A long-winded lesson in how not to tackle RMA reform
In a withering dissenting report included in this week’s select committee report, Labour’s David Parker says the reason for delay was the fact that: ‘‘Government committee members displayed an unwillingness to make whatever changes they thought were necessary, preferring to await direction from the Executive.’’
The Cabinet, in other words, was actively guiding the select committee. That is terrible parliamentary practice.
In part, the problem was that Cabinet ministers were ‘‘consumed by horse trading behind the scenes,’’ says Parker.
After losing its one-seat majority in the Northland byelection won by Winston Peters, and with ACT opposing reform as too timid while United Future opposed its reach, the Government has been forced into the arms of the Maori Party to achieve a majority for its reforms.
The price, which the liberalminded parts of the Cabinet don’t mind, is a new iwi participation process, Mana Whakahane o Rohe, in local government plan-making.
Don Brash’s ‘‘Hobson’s Pledge’’ movement sees this as encouraging race-based separatism, as does NZ First.
However, the issue has failed as yet to catch alight politically.
Meanwhile, the Green Party’s dissenting view from MP Eugenie Sage focused also on the new regime’s ‘‘permissive approach to subdivision and residential activities’’.
However, that is something the Government both sought and has achieved in other ways through its myriad policy responses to the Auckland housing unaffordability and under-supply.
Environment Minister Nick Smith (and Amy Adams before him) have shepherded into existence a very wide range of new centralised tools capable of prising open land supply, fast-tracking urban infrastructure, and unshackling cities from what Prime Minister Bill English calls ‘‘planner-ism’’.
A new National Policy Statement on Urban Planning exists, urban development authorities are coming, the Auckland Unitary Plan has killed the urban-rural boundary, and those are just a few of the initiatives that have effectively overtaken the stalled RMA reform process.
Most significantly, cross-party support has grown for pulling apart the RMA combination of environmental and urban planning law.
In the meantime, the reforms at their worst increase ministerial powers, reduce appeal and public participation rights, and make the RMA more complex.
But the bill must proceed because it includes many widely supported changes, fencing farm waterways and requiring seismic evaluations in resource consents being two of the most obvious.
But Smith is not quite out of the woods. Still on the table, as far as the Maori Party is concerned, are ministerial over-ride powers that could overturn a region’s desire to exclude genetically modified crops. A little more counting and wooing will be required before this leviathan gets over the line.
–Businessdesk