Chris Hipkins pledges Labour will not start ‘repeal and replace cycle’ on RMA changes

Tuesday, 21 July 2026

Labour leader Chris Hipkins has reiterated his intention to not repeal the Government’s new planning laws, even as the party is dead-set against them.

Hipkins was speaking to media after RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop unveiled changes to his new planning laws, which aim to replace the Resource Management Act (RMA) that governs how most land in New Zealand can be used.

Bishop’s changes broadly push the new bills, already far more pro-development than the status quo, towards forcing councils to accept new development.

They extend new powers to the minister to over-rule environmental limits when it is deemed “beneficial” and force councils to consider economic and social factors alongside environmental factors when setting those limits.

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Bishop said he had worked to keep Labour and the Greens onside with the bill and respected the MPs he had talked to over a series of meetings, but ultimately they were so opposed that only a “muddle” of a bill could have pleased both sides, and he was focused on a better law.

“We looked at ways to try and meet in the middle. But ultimately, what we're trying to achieve here is good public policy, and it probably would have been possible to kind of find a bunch of things which everyone could kind of compromise on and create a bit of a muddle, I'm not about creating muddle.”

The last Government also repealed and replaced the RMA, but National opposed these changes so reinstated the RMA the moment it returned to Government - despite being for some kind of reform.

Hipkins said he wanted to avoid that and if Labour won the election he would not repeal the entire system as this would take another three years.

“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.

Hipkins said that while Labour was dead-set against parts of the change - such as the regulatory relief that forced councils to pay people if they regulated away their use of private property - there was enough in the core architecture Labour could live with.

“Some of the architecture is not bad, so we're not proposing to continue to go through a repeal and replace cycle because that takes three years.“

He said Labour’s environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking would set out in detail what those changes might be.

Bishop announced that he would push ahead with the regulatory relief scheme, which a new estimate from MartinJenkins said would cost councils somewhere between $7m and $1.99b - a huge range as there was much about the scheme that was still uncertain.

He said he was adamant about keeping some “tension” within the system to punish councils for stopping landowners being able to use their land for development.

Bishop also announced the Government would tear up existing Mana Whakahono ā Rohe partnership agreements between councils and local iwi, which gave them a role in the planning system.

His reform originally allowed for these to be grandparented in but Bishop said Cabinet was concerned about the number of new agreements underway.

'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.“

Hipkins said Labour would set out a very different view on this matter.

Green environment spokesperson Lan Pham was more against the reform, saying it “embedded dysfunction” and shouldn’t get to survive just because it won the “last round of the flip flopping”.

She said there was a good structure from the last Government’s reform programme that could be used but said reform could also happen without entirely starting again.

“We don’t need to tear the whole thing up, we do need to get rid of the extreme dysfunctional parts of it.”

Pham said the “environmental limits” set in the new laws could not really be described as “environmental limits” given they had to be set with regard to economics as well.