Starting Again: New Zealand, Sustainability and an RMA Replacement
Source: Henry McIntosh
For part one of this article, click here.
The recent electoral success of the Labour-led government, which instituted a review of the Resource Management Act (RMA), will undoubtedly ensure that the RMA’s days are numbered.
Its demise was inevitable given the increasing demonisation of the RMA as the cause of housing unaffordability and its disjointed structure, a product of decades of amendment. Somewhat unusually, most of the research into the new legislation was not produced by the small and policy-focused Ministry for the Environment (MfE), but instead ceded to Environmental Defence Society (EDS), a ‘not-for-profit environmental organisation comprised of resource management professionals who are committed to improving environmental outcomes.
In July 2020, a review panel delivered an ambitious proposal in their report to government: replace the RMA with two interrelated Acts—the Natural and Built Environments Act, and a Strategic Planning Act, thereby acknowledging the failure of the RMA to fully serve the needs of urban New Zealand. The oddly framed sustainable management framework would be replaced by a requirement to enhance the quality of the environment to support the wellbeing of present and future generations while recognising the concept of Te Mana o te Taiao – a 'strategic direction for the protection, restoration and sustainable use of biodiversity in Aotearoa New Zealand’. While the RMA has gradually better recognised both tikanga Māori (Māori customs) and matauranaga Māori (the Māori view of the environment), this new proposal puts Māori environmental principles at the heart of the new Acts rather than leaving them as subsidiary concerns.
However, as with the RMA, what is being proposed in the two new Acts is revolutionary—rather than evolutionary—change. This may create challenges, as revolutionary change requires the plans, methods and processes of the past to be wholly abandoned, leading to a loss of some of the positive outcomes of the RMA and an over-reliance on often-slow-to-emerge appeal decisions from the Environment Court. Central government politicians will also have to commit to playing a more constructive planning role, presumably through a revamped and expanded MfE, something they were happy to shirk in the past.
The new Acts would require fewer but more far-reaching plans. Here the model is clearly the Auckland Spatial Plan and the Auckland Unitary Plan, which overlook the fact that those plans only make sense and work because the city is the country’s only metropolitan centre. In the rest of New Zealand’s territorial and regional councils with mana whenua—the power and jurisdiction associated with the possession and occupation of tribal land—the proposed Strategic Planning Act requires a high level development regional spatial plan, ‘consistent with the purposes of the Natural and Built Environments Act, LGA and LTMA, national direction, the national adaptation plan under the CCRA and relevant government policy statements’ and a single regulatory plan. The spatial plan’s scope is ambitious and calls for a level of integration never before attempted in New Zealand. Moreover, it will be applied to regions where the boundaries are based on river catchment areas, which again seems to reduce the urban focus of the acts while emphasising the infrastructural integrative planning aspects. In fact, these regions may make little sense for spatial land-use planning, achieving fewer but perhaps much more complex plans.
The review panel’s commitment to streamlining the planning system by creating uniform plans across the country suggests the use of a template plan, in keeping with the approach of MfE’s National Planning Standards. Their slow development highlights the enormity of the task of preparing an effective template plan to meet the needs of urban New Zealand in particular. New Zealand has an odd urban hierarchy, which has always been dominated by Auckland with a present population of 1.59 million. The next most populous cities are Christchurch with 378,000 residents and Wellington with 202,737, while the country's sixth largest city, Palmerston North, has only 88,000 residents. That means most New Zealand cities are modest in size . The aim of these uniform plans is also to reduce the time and cost of getting a planning consent. New Zealand already has a development-responsive planning system where between 95 and 97% of all consent are granted, so the focus will surely be on reducing the time and cost aspects of getting consent.
The legislative reforms will also attempt to reduce the involvement of submitters in actual consent applications by ‘sorting out’ more issues, via mediation processes, when plans are created. Mediation is rarely an even-handed process, with the well-resourced inevitably achieving more than the modestly resourced individual or community group. This sorting out process will place a significant burden on communities to envisage the type and nature of development that a plan is allowing in their community at the time the plan is constructed. This will undermine New Zealand’s long commitment to consultation and submission as part of its planning system. New Zealand has always had third-party appeal rights, which were expanded under the RMA to allow anyone to make a submission on a plan or consent application. While apocryphal tales abound of vexatious submitters using this to delay development they are unaffected by are impossible to verify, communities do believe they have a role to play in shaping the development of their environments.
So, it remains to be seen how long it will take to achieve a replacement for the RMA. One can only hope it is enough time to avoid recreating the errors inherent to it.
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Dr. Caroline Miller is an Associate Professor in the School of People, Environment & Planning at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand.