The Coalition Government says work has begun on stopping further designations of Significant Natural Areas (SNAs) on private farmland, but no timeframe has been given for completion of the task.
There have also been briefings on how to go about ending work on SNAs from the Ministry for the Environment.
SNAs are hugely contentious and provoked large protests from farmers and others in 2021.
A halt to further development of SNAs was included in the coalition agreement between National and Act.
Act’s Simon Court is parliamentary under-secretary for reforming the Resource Management Act (RMA) and says the first stage of the process is complete: the repeal of the previous Government’s landmark replacements for the RMA.
“In the second phase, there will be some targeted amendments to the RMA to make it easier to farm,” Court says.
“We will be focusing on the National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity - that’s where councils have been told to map green areas on farmers farms.”
These are the SNAs that farmers have long complained about.
They say SNAs can impose high legal costs, and worse still, penalise farmers who have taken steps to improve their environment.
That is because the beautiful landscapes they create attract attention from councils, which then put a protection order on the land.
But farmers who don’t care about the landscape don’t get noticed in the first place, are not hit with protection measures, and so incur lower costs.
Court says these matters will be dealt with.
“We need to carry out targeted amendments as soon as practical, while we get on with wholesale reforms….as far as I’m aware, it’s a policy under development with no timing set in, but it will be done as soon as possible.”
SNAs are not the only things farmers are concerned about on the basis of the costs they can impose from rulings by local councils. Others are Outstanding Natural Landscapes (ONLs) and Sites and Areas of Significance to Maori (SASMs).
Court says these matters will be dealt with by the substantive reform of the RMA, at a later date than SNAs.
“The basis of resource management reform is to establish a new resource management system based on property rights,” he says.
“It’s quite clear a lot of things are stopping New Zealanders from getting on with building and stopping farmers from farming and stopping infrastructure from being built in a timely manner," Court says.
“We need this to be addressed in a comprehensive way - it’s for the next 30 years - so that’s a long-term programme of reform which we’ll be working on this year.”
In the meantime, “our message to farmers is that this government is working on a 100-day commitment to make it easier to farm, starting with policies like getting rid of SNAs.”
The board member who deals with these matters for Federated Farmers is Mark Hooper. He is pleased SNAs are being dealt with.
“The West Coast has huge swathes of private land which would be captured by SNAs - obviously there’s a high level of concern about the loss of property rights and the ability to graze some land or further develop it, whether it’s part of land use rotation or improved pasture clearing," says Hooper.
“The problem is that it’s a recipe for uncertainty, for increased costs, potentially perverse outcomes and less effective management of private land.”
Meanwhile, hostility to SNAs is not universal.
Environmentalists have long argued they can protect biodiversity, which is threatened by species extinction.
In addition, SNAs are less economically damaging than farmers sometimes allege.
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