The RMA deserves a better successor

Saturday, 25 July 2026

EDITORIAL: The Resource Management Act reforms are among the most consequential this Government will undertake. Having spent its previous term in opposition denouncing David Parker’s RMA reforms – which Mr Parker also described as among the most important of the Ardern Government – the Luxon Government found them so objectionable that it repealed the legislation within its first 100 days, reverting to the existing Resource Management Act.

Yet the objectives of both governments were remarkably similar. Mr Parker explicitly wanted to upend a status quo that, when his reforms were unveiled in 2021, coincided with an exploding housing market. Minister for RMA Reform Chris Bishop described his goal as ending “a culture of no”. There is little doubt the RMA had become a vehicle for lawfare, allowing developments to be delayed or blocked, sometimes to protect commercial interests rather than the environment. On the other side, it has not overly succeeded in protecting areas of high environmental value.

Almost everyone agreed the RMA was no longer fit for purpose. It had been under review for three decades. At its heart it was environmental protection legislation, designed to manage the effects of development rather than actively enabling it.

The Government’s reforms seek to make development cheaper and easier by reducing more than 1100 planning zones to just 17 national ones. Areas of genuine environmental significance would receive stronger protection, while development elsewhere would become simpler. Property rights would sit at the centre of the new framework.

But after taking office against a backdrop of high inflation, weak growth and mounting public debt, Mr Bishop and Regional Development Minister Shane Jones concluded they could not merely knuckle down and spend another three years rewriting New Zealand’s most complicated statute. Instead they argued they needed to tackle more immediate barriers to specific developments, some of them embarrassingly linked to party donors, presumably coincidentally.

Thus emerged the Fast-track Approvals Act, allowing qualifying projects to bypass the usual consenting process. It has accelerated some developments that might otherwise have languished, but it consumed a third of the Government’s term, considerable political capital and generated no shortage of controversy. It has also distracted from the far more significant task of replacing the RMA itself.

The Planning Bill and the Natural Environment Bill – which are replacing the RMA – were always going to be difficult to deliver within a single parliamentary term, particularly for a three-party coalition.

The upshot is that what initially appeared to be a broadly sensible framework with tacit bipartisan support has shifted. The Government’s response to the select committee reporting back has been to expand ministerial discretion at the expense of councils.

Mana Whakahono ā Rohe agreements between iwi and councils have been banned. Councils will no longer even have the choice of pursuing policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, with the Government arguing climate policy is properly the responsibility of central government. So much for Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s purported support for localism. These are surely unnecessary overreaches of new legislation that will invest too much power in ministerial decision-makers.

Writing in these pages on Friday, Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton argued there were too few agreed principles across politics that are underpinning the current legislation, which he also noted is averse to local control. On the first point, Mr Upton ought to know. As the minister who inherited the Resource Management Act from Sir Geoffrey Palmer and shepherded it into law, Mr Upton understands both the complexity of the task and the importance of finishing it. It must also be said this makes him somewhat conflicted and more invested in its replacement than might be otherwise.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins has said that, if Labour returns to government, it will work within the new framework rather than simply repeal it. After six years of instability in planning law, The Post applauds Mr Hipkins’ pragmatism on this fundamental matter.

Mr Upton’s point about localism, however, goes deeper. It is basically a truism in New Zealand politics that parties are localist in opposition and centralisers in Government.

That has certainly been the case for Mr Luxon, who so championed localism in opposition after learning of its success in Switzerland. In government, alas, he has chosen to repeatedly berate councils, introduced rates caps, is forcing council amalgamations and moved to abolish regional councils. Councils are also being blackmailed into signing regional deals with the government to keep their often failing water assets, which show up as assets on councils balance sheets, but are in reality, liabilities. Whatever the merits of these changes, localism it is not.

The biggest weakness in the Government’s reforms is the same one that afflicted its predecessor’s: too much authority is drawn to the centre and too much taken from local communities. Standardising planning rules and reducing unnecessary consents are worthwhile ambitions. So too is strengthening both environmental protection and development outcomes. But this ought not to be pursued at the expense of trading one faceless bureaucracy up the road for one in Wellington.

Sadly, Mr Bishop’s legislation has failed to quite strike the right balance. Even if it is passed before the election, as promised, it is unclear it will give certainty to either investors, developers, households or environmentalists. Given this will shape almost every part of New Zealand’s economy for decades, taking a little longer to get it right is no vice. Even at this late hour, The Post urges Mr Bishop to again reach out to his Labour Party opponents to see whether a compromise can be struck and the legislation passed with the support of both major parties before Parliament rises on September 24.