‘Cultural heritage’ is the new catchphrase
As fans of Parliament TV will know, the House of Representatives has undertaken the first reading of two new bills this week; the Natural and Built Environment Bill (NBE) and the Spatial Planning Bill.
Both have been some time in the making and are set to replace the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA) in the next year.
As is my custom when perusing legislation, a search within the bill for my key word ‘heritage’ reduces the scale of the reading required; I’ll leave it to others to search for their burning issue.
In the NBE, ‘heritage’ appears 249 times in 53 clauses.
According to the text, the NBE ‘shifts the focus of the current resource management system from managing adverse effects to promoting positive outcomes’.
That’s great, given that the implementation of the RMA in the heritage field has too often equated the management of adverse effects with mitigating the loss of heritage items by erecting signage and retaining vestigial building elements.
Instead of outcomes management, the NBE provides principles for cultural heritage offsetting.
‘Cultural heritage’ is the new term that replaces the RMA’s ‘historic heritage’; the definition remains the same for both with the addition, finally, of ‘cultural landscapes’.
According to Schedule 5 of the NBE, a ‘cultural heritage’ offset is a commitment to redress any more than minor residual adverse effects and should be contemplated only after steps to avoid, minimise, and remedy adverse effects are demonstrated to have been sequentially exhausted’.
The goal apparently is to achieve a ‘net enhancement’ of cultural heritage values and the bill states that cultural heritage offsetting is not appropriate if ‘cultural heritage values are adversely affected so that they will be permanently lost’.
In the same schedule ‘cultural heritage redress’ is also provided for.
This will involve compensation, including financial, but is not considered appropriate where, for example, ‘the affected cultural heritage is irreplaceable or vulnerable’.
Underpinning these new provisions, which are much more explicit about the desired outcomes for historic heritage than in the RMA, is ‘system outcome’ (g) ‘the conservation of cultural heritage’.
Putting to one side who thought up the phrase ‘system outcome’, what is interesting about the purpose of the NBE is that ‘conservation’ has supplanted ‘protection’ as the key word for cultural heritage resources.
I had to reach for my dictionary to get my head around the change and I’m a bit conflicted as to whether the new terminology will lead to better outcomes.
On the one hand ‘conservation’ is aligned with the ICOMOS Charter, the guiding document for heritage professionals around the world, and the base meaning of the word is to ‘protect something, especially an environmentally or culturally important place or thing, from harm or destruction’.
On the other, ‘protection’ is carried over from the RMA for ecological resources and means to ‘keep safe from harm or injury’.
For my money I’d prefer the NBE kept protection of cultural heritage on the same linguistic level as protection of natural heritage, especially when cultural heritage conservation now follows land supply and housing provision in the system outcomes layout.
I’d also note here that the NBE itself refers to protection of cultural heritage when it comes to rules that have immediate legal effect, which is the case now as many owners affected by Hamilton City Council’s Plan Change 9 have just discovered.
One last aspect of the NBE that is of immediate interest, is the development of a new category of ‘specified cultural heritage’.
This comprises Category 1 Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga historic places, National Historic Landmarks, which are determined by HNZPT, and ‘wā hi tapu, wā hi tapu area, or wā hi tū puna for which there is an application notified but not determined’ by HNZPT.
This rightly, some might say, privileges the national oversight of our heritage afforded by Heritage NZPT.
But the NBE also sets out ‘less stringent management of any particular adverse effect other than one on significant biodiversity areas or specified cultural heritage’ thus apparently creating a twotier system that appears blind to the fact that the HNZPT list is not a definitive survey of all the most significant heritage resources in the country.
Historically HNZPT has been very reluctant to list buildings, sites and structures where there is opposition from the owner and has also relied on city and district councils to undertake identification and assessment of heritage resources.
In Hamilton for example, there are just seven Category 1 HNZPT list entries and the most recent listing was in 1998; that’s 24 years ago people.
As for the Spatial Planning Bill, I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet and so more on that anon.
Postscript: So that I can ensure my safe entry to Oamaru next time I’m in the Mainland, I must correct last week’s fundamental error.
Oamaru stone is a limestone, not a sandstone, and I was especially annoyed after I realised my mistake because it is quarried at Parkside, Weston, which was developed by my grandmother’s family over a century ago.