RMA overhaul promises faster consents but less certainty, experts say

Wednesday, 22 July 2026

Minister Responsible for RMA Reform Chris Bishop.

Parliament’s environment committee published reports on the Government’s two RMA replacement bills this week.

The proposed regime could speed up processing times and expand 'permitted activities' that no longer require council consent.

But independent advisers and experts warn the multi-tiered 'funnel' structure gives ministers significant power, creating a risk of legal challenges and rule changes whenever governments shift.

Parliament’s environment committee published reports on the Government’s resource management replacement bills on Tuesday, totalling a whopping 1511 pages in length. For most Kiwis, that’s too much to digest. But lucky for you, Stuff has a handy guide for dummies to the Government’s proposed regime. Now, Stuff’s political reporter Emma Ricketts has taken a look at the committee’s recommendations to answer a key question: will these changes actually make consenting more efficient?

If there’s one thing Chris Bishop doesn’t like, it’s the existing Resource Management Act. It is “too slow, too expensive, and too unpredictable”, the Minister for RMA Reform said this week.

One of his biggest jobs over the past three years has been leading the work to replace it. Again.

The previous Labour government repealed and replaced the RMA in 2023. Just months later, the coalition Government repealed the new laws - the Spatial Planning Act and Natural and Built Environment Act - and reinstated the RMA while they worked on their own reform.

“The previous Labour Government claimed the NBA would simplify planning rules, but the Act (a 900-page monster) was just as long as the RMA, and it introduced significant new legal complexity and uncertainty,” Bishop said when Labour’s bills were repealed.

It’s been the bane of developers, councils, builders, contractors, farmers, investors and politicians for decades. But will the latest RMA replacement attempt last the distance?

His new bills - the Planning Bill and Natural Environment Bill - are shorter, running to 743 in their initial form. (The post-committee versions are 1169 pages combined, but this includes the committee’s suggested changes and would be an unfair comparison).

But this leaves an outstanding question - will they reduce legal complexity and uncertainty?

Here’s what the experts (and the select committee) had to say.

The bills will make consenting more efficient…

According to the New Zealand Planning Institute’s head of advocacy, Liz Moncrieff, Bishop’s bills are likely to make obtaining consents faster.

The new regime will mean more activities are permitted as of right, and less consents will be required, she said.

“Once the whole system is actually set up, there is a potential for things to move more quickly. That would require a stable set of national instruments from the Government, but … it will mean more permitted activities. And if that happens, that’s quite a few more activities that don’t need permission.”

Bill McKay, a senior planning lecturer at Auckland University, said the consents that are needed will be faster to obtain too - something he didn’t necessarily agree with.

“These bills have less environmental protection and less iwi participation. That will mean less compliance costs, less processing time,” he said.

…but may contribute to greater uncertainty

However, while the proposed bills would likely make things quicker, both Moncrieff and McKay said they risk contributing more uncertainty to the system.

Labour’s resource management spokesperson, Rachel Brooking, warned of this as well.

“The bills have this funnel approach, and they have a whole lot of goals that are in conflict with each other,” she said.

The “funnel” approach was explained by the committee. In short, the bills create a system with multiple levels where each level is designed to give effect to the one above it.

So national instruments - set by central government - would be implemented through regional spatial plans, which in turn would be implemented through land use and natural environment plans set at district level.

Labour’s resource management spokesperson Rachel Brooking.

Stuff’s RMA reform for dummies explains what that could mean in practice, here.

But two independent advisers appointed by the committee - the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE) and Bronwyn Carruthers KC - both advised that this structure could undermine the system’s stability.

A change by the minister would lead to changes in the rest of the system, Carruthers said, while the PCE warned those changes introduced “the potential for endless churn following every change of government and resulting in uncertainty for system users.”

The committee ultimately decided that the bills strike the right balance despite their advisers’ warnings, while Bishop told Stuff the design will mean people can “get on with things”.

“The funnel structure is not so much about government direction, although that is an important part of the system. The funnel is more about making sure that decisions are made at the right level,” he said.

“So, at a spatial planning level, you map out your growth areas, your infrastructure corridors, your sites of significance. Then you move further down towards more standardised plans at a district level … and then at an individual consenting level, there's more ability to do things without having to go further up the system.”

The problem is the amount of power this gives to the minister of the day.

The first iteration of the Planning Bill, one of two introduced to Parliament to replace the RMA.

“The risk with that is that if they exercise the powers strongly in one direction, another minister may come in and flip the way of doing things. As professionals working in this space, we don’t have the certainty of knowing how things will be treated over time,” Moncrieff said.

Where councils do implement rules that go further, they may have to offer landowners “regulatory relief”.

This concept, being introduced by these bills, essentially means councils would have to compensate landowners (monetary or otherwise) for restrictions on the use of their land.

The committee noted there was “a high level of interest in these provisions and hundreds of submitters shared their thoughts on the proposed regulatory relief system”. Nearly all were opposed to the concept.

Brooking also said the Government’s two-bill format will decrease certainty in this regime.

While Labour had more than one piece of legislation, the Spatial Planning Act was limited to the development of regional spatial strategies, she said.

In the current iteration, the Planning Bill would manage consents for land use activities and the Natural Environment Bill would manage natural resources.

According to Brooking, Moncrieff and McKay - as well as the committee’s independent advisers - no proper justification has been given for splitting the two and it is not clear how they will work together.

“You'll see in the report back from the select committee - we're explicit that it wasn't clear how the goals in the two acts will interact, and there's no hierarchy within that. So the minister gets to determine which goals take precedence over other goals and that is one of the things that will lead to a whole lot of inefficiencies, because there will be lots of litigation around these issues,” Brooking said.

The committee’s majority did consider these concerns, but ultimately decided that the “two bills approach” would promote a simpler system.

“We echo the desire to streamline administration of the new system. We have proposed amendments throughout both bills to better align provisions and, in our view, improve the coherence of the overall system,” they wrote.