A National administration is pledging to repeal - by Christmas 2023 - Labour's reforms of the Resource Management Act (RMA) currently going through parliament, party leaders say.
The most important reform is the Natural and Built Environment Bill. The others are the Spatial Planning Bill and the Climate Adaptation Bill.
The Natural and Built Environment Bill has just been reported back from Parliament's Environment Select Committee.
The RMA was widely accused of throttling initiative in red tape, and successive attempts to improve it since it was passed in 1991 have been blamed for making the problem worse.
That is also what the latest change will do, according to the National Party politician in charge of this matter, Chris Bishop.
"The RMA is broken, but any reform of the RMA must actually improve things and be worth the considerable cost of change," he says.
Labour's reforms "will make it harder to get things done, will not improve the environment and will actually be worse than what we have got now".
"Environment Minister David Parker sees RMA reform as his legacy, but after five and a half years, it is deeply depressing that this is the best he can come up with."
Bishop says the reform will increase bureaucracy, will significantly increase legal complexity and litigation, will remove local decision-making, and even put our decarbonisation goals at risk.
It would also produce extensive litigation that the country cannot afford.
Bishop also accuses the Government of ignoring submissions against the bill.
He says if National Is elected it would be gone by the end of the year.
In an explanatory note, the committee says the bill seeks to shift the focus of the current resource management system from managing adverse effects to promoting positive outcomes.
Bishop rejects this.
14 Comments
Which interest group's positive outcome will this bill promote? All the Labour and Green party interests I presume.
Like reducing lanes on the roads to promote 'safety', spending money to clog up the traffic, I imagine there will be various perverse and self destructive outcomes from this bill and people like myself will hold their noses and vote National just to get rid of the mess.
I don't like that Wayne Brown is attempting to sell any asset Auckland owns but if this crowd is the only alternative to the present govt then it is what it is.
A 900 page legislative change will not make things quicker, easier or better [depending on your definition of better of course]. All left of centre govts in the west want to do is shut down the last 200 years of hard work. All this will do is put us back into the pack of the developing nations or worse. There has to be a smarter version of this going forward, without killing it & everyone in it during the process.
Bollocks - you need to do some homework. As does Eric - this is reporting, not journalism.
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/ start with the right-hand of the Animated Series; the Great Simplification one. Then traverse the whole site.
In that light, the RMA was already deficient (the Brundtland definition was inadequate):
https://www.albartlett.org/articles/art_meaning_of_sustainability_2012m…
Now that you're educated, you'll realise that National are about nothing more than raping the chances of your children, and theirs. There is a slim chance we can dig our way out of the ecological hole we've dug ourselves over the last 200 years - they're just advocating a bigger spade.
Not that it matters; events seem to be overtaking us....
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