OLIVER HARTWICH: As they stand, no
- Administrator
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Last week, Eric Crampton made the case for passing the RMA replacement Bills, while noting some risks in their current form.
Nick Clark argued that Parliament should pause them.
I promised a verdict. Here it is: the Bills still need work. Deadlines loom if the government wants to pass them this term. And it may not have time to get them into shape.
Eric is right that the Bills contain improvements. Councils would have fewer ways to block homes and businesses. Planning rules would become more consistent.
Chris Bishop and Simon Court deserve credit for taking on a reform that governments have failed to achieve for decades. Few politicians have understood the problems more clearly.
But Nick is right that protections are missing. We are not judging the Bills against an economist’s ideal. We are judging them against Cabinet’s own promises: more housing, respect for property rights and better regulation.
The bills make some progress. Planners will have less scope for micromanagement. A limited number of simplified, standardised zones will apply all throughout the country and more activities will be allowed by right.
But the Minister of the day will have wide discretion to set the direction that planners must follow. A Minister could prioritise any combination of the legislation’s sixteen goals. The bills provide few protections for property rights and housing affordability if priorities shift.
The Initiative has consistently argued that this kind of legislation requires guardrails. If national direction and planning go wrong, protective measures should take hold. Done well, they would help avoid problems in the first place.
Making private plan changes easier, especially when land prices show that zoning has been too restrictive, would make housing supply more reliable.
If a new public rule sharply reduces what someone can do with a property, the authority should have to relax the rule or buy the property for what it was worth before the new rule. One owner should not carry the cost of a public benefit. This kind of rule helps encourage better thinking about costs and benefits.
Protections must be in the Acts themselves. Otherwise, a future minister could remove them without returning to Parliament.
None of this is new. Our February submission and Nick’s April research note set out these safeguards.
The Government can still add them before the final vote. But time is short and the task is substantial.
Our verdict, therefore, must wait for the final amendment papers.
Dr Oliver Hartwich is Executive Director of the New Zealand Initiative
To keep this short. Let's scrap the current bill entirely, fire the legislative team and hire a new one competent enough and with an appropriate ideological mindset to write comprehensive, unambiguous, fair, principled legislation that can be presented within 6 months of the coalition being returned to Government. If the coalition is not returned then we're stuffed anyway so who cares. Otherwise we'll be limping along again for years with a half-arsed RMA that needs replacing.
more concerning is that it's taken nearly 3 yrs + 6yrs in opposition to get this far... & they only scrapped iwi-council agreements weeks ago... they truly are hopeless on many matters...
having said that thou i prefer it to the spend & borrow madness of the last labour govt (who along with greens,top,tpm) promise much the same...
Oliver Hartwich supports both Crampton's and Clark's positions. Crampton wants to get the reforms in place ASAP and then deal with problems later. Clark wants the guardrails up first - otherwise the reforms will be too easy to undermine. It strikes me the RMA reforms could revolutionise NZ so it is important to enact them. However we need to be sure that the proper safeguards are in place first --- especially relating to property rights, compensation and limitations on ministerial interference.
It would be interesting, Oliver, to compare today’s planning rules with those of 80 years ago. This comes to mind because I recently used Google Street View to take me to the Gisborne property I spent the first couple of years of my life on. Then I asked it to take me to the Auckland house I lived in until my late teens. Both houses are still there and both appear to be in excellent condition. The Gisborne house is still on its original quarter acre section. The Auckland section was originally the same size, but my father’s productive vege garden is now buried under 2 adjoining units. My father worked in a fairly ordinary job as a mid-rank public…
The bills the government wants get pushed thru. "We'll refine that later." The bills the goverment does not want must be fully completed and operative. "Wouldnt want this to be incomplete".