Lucky for the the shovel-ready

The chips are down and the refrain so often heard from governments – ‘‘these things take time’’ – is rapidly retreating from earshot. Nowhere is the appetite to expedite more apparent than the way Environment Minister David Parker will soon be empowered to sweep aside longstanding resource management hoops with an emphatic, ‘‘I’ve got this’’.

In essence, Parker will be able to bypass the often lengthy public consultation processes under the Resource Management Act and steer favoured projects from a sizeable pool of those deemed ‘‘shovel-ready’’ on to a fast track.

If anything, this process is now less like a track than a whooshing toboggan run. Each project will pass in front of an appointed ‘‘Expert Consenting Panel’’ chaired by a current or retired Environment Court judge or senior lawyer, and including nominees from local councils and iwi.

But each pathway is already essentially predetermined. Parker says normal consenting and approval processes provide neither the speed nor the certainty required.

That the word was certainty (as distinct from a mere likelihood) makes clear the importance of what projects are fed into this toboggan run, or not.

The shovel-ready approach offers nothing for any projects that aren’t already well advanced in planning. Sucks to be them, whatever they may have been, because they failed to present themselves in timely fashion to a starting line that only now has come into existence.

So, in this new economic environment, we’re really putting a great deal of faith in picking from the most advanced of projects that existed before things changed all around us. A case, perhaps, of the Government deciding that a good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.

OK. Time is of the essence. But there must also be scope, and resources, to give more recent or upcoming projects that are reactive to the new realities a chance to prove consequential. There’s much curiosity about further details of the criteria Parker will be applying but obviously the potential to create jobs and economic benefits will loom large, albeit alongside his simultaneous assurance that environmental standards set out in Part 2 of the Resource Management Act will still be applied.

If this is, indeed, a reasonable measure that still provides sufficient scrutiny and safeguards, then it’s also an acknowledgement that the pathway has hitherto been a maddeningly complex and muddied plod.

In Parker’s own words – and far from his alone – the RMA costs too much, takes too long, and has not protected the environment.

To date, tinkering in the name of reform hasn’t particularly helped. But now we await the completion of the substantial Randerson review, which has been tasked not only with putting forward reform proposals, but also drafting key legislative provisions, by the middle of this year.

The Covid fast-track measures have drawn quite wide-ranging support, to the extent that National is asking whether these amendments, which have a two-year life cycle, should be permanent.

That’s not, really, a decision that can be divorced from the Randerson review.

If anything, this process is now less like a track than a whooshing toboggan run.