I’m writing to update you on the Government’s RMA replacement bills and ask you to join us in making a submission to parliamentary select committee considering the bills.

To recap, the Government campaigned on replacing the Resource Management Act 1990 (including Labour’s replacement that hadn’t come into force yet). The RMA, among many other things, sets the framework for how central and local government decide what people are allowed to do with their land.

The new bills – the Planning Bill and the Natural Environment Bill – were introduced to Parliament late last year and make a few good changes, even if it isn’t exactly clear yet how some will work in practice. We said at the time that the bills were a missed opportunity for reform, keeping too much of the old RMA and bringing in a tweaked form of Labour’s Freshwater Farm Plans.

As there has been more time to look over the hundreds of pages, though, the overall effect of the bills may well be worse than the current law.

Why it matters

First, the good: legislating the concept of property rights in planning law and bringing in a compensation scheme for landowners.

Reframing the law around property rights and the presumption that a landowner gets to use their land unless there’s a rule against it is a fine idea. But anyone can see that how those rules get made determines whether that presumption is any use in practice.

The compensation scheme for landowners affected by councils going beyond what is required by the law and central government regulations sounds like a good idea, but councils have always said they were just following the rules when they declared some farmland too picturesque or biodiverse to farm. If the farmer has to sue the council for compensation every time, it might scare councils off the worst excesses we’ve seen, but it’s no protection against the persistent rolling maul of council bureaucracy meddling with private land use decisions.

Most of the noisy politics on the bills is about housing in the cities, which is all well and good. But the bulk of the unworkable regulations Groundswell has campaigned against over the years are issued under the RMA.

The national policy statements on Freshwater Management (NPS-FM) and Indigenous Biodiversity (NPS-IB) are central government rules made by ministers under the RMA.

All the Land Grab classifications, including Significant Natural Areas (SNAs), Sites and Areas of Significance to Maori (SASMs), Outstanding Natural Landscapes and Features (ONLs and ONFs), are councils using the Section 6 of the RMA to impose restrictions on landowners’ use of their own land.

The RMA has national regulations made under it, which regional councils then make plans under, and district councils then make more plans under. This framework of rules then requires the farmer (or any landowner) to jump through hoops to get consents signed off by their council to allow them to farm, or to change their plans to avoid having to get a consent.

So, while stopping any Farming Tax and quitting Paris are existential questions for farming in New Zealand, the slow ratchet of misguided and unworkable land use regulations are squeezing farming and all economic activity – too often without even a clear environmental benefit. The RMA and its replacements will also decide the future of farming and rural communities in New Zealand.

The Groundswell view has always been that environmental efforts must prioritise the local community work that is already happening and take an integrated, holistic approach to regulation, rather than the top down and siloed approaches taken by successive governments.

The best environmental work in New Zealand today is taking place at the local community level. The catchment, land care, water care, and a host of other groups where farmers and their communities are coming together to proactively manage and improve their own local environment are what have the greatest impact on environmental outcomes.

The Section 6 Land Grab continues

While no longer in a section numbered 6, the ability for councils to classify land remains in the new bills mostly as it was in the current RMA. Significant Natural Areas (SNAs) might be technically gone as a named category, but the fundamentals of the old list – Outstanding Natural Landscapes and Features, Sites and Areas of Significance to Maori, and the rest – are still going. If you were concerned about councils marking down land on maps to apply new restrictions and regulations to them, that’s still available to them.

That means all the old arguments about the Section 6 Land Grab remain.

It’s arbitrary, with no real rhyme or reason why one piece of land should cross a threshold for becoming “outstanding” over another.

It’s counterproductive, making well-kept land a liability for the landowner and incentivising farmers away from the purported goals of replanting native bush etc.

It’s anti-local, prioritising legislation, regulation, and council plans over the values and livelihoods of the people who live and work on the land it applies to.

These RMA reforms are an opportunity to redesign how land use regulation is done in New Zealand and the Government is fumbling that opportunity. We could have a locally led approach that empowers landowners to care for their land and begins with what already works in practice, with initiatives like the QEII Trust.

Labour’s Freshwater Farm Plans live on

It isn’t just what this Government will do with their new law, but what the next government will bend it towards. Once the replacement laws are in force and new national policy statements are underway, we will be campaigning to have them written so farmers and consumers get a fair deal. That’s one thing under this coalition, but what about the next government?

Ministers trying to sell the Freshwater Farm Plans say that it will reduce paperwork for farmers that currently have to get planning consents, but they leave out the trade off that nearly all farmers will have to make the new Farm Plans, including those who don’t currently have to gets consents.

Rather than a threshold based on actual environmental impact, we’ll have Big Brother keeping tabs on every farm in the country, just in case the government wants to take a look at what you’re up to on your own land.

The same ministers then say that it’s just a small bit of paperwork to comply. Maybe with these ministers, that will be the case. But there’s nothing stopping the next government from using the legislated Freshwater Farm Plans to shoehorn in all their wildest dreams from the Ardern era that they couldn’t get past coalition partners or get done in time when they had a majority.

David Parker and James Shaw would have loved to have these Freshwater Farm Plans on the law books because they would then get to write their own regulations under the legislation. Even if a coalition or confidence and supply partner objected in the next Labour government, it’s possible whoever steps into David Parker’s shoes would just be able to issue regulations over their objections. Should we just hope that the smaller parties would bring down the government over some environmental legislation?

We think Freshwater Farm Plans should be canned all together. It’s a Labour idea that the new Government has kept alive, saying they’re worried about votes in the centre, despite those voters in the centre being far more interested in the cost of their groceries than the details of planning law.

But if National, ACT, and NZ First ministers want farmers to go along with this scheme, they at least need to put into law some limits on how widely Freshwater Farm Plans apply and how deeply they can look into what’s going on in the farm. It needs to be in law so changes would require a majority in Parliament, not just pushed through in regulation.

To start with, the threshold for filing a farm plan should not be lower than the current threshold for getting a consent. Rather than capturing almost all the farms in the country, farm plans should be based around actual environmental impact.

Then, there should be legislated limits on how much can be required to go in a freshwater farm plan. Ministers clearly imagine that it should just be the work farmers do already, but right in the Natural Environment Bill (Schedule 5, section 7(d)), it says freshwater farm plans must “comply with any other requirements in regulations”.

Freshwater Farm Plans, as they stand, are an open back door for unlimited unworkable regulation of farming for whatever a future Environment Minister can get through their Cabinet.

Have your say

We encourage everyone to make their own submission. You can click here to go to our website, which has the main points we think are important to make, and then a link to where to submit on the Parliament website. You can also read the Groundswell submission there, if you’re looking for more information.

We’re especially asking for anyone involved in local community environmental groups to make a submission, whether for their group or as an individual. Telling the politicians what you do in your community is an important corrective against the bureaucrats and lobby groups who see top down legislating and regulating as the most important, or even only, part of looking after our local environments.

Thank you again for your support.

Kind regards,

Bryce, Laurie, and the Team at Groundswell NZ