Parliament’s Environment Select Committee has today released its report on the Natural Environment Bill and Planning Bill. Together, the Bills will replace the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA).
“The Committee’s lengthy majority report completely fails to address the massive concerns we had with the Bills when they were introduced,” said EDS Reform Director Dr Greg Severinsen.
“In fact, the recommendations will make the Bills even worse.
“The framework for regulatory relief is the most alarming. Councils will still have to give compensation to landowners when certain public interest protections are imposed, including for areas of indigenous biodiversity and for outstanding landscapes. Relief would be required where there is a ‘significant impact’ on the reasonable use of someone’s land, a term which the Minister gets to define.
“There is no way councils could afford to pay to keep existing rules, many of which have been in place for a long time, let alone set new ones. According to advice received by the Committee, it could cost ratepayers billions of dollars to retain them.
“Vast tracts of legitimate environmental protections will need to be erased. Going through the process will itself cost millions, take years, and involve armies of bureaucrats and lawyers at council, Planning Tribunal and Environment Court levels.
“The Bills’ framework for environmental limits has been gutted even further.
“Ministers will get to resolve conflicts between environmental limits and economic development however they wish. There’s been a doubling down on the idea that there should be no legal hierarchy or prioritisation in the Bills, even for basic protections like for water quality. Astonishingly, this means that all reference to limits is being scrubbed from the goals of the Bills entirely, lest they be seen as something that actually constrains development goals.
“When setting limits, like the amount of threatened species’ habitat that can be cleared or how much pollution can enter a river, there’s still an explicit direction to balance the environment against the economic aspirations of communities. That’s not a limit.
“Exemptions to limits have been broadened hugely as well. Instead of being limited to significant infrastructure, the Minister can allow limits to be breached for any activity if they are of the opinion that its ‘public benefits’ outweigh its harm, which could include almost any form of development.
“And there are still big barriers if councils want to regulate. Rules on land use and inputs, like how much fertiliser can be applied to farms, are not allowed at all unless non-regulatory measures are looked at first. Heavy reliance is being placed on voluntary actions. It looks like this has been written by sectoral interests and will pit town against country.
“Severe constraints on public participation are still there too. People are almost entirely cut out.
“Public notification of environmental consents will be allowed only where they generate significant adverse effects. Even then, people will have to reside in the relevant district or region to submit.
“Where councils choose to just paint by numbers by adopting national standards, people will have no ability at all to submit or appeal on the merits of plans. That leaves unique and complex environments like the Mackenzie Basin and Fiordland in an extraordinarily risky position, because they need bespoke management.
“Concerns also go well beyond environmental ones. The Regulations Review Committee described Ministerial powers in the Bills as Henry VIII clauses – meaning they essentially allow the government to alter the effect of primary legislation. This warning has fallen on deaf ears, with no changes recommended.
“Ultimately, the majority recommendations fail to fix the fundamentally flawed core of the Bills. It is clear throughout the report that the strong advice received from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has been systematically ignored.
“Let’s call a spade a spade: what we are seeing is a dismantling of decades of environmental progress.
“All this means the proposed system lacks bipartisan support. The Committee’s report contains scathing minority views from opposition MPs, which describe the Bills as an embarrassment. The new laws may well come crashing down if the government changes.
“It’s also nonsensical that deep legislative reform is being done at the same time as significant policy shifts and institutional changes, including to councils that are expected to implement all this. If we do everything at once, the system may slow to a crawl or cease to function at all as it descends into chaos.
“We need to hit pause and give more serious consideration to creating a system that will actually work. Unfortunately, that looks unlikely. The Bills will now proceed to their second reading and the Committee of the Whole, where members of Parliament will be able to debate them in detail. We will be watching closely for any further changes, especially a big item that has been kicked down the road by the Committee – how the goals of the two Bills are meant to interact with each other.
“Next week EDS is running a webinar exploring the Committee’s recommendations in more detail, and what they might mean,” concluded Dr Severinsen.
More: Greg Severinsen greg@eds.org.nz 021 585 951