Minister responsible for reforming RMA Chris Bishop.
Photo: RNZ / SAMUEL RILLSTONE
Most people agree that the resource management law needs reform, but the government is doing more than just moving work changes – they are throwing it all
“RMA is broken, and everyone knows that.”
“RMA is similar to a wind of the head of the gale force, fighting any attempt to develop anything, anywhere.”
“RMA has allowed a lawyers and consultants industry, elaborating thousands of pages of papers and reports, all designed to block new roads, new wind farms, new apartments in our central cities and agriculture in the rural area of New Zealand.”
“This raises progress in a network of absurd processes and conditions.”
The government is reforming the cursed and complicated resource management law, and these quotes from a hive press conference conducted by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, minister responsible for the renovation of RMA Chris Bishop and Undersecretary Simon Court, explain why.
The court talks about “all tone, Dick and Harry … opposing things and arming the planning system to block progress.”
But the work also reformed the law, replacing it with two different acts.
National revoked this legislation, retreated in the old RMA and is now changing it to some quick corrections and then revoke it (again) to (again) will be replaced by two more pieces of legislation.
“Therefore, RMA is a very rare legislation that has been repealed twice,” says New Zealand Herald Political Editor, Thomas Coughlan, who followed the progress of the reform for years.
He speaks The details Through the history of the act, which is an integral part of the way New Zealand treats the environment and its resources.
“It is one of these laws that emerged from this great period of reform in the 1980s and early 1990s … When a lot of politicians entered and really swept the decks of the statute books and established the economic and regulatory environments with which we are still living today,” he says.
“Basically, all the resources we use – you think about the land where your home sits, the air you breathe, the forest and the countryside, the land our farms occupy – all of these are resources we use to some extent, and we need laws to govern how these resources are used and the effects that use of these features have on ourselves and others.
“If I turn my house into a pizza restaurant, for example, this is great for me, but the smoke of my pizza oven that is going all the time will not be great for my neighbors. And therefore, we need laws to rule the effect that my action has on me, the environment and other people.”
The RMA was promulgated in 1991 by a national government that was being built in the work done by the work before it.
Before that, there were a number of different statutes and regulations – more than 70 of them – that did the same job, but in a very fragmented way.
Think of the Hawke Bay River Amendment Law, the Geothermal Energy Amendment Law, the City and Country Planning Law.
“RMA has consolidated everything in a unique place,” says Coughlan, “so that there are national laws that govern how our resources would be used, it would be very simple, very easy, it would protect the environment … You would have national political statements that would be rigorous guidelines about what the advice could and could not do.
“Fast advancement 30 years and RMA has grown in size through various changes. Governments have not issued as many national political statements as they should have made, which means that governments make the field vacant in terms of telling councils how to manage resource.
“This means that, throughout the country, you kind of repeated what the problem was before … that you have different rules in Napier to Auckland wherever it is.”
This is the problem that these new movements are trying to solve.
There has always been a difficult bipartisan agreement on resource management – because it is very important. However, this time, National says that although it will speak with the opposition about the changes, this will be independently independent. It also has no intention of including any Treaty of Waitangi clauses.
Bishop says RMA is a disaster and is a direct cause of the real estate crisis, which is why it is impossible to build infrastructure in this country.
“It has been a millstone around the neck of the economy of New Zealand for a long time,” he says.
He says the work reforms were a disaster, replacing RMA with longer legislation in a system that was designed to be simpler.
The government estimates that its reforms will reduce conformity costs by 45 %, saving $ 14.8 billion.
He plans to have the two new bills in the House by the end of the year to select the committee in 2026 and in force before the next election. The goal is to have the rules before the councils have to start their new long -term plans by 2027.
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