‘Lots of litigation’: Labour says Government’s RMA reforms will be field day for lawyers
Tuesday, 21 July 2026
Labour’s Rachel Brooking says the Government’s resource management reform will open a legal can of worms and lead to extensive court cases, harming the “efficiency” the reforms are supposed to create.
She has particularly attacked the move to leave decision-making around which environmental and planning goals to prioritise in the hands of ministers, saying this was ripe for court action.
Resource Management Reform minister Chris Bishop conceded there would be some litigation as the two new laws “bedded in” but said any new system would require this.
Bishop announced the changes to his reform programme for the Resource Management Act (RMA) on Monday, the law which governs how almost all land in New Zealand can be used.
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His changes broadly push the new bills, already far more pro-development than the status quo, towards forcing councils to accept new development.
Brooking, who worked for decades as a resource management lawyer, said her former colleagues would have plenty of work under the new scheme.
“The resource management lawyers are going to be in for a whole lot of work for a long time, and they're going to be very busy, which is the opposite of what [the last Government’s] reforms were trying to do,” Brooking said.
“My stated goal always in doing RMA reform is that: sorry to my ex-colleagues, but we should not have as many resource management lawyers.”
She said a big area for litigation would result from a lack of clarity around which of the goals of two acts in the resource management reform took precedence.
The new Natural Environmental Bill establishes six goals that all people using the act must follow:
to enable the use and development of natural resources within environmental limits
to safeguard the life-supporting capacity of air, water, soil, and ecosystems
to protect human health from harm caused by the discharge of contaminants
to achieve no net loss in indigenous biodiversity
to manage the effects of natural hazard associated with the use or protection of natural resources through proportionate and risk-based planning
to provide for Māori interests.
The new Planning Bill has a further 11 goals, which overlap in some areas.
The Select Committee majority report noted that these goals intentionally had no hierarchy, with ministers able to “particularise” the goals in national decisions to determine how to resolve conflicts between them.
Brooking said the tension between the goals both within the bills and between them would lead to a lot of litigation.
“The minister gets to determine which goals take precedence over other goals. And so that is 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.
She said the agreements between iwi and councils that the Government was now scrapping would have increased efficiencies as some of these goals would have been settled.
Bishop said there would naturally be some litigation initially.
“We're fundamentally changing the system that's operated for 30 years, so there's going to be a bedding in period. There will be court cases,” Bishop said.
“It's a very complicated, comprehensive piece of legislation,” he said.
“But we are aiming to produce a much more coherent, streamlined, simpler system for everybody, and it will also be simpler for councils.”
Bishop said the Government had considered whether putting so much power in the hands of individual ministers could lead to big swings between governments, and said this was a reasonable concern, but ultimately ministers had to act within limits stipulated in the act and central government had an interest in resource management matters.
“The key point is that the national direction has to follow the legislation, so it doesn't just give ministers the power to do whatever they like. It has to follow the overarching legislation,” Bishop said.
“National direction or central direction is a feature of almost every planning system. The Government has to have the ability to send signals through the system about what's a priority. Renewable energy, for example, is a key national priority, and so we need the ability to make sure that wind farms and geothermal and solar panel solar farms can get over the line.”
The Government says its reforms will halve the number of consents required and unlock an estimated $13.3 billion in savings over the next 30 years.
It 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.
Bishop said he was confident that all remaining stages of the reform could be passed through Parliament in the sitting weeks remaining ahead of the election.
Labour has said it will campaign on making major changes to the Government’s reform but not starting another “repeal and replace cycle”.