Meanwhile, New Zealand’s product market regulation ranking has dropped to 20th in the OECD, down from 2nd in 1998.
What did we get in return? The RMA has not achieved its intended environmental purpose. Forty-five percent of our river length is now unswimmable. Seventy-four percent of indigenous freshwater fish are endangered.
The Act delivered crippling process costs while parts of the environment continued to deteriorate. It was the worst of both worlds.
The Government’s intent in replacing the RMA with a Planning Bill and a Natural Environment Bill is sound. Minister Bishop and Undersecretary Court have done a huge job. Making competitive urban land markets a statutory goal is progress.
But as the Initiative’s submission argues, the Government has made a deliberate choice we think is wrong. It has kept the Bills skeletal, with most substance left to national direction that Ministers can write and rewrite. The Government says this avoids the RMA’s mistake of putting too much detail in primary legislation.
We disagree. National direction shifts with political winds, and whoever forms the next government inherits maximum discretion to reshape the system without touching the Act. Property rights protections, cost-benefit requirements and competitive land market mechanisms belong in statute.
The Bills removed section 32, which (inadequately) required cost-benefit justifications before the Government could set binding rules. Nothing has taken its place.
Key goal terms like “unreasonably affect others” and “inappropriate development” are left undefined. The Government assumes existing case law will carry their meaning into the new Act. But legal meaning is framework-dependent. Courts will interpret these terms afresh, and those interpretations will cascade through the system.
The deeper problem is that the Bills were supposed to put respect for property rights at the heart of the new system. They make some progress by ruling out certain site-specific matters from council interference, but they fall well short.
Without these safeguards in the primary legislation, the Bills will not deliver what they promise.
We do not want to spend another three decades discovering we have simply replaced one dysfunctional planning system with another.
The Act delivered crippling process costs while parts of the environment continued to deteriorate. It was the worst of both worlds.
The Government’s intent in replacing the RMA with a Planning Bill and a Natural Environment Bill is sound. Minister Bishop and Undersecretary Court have done a huge job. Making competitive urban land markets a statutory goal is progress.
But as the Initiative’s submission argues, the Government has made a deliberate choice we think is wrong. It has kept the Bills skeletal, with most substance left to national direction that Ministers can write and rewrite. The Government says this avoids the RMA’s mistake of putting too much detail in primary legislation.
We disagree. National direction shifts with political winds, and whoever forms the next government inherits maximum discretion to reshape the system without touching the Act. Property rights protections, cost-benefit requirements and competitive land market mechanisms belong in statute.
The Bills removed section 32, which (inadequately) required cost-benefit justifications before the Government could set binding rules. Nothing has taken its place.
Key goal terms like “unreasonably affect others” and “inappropriate development” are left undefined. The Government assumes existing case law will carry their meaning into the new Act. But legal meaning is framework-dependent. Courts will interpret these terms afresh, and those interpretations will cascade through the system.
The deeper problem is that the Bills were supposed to put respect for property rights at the heart of the new system. They make some progress by ruling out certain site-specific matters from council interference, but they fall well short.
Without these safeguards in the primary legislation, the Bills will not deliver what they promise.
We do not want to spend another three decades discovering we have simply replaced one dysfunctional planning system with another.
The New Zealand Initiative's submission, Planning Bill and Natural Environment Bill, was lodged on 13 February 2026.
Dr Oliver Hartwich is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative think tank. This article was first published HERE.
2 comments:
Oliver, it is hard to overstated the importance of your comments about the two Bill's intended to replace the 1991 Resource Management Act (RMA)
One day, someone might attempt to quantify how much this Statute cost, hastily drafted by an outgoing Labour government and stupidly enacted by the incoming National Government. Full of lovely, but often undefined laws intended replace the old, nasty, prescriptive Town & Country Planning Act with 'permissive' requirements aimed at insuring the sustainability of our natural& physical 'resources.
What could possibly go wrong?
Turns out 'permissive' meant bureaucrats decided what was indeed to be permitted! Resource Management, it turned out, required managers,....and land owners were largely excluded from managing their own properties.
As Oliver pointed out, this massive, costly investment in better environmental outcomes, produced arguably meague results.
But much more important than looking back, this new legislative attempt contains the germ of a new but continuing disaster.
Following recent trends, the draft bill is, as Oliver describes, "skeletal"...ie not much substance and much of that lacks statutory definition. The real substance will be decided, from time to time, by bureaucrats, this time by Wellington rather than local variety.
But to avoid a very long dissertation on what constitutes good law I refer readers to a book called, "The New Despotism" by Lord Hewart, a text once included in legal studies in NZ. Published in 1929, in part it traced the tendency in the UK for governments to use emergency regulatory powers mainly created during WW1 i instead of using the "tiresome" process of pushing statutes through Parliament.
In NZ one could argue, successive governments, through further crises like WW2, developed the habit of using regulation making (largely outside the oversight of our elected representatives in Parliament to an art form!
And worse, in recent times, even the process of getting the Govenor General's signature on regulation is too cumbersome so a new, faster system of ''statutory rules' and giving wider authority of bureaucrats to approve this or that, is being used.
Does it matter? Surely modern fast-paced life is such that rapid technical change needs equally fast law-making?
My take is that, possibly with pure motives, the Rule of Law is being diminished. Ie rules developed by our elected representatives, rules that are stable and widely known, and which are debated in public in independent courts of law.
Arguably, modern law-making is removing ordinary responsible citizens from the democratic process.
Thank you Oliver for your post. Please developed your thesis.
The recourse consent has been destroyed by bureaucratic self preservation, or control, nonsense in a lot of cases. One thing that they will want to keep control on will be waste water disposal. Can that be regulated in such a way that its not subject to human official, diverse interpretation and control. ?
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