RMA reform: Ministers to get more power to overrule councils, tear up iwi agreements

Monday, 20 July 2026

RMA Minister Chris Bishop announced sweeping planning changes in December last year.

The Government will rip up existing iwi participation agreements with local councils and give ministers extended powers to approve of developments that breach environment limits, in a series of changes to its planning law reforms that have now lost the support of Labour.

The updates to the reform will slightly delay the new law coming into force and scraps a plan to allocate water resources through auctions and tenders.

Unchanged is the controversial Regulatory Relief scheme where councils are punished for stopping land-owners using their land for economic activity - at newly estimated cost to those councils of up to $1.99 billion.

Resource Management Reform Minister Chris Bishop announced the changes following the Environment Select Committee’s report back on the reforms, released on Monday afternoon.

He is taking the changes recommended by the Government parties on the select committee and going further, ripping up existing Mana Whakahono ā Rohe agreements between councils and local iwi.

The new bills also explicitly bar councils from trying to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The new version has lost the support of the Labour Party who voted for the bills in question at first reading, but now call them an “embarrassment”. The party is not promising a full repeal however.

The reforms are aimed at replacing the much-maligned Resource Management Act (RMA) with two new laws, and almost halve the number of consents required across the system - unlocking an estimated $13.3b in savings over the next 30 years.

The Government has been attempting to replace the RMA all term, after it re-instated the controversial law early in the term, arguing the last Government’s reforms had not gone far enough.

National interest extended beyond infrastructure

The earlier version of the RMA reforms gave ministers the power to overrule local councils when they deemed that bits of nationally significant infrastructure was worth breaching local environmental and human health limits.

The select committee recommended taking this change further, so that a minister could over-rule on projects deemed “publicly beneficial”.

Bishop said this change recognised a need for flexibility with particular regard to aquaculture and horticulture.

“We are really keen to make sure that commercial vegetable growing, which not only feeds New Zealand but also helps feed the rest of the world as well, is given real primacy in the system. And so the feedback was we just needed a bit more flexibility,” Bishop said.

Some guard-rails would still remain, with ministers required to be satisfied that the public benefits were tested against the “harm to ecosystem or human health”.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment heavily pushed back on this change.

Bishop said the change was part of a wider push for councils to consider the costs and benefits of regulation not just to the environment.

“The science and the the data has to be weighed against what the impact of setting those limits might be on, on, you know, society and the economy that we live in,” Bishop said.

Existing Mana Whakahono ā Rohe agreements torn up

The Government’s original bills did not allow for councils to sign new Mana Whakahono ā Rohe partnership agreements with local iwi, which gave them a role in the planning system.

But it did allow for existing agreements to be grandfathered in, and Bishop said Cabinet had been concerned about the moves many councils had made to initiate new ones since the reform was unveiled.

'Cabinet has therefore agreed that existing and initiated Mana Whakahono ā Rohe agreements will not transfer into the new planning system,“ Bishop said.

'Instead, councils will have the option of entering into new narrowly scoped iwi participation agreements to record how iwi authorities will participate in statutory planning processes and processes required to give effect to Treaty settlement redress. Clear guardrails will be included in the legislation to prevent scope creep.“

He also said the Government was “considering options” around Waikato’s Plan Change 1.

Regulatory relief remains

The Government has decided to keep the “regulatory relief” provisions which would force councils to pay landowners is significantly restricting the use of that land.

A report from MartinJenkins commissioned into the potential liabilities from this scheme estimate a gigantic range of between $7 million and $1.99b.

“This large range, which accounted for the specified topics in the bills as introduced, reflects that local authorities may take a range of approaches to setting their relief frameworks,” the report from the select committee said.

It noted that submitters were almost universally against this change, and the Opposition is also dead-set against it.

Bishop said that it was crucial that the new bills introduced some “tension” into the system to make it harder for councils to regulate development.

He said this was not something he was willing to give up to get Opposition parties over the line.

Bishop has been adamant about getting the reform done before Parliament rises in September for the general election.

The Post revealed last week that Treasury had put the RMA reform programme on “amber/red” rating in its Gateway Review process in December, indicating “major risks” that the the project would not be delivered.

Councils must consider economy when setting limits

The new planning framework puts environmental and health “limits” at the heart of the new Natural Environment Bill.

Human health limits are set nationally by ministers while ecosystem health limits would be set by regional councils, following specific national standards. Ministers would typically set “minimum” ecosystem health limits but these could be exceeded.

The changes recommended by the select committee make explicit that when setting these limits regional councils must also consider social and environmental factors.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment told the select committee the framework for limits would not result in meaningful limits being set, but with so much power given to ministers the limits could change rapidly.

“Parliament is effectively being asked to delegate environmental protection to the Executive on terms that are completely open-ended,” he wrote.

The majority of the committee disagreed, saying the new measures would protect the environment to a similar level as to that under the RMA.

“Changes to the purpose and goals will give stronger recognition to people's enjoyment of their land and the importance of food and fibre production, and will better enable infrastructure, create competitive urban land markets that deliver an abundance of development opportunities, and support enhancement of the natural environment,” Bishop said.

Labour: Against, but won’t repeal in full

Labour leader Chris Hipkins said his party was against the bill but he would not start a new “repeal and replace” cycle if elected.

“We've worked hard to try and reach some agreement with the National Party on RMA reform. Unfortunately, Chris Bishop's attitude is bipartisan consensus means him saying what he wants and expecting everybody else to agree with him. But we won't continue the repeal and replace cycle,” Hipkins said.

He said the party would set out detailed changes to the bill ahead of the election but it was against the regulatory relief provisions and would likely have a different policy on the iwi partnerships.

Greens: Bill a ‘race to the bottom’

Green Party environment spokesperson Lan Pham said the changes had removed safeguards and the reform was now a “race to the bottom”.

“The Luxon Government is stripping away environmental protections while New Zealanders are left paying for the costs of environmental damage and the Government’s regulatory relief framework,” Pham says.

“One of the most concerning changes made during the select committee process was the removal of requirements that environmental use and development occur within environmental limits,” Pham said.

“Environmental limits acting as a backstop to development were one of the few remaining safeguards in the legislation. The Government has watered them down and included references to big agriculture and aquaculture instead.”

“New Zealanders are already paying the health and environmental costs of polluted drinking water, unswimmable rivers, lakes and beaches, biodiversity loss, and climate change. These bills will make a bad situation far worse.”

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