Rushed, awkward and unbalanced: the fast-track saga continues

Monday, 10 November 2025

OPINION: From a process perspective, the law changes implementing the Government’s fast-track regime continue to be deeply disappointing.

On Friday, the public and interest groups were given just 10 days, until November 17, to make submissions on about 130 tweaks and more material changes to the one-stop shop consenting regime set out in a Fast-track Approvals Amendment Bill, which the Government intends to rush through Parliament before Christmas.

Public hearings will take place in the week starting November 26, with the committee reporting back on the bill by December 5, despite objections from Labour and the Greens over the truncated time-frames. Green MP Kahurangi Carter was today drafting a letter to speaker Gerry Brownlee, requesting a review.

The techniques used to pass the original version of the Fast-track Approvals Bill in December last year weren’t much better.

A decent amount of time was allocated for a select committee to hear and then largely disregard objections to the development-friendly legislation last year, it’s true.

But then a raft of amendments that law firm Holland Beckett summed up as being largely favourable to applicants were introduced at the last minute, before the bill’s final reading, that skipped even that fairly token public scrutiny.

Those included requiring expert panels to issue a “draft decision” if they planned to turn down a fast-track consent — giving the applicant a second chance to adapt it to address the panel’s concerns — and reducing the time in which objectors could seek a judicial review of successful applications.

Less than a year after those supposed final touches to the fast-track regime were hurriedly put in place, the legislation is back in front of MPs because ministers have decided it is not “fast” enough or sufficiently pro-development.

Gold may have been sitting in Central Otago for millions of years and may stay there for millions more if it is left undisturbed, but deciding whether to dig it out six weeks faster has suddenly become of supreme importance, it seems.

Ministers have, in my view, been brazenly misleadingly in implying the Fast-track Approvals Amendment Bill is primarily concerned with improving with supermarket competition, when that is not the case at all and the groceries industry is mentioned just once in the 59 substantive clauses in the bill.

Yes, the amendment bill would give effect to a draft “government policy statement” requiring the expert panels appointed to rule on fast-track consents take account of the Government’s desire to promote competition in the industry in any applications they received from the sector.

But that pales in comparison when compared to the significance of the more material changes to the regime.

Those include complicating the right for expert panels to decide who they should hear evidence from, effectively removing the right for environmental groups to appeal consents to the High Court on points of law and — arguably — undermining the independence of the Environmental Protection Authority in providing advice on consents.

The Government’s policy statement on groceries competition is fairly irrelevant, anyway, given there’s little reason to think that resource consents are a major barrier to more competition in the supermarket sector.

A far bigger factor holding back grocery competition is the reality that Foodstuffs and Woolworths already have supermarkets in every decent-sized town and suburb and could cut the throat of any new entrant that set up shop beside them before they could recoup the cost of their initial investment.

That is notwithstanding the theoretical risk that they could get hauled up in front of the courts years later, if they ever deemed to have gone as far as engaging in “predatory pricing” to knock-out competition. Whoops, sorry, too late.

Encouragingly, no independent commentators appear to have shown any sign of buying the line that the Fast-track Approvals Amendment Bill is primarily concerned with supermarket competition, as opposed to further liberalising the broader regime itself.

But that didn’t deter Nicola Willis — commenting in her party political role as National’s deputy leader — from attempting to continue to plough that track, after the game was up, by claiming on Thursday evening that Labour was siding with supermarket giants and “against Kiwi shoppers” by voting against the amendment bill at its first reading.

Hardly.

The more substantive issue is whether the amendments the Government has proposed to the fast-track regime are likely to, in fact, result in different outcomes.

As Greenpeace executive director Russel Norman put it, the amendment bill has come about because (at least some of) the expert panels considering fast-track applications have proved to take their job seriously and have “a mind of their own”.

The amendments the Government has tabled scream “approve everything now”.

But a preamble to the bill notes they would “not substantially alter” the decision-making framework for fast-track decisions. The Infrastructure Minister would continue to decide whether to refer fast-track applications to expert panels, with those panels continuing to make the “substantive decisions on projects”.

The panels “may” (note, not should or must, but may) still decline applications under the bill if they judge the adverse impacts are “out of proportion” to a project’s regional or national benefits even after setting conditions and giving the applicant the chance to modify their proposal.

It is difficult to appoint someone as an expert to a decision-making body and then ask them not to make objective decisions that are in public interest based on the evidence put in front of them, as opposed to pre-conceptions — even if articulated in the likes of government policy statements — of how ministers might like approvals to play out.

At the same time, it would be understandable if panel experts already felt under undue pressure to approve applications and that the wording of legislation made it difficult to find the legal justification to turn down ones that were problematic or half-baked.

The amendments the Government is proposing are only likely to make those problems worse.

The panels risk being put in impossible positions. It’s rushed and awkward stuff and, frankly, completely unnecessary, if the goal is to put the true, long-term interests of Kiwis first.