RMA minister: Reforms will hinge off being able to do what you like, with your own land

Monday, 24 March 2025

Ministers Chris Bishop and Simeon Brown want to streamline permits for ports as part of fixing a ‘broken RMA“. A few protesters gatecrashed the Auckland. .

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If you own a piece of land, you should be able to do with it what you like.

That’s the starting point for the new regime that will replace the Resource Management Act (RMA), more details of which were unveiled by the Minister responsible for RMA reform Chris Bishop and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon on Monday, including the Government’s intention to introduce two new laws to the House before the end of the year.

“The starting point for the new regime will be a presumption of land use,” said Bishop. “So if you own a piece of land, you can do with it what you like, and you have to take account of effects on where that land use will affect others.”

The equal principle was where there was an impact on people’s private land use, sometimes called a regulatory taking, which was a more complex piece of work and took into account things like heritage, or outstanding natural landscapes.

Policy work is continuing but this year the Government plans to introduce two new laws, the Planning Act and the Natural Environment Act, to the House, which promised “a radical transition to a far more liberal planning system with less red tape,” according to Bishop.

The Natural Environment Act would cover freshwater, indigenous biodiversity and coastal policy while the Planning Act would cover urban development, infrastructure (including renewable energy) and natural hazards.

Details of the new regime were unveiled by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and RMA reform minister Chris Bishop on Monday. (file photo)

Bishop said he was open to negotiation and feedback from the Opposition - within reason. National in December 2023 scrapped Labour's answer to an RMA replacement: the Natural and Built Environment Act 2023 and Spatial Planning Act 2023.

“We will reach out [to Opposition parties] in good faith, but we also have a mandate to implement good public policy, to fix the resource management laws,” Bishop said.

'All three political parties campaigned on a mandate of scrapping the RMA and a new regime based on largely all the concepts that we have developed.

'We'll be putting legislation before the Parliament. That's not to say that there isn't room for some consultation and negotiation as we go through. I do think it is important we have some degree of stability when it comes to our planning laws.'

The system would introduce nationally set standards, including standardised land use zones. That would replace the current system where individual councils determine the technical rules of each of their zones. Bishop said there was no justification, for example, of Napier having different height in relation to boundary rules to Upper Hutt.

“Across New Zealand there are 1175 different kinds of zones. In the entirety of Japan, which uses standardised zoning, there are 13,” Bishop said.

“There are 1175 different sets of technical zoning rules in a country the size of New Zealand, our view is that is totally nuts. There is really no legitimate justification for the maximum building height in a residential zone to be eight metres in Kāpiti, and and nine metres in Dunedin.”

He’d like to see New Zealand get closer to Japan’s number of zones.

He and under-secretary Simon Court would be working, over the next few months, on what would be considered a regulatory taking.

He said the changes decided on so far were significant in that, “the RMA, at the moment, does not have a particular presumption in favour of property rights. The new laws will, and once you establish that from the start, then a whole range of other factors starts to come into play around regulatory changes, which we’ll work through.”

Business NZ chief executive Katherine Rich said the plans were a “step in the right direction”.

A 2021 report for the Infrastructure Commission estimated RMA consenting processes were costing $1.2b a year.

“There is also a need for compensation to be made available in cases where property is taken or reduced in value as a result of government regulatory action. It is pleasing that the Government is taking property rights seriously, as it should if we want to attract long-term investment into New Zealand.”

Labour leader Chris Hipkins said people wanted more stability when it came to the RMA “but the last time we extended the hand of bipartisanship to the National Party they took a dump on it”.

“I think the protection of private property rights is an area that we want to understand more fully, the implications of what they’re announcing there, because the protections for the environment still matter…we haven’t seen the detail of exactly what they’re going to do yet. I think a lot of it comes down to how the law changes are drafted. There are certainly areas in common with the law changes that they repealed.”

On whether Labour would keep the new RMA if it were to win the next election, Hipkins said, “we're not going to rip up things just because the other side have done them”.

“There's been far too much of that. Having said that, I'm not going to say that we wouldn't make changes, but we'll be clear before the election what those changes would be.”

Overhauling the RMA would encourage infrastructure and housing development, Bishop said.

The Green Party’s environment spokesperson Lan Pham called on the Government to create a system that protected the environment “ahead of the private gain they are constantly pandering to”.

Key changes

An expert advisory group was last year working on testing the Government’s new principles, and by December last year had developed a ‘blueprint’ for the reform including 21 key recommendations. Cabinet had agreed the blueprint provided a “workable basis” for the new system.

The new laws would narrow the scope of the effects considered by the system, more clearly defining the types of adverse effects that could be considered, and raising the threshold for when those effects must be managed.

Both acts would include a starting presumption that a land use is enabled, unless there is a significant enough impact on either the ability of others to use their own land, or on the natural environment. They would also include a clear protection for lawfully established existing use rights, and the potential for the reasonable expansion of existing activities over time where the site is ‘zoned or owned’.

A national compliance regulator with a regional presence for environmental compliance monitoring would be established – taking over what has been a regional council function.

There would be a requirement for regulatory justification reports if departing from approaches to regulation standardised at the national level. Compensation may happen for regulatory takings in some circumstances. There would also be an expansion in the range of permitted activities.

The system would provide for nationally-set standards, including standardised land use zones, and each region would be required to have a spatial plan, which identified sufficient future urban development areas, development areas to be prioritised for public investment and existing and planned infrastructure corridors and strategic sites.

Each region would be required to have a spatial plan, which identified sufficient future urban development areas, development areas to be prioritised for public investment and existing and planned infrastructure corridors and strategic sites.

Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Infrastructure Simon Court, who was also at the announcement and carried with him a copy of the RMA, numbering 900 pages, said Government would be asking councils to plan and get democratic sign off for their plans in their areas.