Bosses plan field trip as what’s old becomes new
Whoever wins the election in September will go back to square one for environmental and urban planning law.
settings almost since its creation as an amalgamation of the Business Roundtable and the New Zealand Institute five years ago.
The difference is that back then, the Auckland housing crisis was less acute.
The Resource Management Act was assumed to be the primary planning law for the foreseeable future, and the prevailing assumption among policymakers was that local government amalgamations were necessary to drive efficiencies and fiscal sustainability.
Today, much of that dynamic has changed.
For a start, every political party now regards root-and-branch reform of the RMA as inevitable.
The Government finally rammed its final, flawed reform package through Parliament this week on a single vote majority provided by the Maori Party.
But whoever wins the election in September will go back to square one for environmental and urban planning law.
And five years ago, early in the life of the Auckland super-city experiment, the presumption that council amalgamations would lead to better resourced, more efficient local government prevailed.
Today, spurred in part by the NZ Initiative’s work on the ideal structure for local government, the pendulum has swung.
There is more acceptance that smaller councils are better at expressing the will of discrete communities, and that pooled essential services don’t require full mergers. This is the lesson that Switzerland has to offer.
The country has literally thousands of local councils, which compete with one another for residents because they see growth as the route to more prosperous communities.
That a group of New Zealand chief executives is willing to spend time finding out how that all works, at a time when fundamental change to urban planning and environmental law is rising up the political agenda, is telling.
It’s not only consistent with the cross-party support for reform, but with the accompanying clamour now coming from environmental, developer, business and local government lobby groups.
And it is assisted in large part by last week’s final report of the Productivity Commission on urban land use.
For example, the Green Building Council has just published views on a new built environment policy, while the Environmental Defence Society is pressing for a commission of inquiry to establish a politically independent way forward.
Within this momentum, there are two elements particularly worth watching.
One is the tension between the case for small, cohesive local government and a strong consensus for central government to set more of the rules than it has under the RMA, to prevent the costs and inconsistency of regulatory fragmentation.
The second is how the controversial wins by the Maori Party on iwi participation in resource consenting, and the ability to create Gm-free zones, fare in such a process.
Debates that may seem closed with the passage of legislation this week can be expected to arise again all too soon. –Businessdesk