions on the first tranche of changes to the Resource Management Act, an underlying theme has been the need for a bipartisan approach.
That is because planning legislation has an impact that spans Governments.
An Auckland environmental lawyer, Douglas Allan, set out the case for a bipartisan approach in a submission to the Committee.
He said that the Act in 1991 originated in a compromise between the outgoing Labour administration and its then-leader, Geoffrey Palmer and the incoming National Environment Minister, Simon Upton.
He said both believed that if this critical legislation was to have relevance in the future, it would need to have cross-party support.
“The RMA was a compromise, but it was one that all parties bought into,” he said.
But that has changed.
“As a consequence of that consensus, the RMA was left largely untouched for the first 15 years or so of its existence,” Allan said.
“It was only in the early 2000s, by which time there had been sufficient churn in the membership of Parliament for cross-party cooperation on planning and resource management law to ebb, that the RMA began to be criticised substantively and blamed for a wide range of administrative, policy and implementation failures.
“Resource management issues have now become a political football with the consequence that successive governments have sought to impose their will on Parliament and the country, regardless of whether their policies have broader support.
“That may be of little consequence in some areas of the law but is hugely problematic and expensive for the community in the resource management arena because of the long-term implications.”
Allan was critical of the previous Government’s Environment Minister, David Parker, and his controversial (and tortuous) reform process. This led to new legislation in 2023, which the new National Government promptly repealed.
“The previous government’s insistence on passing the (now repealed) Natural and Built Environment Act 2023 and the Spatial Planning Act 2023 in the face of clear opposition in Parliament is an example of the problem,” he said.
“Regrettably, the current government’s intention to replace the RMA with “property rights” based planning legislation is almost inevitably going to repeat that error, which will result in ongoing legislative swings, at great cost to the environment and the public.”
Allan said he had made his plea for a bipartisan consensus for the past decade.
“If you do not get Labour and National and your partners in the room to make the legislation work, you’ll end up in the same position that Mr Parker ended up with last time, where he had new legislation, 800 pages, half-life of about a month because he had not taken everybody along with him,” he said.
The architect of the emphasis in the new legislation on “property rights”, ACT MP and Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Minister for Infrastructure and RMA reform, Simon Court, picked up on the bipartisan theme when he questioned Infrastructure New Zealand’s Policy Director, Michelle McCormick.
He asked her whether it might be possible to achieve bipartisan agreement on the new legislation.
“Yes, I think that we need an enduring system,” she said.
“And it is obvious that with the elements of the previous legislation and with the current amendment program, too, that there is a cross-party agreement on how we actually go forward, how we provide certainty for our communities, and we have environmental standards and bottom lines that we use to protect the surrounding environment, but we also have for developers some certainty.”
But there are obvious fracture points.
McCormick was particularly encouraged by the much greater use of national standards that the new legislation is proposing, but that in itself is controversial with concerns that this would mean an end to “localism”.
While Infrastructure New Zealand welcomes the streamlining and consistency that national standards allow, local Government sees it as an erosion of its power.
They have support from Federated Farmers, which believes national standards should be administered through regional plans.
This is likely to be a divisive issue within National, with some rural MPs supporting Federated Farmers and local government positions.
Dunedin City Councillor Sophie Barker put that local government position to the Committee.
“The (Dunedin City) councillors are really worried about the exclusion of elected members from the streamlined planning process. because we consider that our elected councillors, they’ve done the Making Good Decisions course, they’ve got experience as RMA commissioners, they’ve got experience in our district plan, and also in the review of the district plan, our policies, etc,” she said.
“So we would love to have our local voice in there, and we consider that’s really, really important to have that.
“The government certainly talks about localism, but this seems to be removing some of it.”
In contrast, Mercury Energy worried that Councils might meet the requirement in the Bill before the Committee that consents be disposed of within 12 months by putting unworkable conditions on them just to tick the box.
That clash between the efficiency that national standards deliver and the desire for localism is a potential flash point as the legislation proceeds through the Committee.
And that is the problem.
By its very nature, planning legislation is so political that achieving consensus across the House is both difficult and time-consuming.
After all, it took over three years to reach a bipartisan agreement on the 1991 legislation.
Whether the Prime Minister and his incessant demand for “deliverables” have the patience to achieve that is a moot point.
