Is the coalition’s RMA reforms just a lite version of Labour’s?
Tuesday, 9 December 2025
The coalition split the RMA into two bills, just like Labour did. And they have very similar names. So is the much-hyped announcement just an update of what Labour passed in 2023? Lloyd Burr talks to three people in the know.
For six years, Labour MP David Parker beavered away on a replacement to the Resource Management Act. It was one of his priorities after he became a minister in Ardern’s government in 2017.
By August 2023, in the last throes of Labour’s time in power, Parker managed to pass his RMA reforms.
He’d split it into two parts: The Natural and Built Environment Bill (977 pages) and The Spatial Planning Bill (62 pages). The RMA was 996 pages long, making Labour’s two replacements much longer in total.
Parker promised the new laws would see faster, cheaper, and better consenting processes. They would cut approval times for houses and infrastructure. The changes even condensed the more than 100 different regional plans down to just 16.
It included standardising consents across the country and having fewer bespoke consents.
Not long after Parker’s reforms became law, the new coalition government took over, repealed them, and replaced them with the old RMA with the promise to rewrite it with something better.
Interestingly, what the coalition has come up with is very similar to Parker’s version. It’s been split into two parts with very similar names: The Natural Environment Bill (292 pages) and The Planning Bill (452 pages). The only words missing are “and Built” and “Spatial”.
So how different are they? It depends who you ask.
Wellington Mayor Andrew Little
Little was in the lockup at Parliament where the new bills were unveiled. He has an interesting relationship with RMA reform given he was in Parker’s government, and he’s now leading a local council that needs to enforce the new version.
“This follows a similar structure, there are a lot of similarities to it, and not a lot of surprises there.
“When you look at the six years of work that went into the Labour reforms, the hundreds of thousands of hours, the literally millions of dollars of work that went into that, then to be repealed in a matter of months,” says Little.
“Then, two years on, to get two pieces of legislation, whose names all but mirror the two previous pieces of legislation, and with a set of principles that are very close to the principles of Labour’s legislation, people have to judge for themselves whether a wholesale repeal at that time was warranted,” he says.
“Everyone is looking for greater simplicity when it comes to land use and environment regulation. That’s not a bad thing, that’s a good thing,” Little says.
RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop
Bishop laughed when told of the superficial similarities of his reforms and Labour’s repealed version.
“I wouldn’t read too much into the names. But look, there’s some similarities in the sense that there’s an aim to make the system more positively focused as opposed to wholly focused on the externalities of things.
“The regulatory relief components was not there, the greater emphasis on private property was not there, the concept of the funnel which narrows the scope of the system as you get down towards individual consent level was not there, and the ten-year transition too,” Bishop says.
“There were all sorts of different problems with theirs which is why we scrapped it and started again. But we didn’t start again with a completely blank sheet of paper but it’s a very different piece of legislation,” he says.
Labour Leader Chris Hipkins
“It’s very similar to the law changes they repealed from what I can see so far. There were two bills previously and they’ve just changed the titles of them.
“They’re now called ‘The Planning Bill’ rather than the ‘Spatial Planning Bill’ and the ‘Natural Environment Bill’ rather than the ‘Natural and Built Environments Bill’. Ultimately, from what I can see, there’s a heck of a lot of similarities between what they’re proposing now and the law they repealed,” Hipkins says.