RMA reform addresses environmental needs of our urbanised society

Wednesday, 29 July 2020

Environment Minister says a long awaited overhaul of the RMA's planning laws will put new dairy farm conversions off the agenda in some regions. (First published July 25, 2020)

OPINION: If the recommendations of the Resource Management Review Panel are accepted, we will see a new commitment to the wellbeing of present and future generations while recognising the concept of Te Mana o te Taiao (health and wellbeing of the environment).

This review of the RMA (Resource Management Act) also recognises that New Zealand is a largely urban nation and there is greater commitment to directly addressing the complex issue of achieving good quality and environmentally informed urban development.

The Christchurch city skyline. The review of the RMA recognises that New Zealand is now a largely urban nation.

Comprehensive and wide-ranging changes are being proposed, with the RMA replaced by a Natural and Built Environments Act and a Strategic Planning Act.

The former would focus on enhancing environmental quality, essentially what the RMA set out to do. The latter would promote the strategic integration of functions across the resource management system through development of regional spatial strategies.

* Scrap and replace the RMA, official report to Government says

The Government announced a comprehensive review of the RMA in July 2019 to deal with an increasingly dysfunctional act. The review panel, chaired by the retired Court of Appeal Judge, Tony Randerson, QC, was required to report on how to improve environmental outcomes and better enable urban and other development within environmental limits.

Central government is also to have a much greater role in the new resource management system, through the use of targets, including environmental limits or standards. This creates a stronger role for the existing RMA National Environmental Standards (NES) and National Policy Statements (NPS), which central government has only started to use in earnest in the last 15 years or so.

These will be expanded and integrated to form a single document.

Water allocation and management, a contentious area already slated for major reform, is likely to be one of the foci of such involvement. There is also to be more direction from central government on how these issues are to be reflected in all plans produced under the new acts, which seems to predicate a stronger role for the Ministry for the Environment or an expanded Environmental Protection Authority.

Environment Minister David Parker commissioned the Resource Management Review Panel.

Treaty of Waitangi principles get greater recognition

A new National Māori Advisory Board will be created, presumably to ensure the Te Mana o te Taiao pillar of the new legislation is achieved. There is also an ongoing commitment to the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi remaining a mandatory part of all planning and decision-making.

As in the past, central government will have a stronger presence in the planning system, to ensure greater uniformity of planning across New Zealand. There seems the potential for greater central government involvement to crowd out or limit the involvement of communities in shaping the planning and management of their local environment.

The most significant changes are in what plans will be needed, what those plans will address and who will make them.Reflecting concerns about the number and complexity of plans required under the RMA, the panel believes regulatory plans need to be simplified and integrated.

The most challenging aspect of the proposed reforms is surely the new Strategic Planning Act. It will require the creation of a regional spatial plan for development which is ‘’consistent with the purposes of the Natural and Built Environments Act, Local Government Act and Land Transport Management Act, national direction, the national adaptation plan under the Climate Change Response Act and relevant government policy statements’’.

Its construction will require territorial and regional councils and mana whenua to work together to produce a plan with a higher degree of integration than has ever been achieved in existing plans.

Under the Natural and Built Environments Act, all councils will have to produce a single regulatory plan that will reflect national directions and the regional spatial plan. Hearings for such plans will, as with the Auckland Spatial Plan, be in the hands of an independent hearings committee.

There is also a clear intention to settle development standards and potential disputes through the plan hearing process, reducing the number of consents and the potential costs and delays of that system. Consents would require a robust Environmental Impact Assessment, but what are called localised disputes would be settled by alternative dispute resolution processes.

Monitoring would be improved with the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment being given a wider auditing role.

The proposal can only be called ambitious, requiring totally new ways of planning for New Zealand. On past experience, wholesale change is usually stressful and expensive, while not always delivering the outcomes sought. It is also more of a ‘’one size fits all’’ approach to planning, which may clash with communities’ desires to forge plans which reflect their views and ambitions.

In a post-Covid-19, fiscally constrained world, it may also be a proposal with a too expensive price tag.

Dr Caroline Miller is an Associate Professor in the Resource and Environmental Planning Programme, School of People, Environment and Planning at Massey University and is a Fellow of the New Zealand Planning Institute.