Select committee recommends Fast Track bill proceeds

Friday, 18 October 2024

The controversial Fast Track Amendment Bill is a step closer to becoming law after Parliament’s Environment select committee recommended it proceed with amendments already announced by the Government, and a few small tweaks of its own.

That is despite the vast majority of submitters the committee heard from strongly opposing the legislation.

The Labour, Green and Te Pāti Māori members of the committee, along with independent MP Darleen Tana, offered dissenting opinions.

The legislation is designed to reduce the hurdles for consenting major infrastructure projects, aquaculture investments and mines by handing consenting decisions to “expert panels” appointed by the Government and overriding several laws intended to safeguard the environment.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has said it will speed up the delivery of significant regional and national projects.

The committee declined to water-down the purpose of the bill despite noting that “many submitters” were concerned by its lack of reference to environmental considerations and had requested they be included.

“We, by majority, emphasise that the policy intent is to facilitate the delivery of infrastructure and development projects with significant regional or national benefits,” the committee stated.

Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Russel Norman said the select committee had made the bill “worse”.

“The purpose clause of the bill has been amended to give even greater direction to expert panels to focus on approving development projects,” he said.

Amendments previously agreed by the Government mean that the final say on projects will be made by expert panels appointed by the Government, rather than ministers themselves, as first envisaged.

An already-agreed concession means the Minister for the Environment would need to be consulted on the referral of the projects for fast-tracking.

“Some of us consider this would address some submitters’ concerns about a lack of consideration of the environment in the decision-making powers proposed in the bill,” the committee said in its report.

The members of expert panels will, collectively, need to have “expertise in environmental matters”.

In an apparent small win for conservationists, the select committee has recommended expert panels would need to consider the impact of developments on species that are subject to international conservation agreements, to avoid breaching international conventions.

The committee did not make clear whether it expected that to have any impact on specific projects, such as the proposed Taranaki offshore ironsands seabed mining scheme.

But the committee also suggested the Government should consider allowing applicants to apply for the fast-track consent to generate electricity and put transmission infrastructure on “high-value conservation land”.

Norman said it was deeply disturbing that “the Minister of Infrastructure, who gets to decide if a corporation gets access to the fast track rubber-stamping process, is Chris Bishop, who was also the chair of National’s campaign committee at the last election”.

'We already know that $500,000 in campaign donations flowed from shareholders and companies associated with projects that have been listed for fast-tracking. This creates clear risks of conflict of interest in the very heart of the fast-track process,“ he said.

Overall, the amendments in the select committee report did not change the “fundamental problems with the bill” and would not deter what he described as a “groundswell of public protest that is building”, he forecast.

Labour acting environment spokesperson David Parker said the bill enabled “the most radical and unbalanced consenting regime in living memory”.

“This bill excludes any reference to the environment or sustainable management in its purpose, and now enables environmental protections in the Resource Management, Conservation, Wildlife and Heritage Protection Acts to be overridden,” he said.

“It is aimed at pushing through environmentally contentious projects, some of which have been previously declined or are midway through other processes.”

Lobby group Communities Against the Fast Track said the select committee had recommended no meaningful changes.

“The committee has ignored the thousands of submissions against this bill,” spokesperson Augusta Macassey-Pickard said.