Chris Lynch: Seymour rules out GST on fuel, dismisses focus on Hipkins’ private life

Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour has defended the Government’s response to rising fuel prices, warning against intervention and rejecting calls to cut GST, during an extended interview in Christchurch.

Speaking to chrislynchmedia.com while visiting the city, Seymour said global supply disruptions were behind rising prices, despite assurances from officials fuel supplies remained stable.

Heather du Plessis-Allan: The RMA change is good, but prepare for issues

Cast your mind back a couple of weeks to what the boss of Auckland Port Roger Gray said.

He told us New Zealand is a country that says 'no' so often, Miami cruise bosses he spoke to had taken to calling us 'No Zealand'.

Yesterday the Government unveiled its plan for how we stop that, which is a rewrite of the RMA because the RMA is part of the problem.

Ele Ludemann: Small changes, big savings

My farmer got a message from the regional council telling him he didn’t have to reapply for a water consent for five years.

The reason? A change in government policy pending changes to the RMA.

This will save us time and money. The council will save even more as it won’t have to process all the consent applications similarly put on hold.

Dr Bryce Wilkinson: The demise of a Wellington icon

Minister Chris Bishop has swung his ministerial wrecking ball at Wellington. He will strip the Gordon Wilson Flats of its heritage protection. At last, the bulldozers can begin.

What a loss to world culture this will be. Forget Paris, Cairo or Rome. For over a decade Wellington has been conserving its own decaying monument to another time.

David Farrar: Paying off objectors

Stuff reports:

Meridian Energy is not revealing the amount it has paid Ngāi Tahu as it seeks to renew resource consents for its Waitaki Hydro Power Scheme.

Last year Meridian signed agreements with Ngā Rūnanga o Waitaki (Arowhenua, Waihao and Moeraki), the Department of Conservation (DOC) and Central South Island Fish & Game which included financial settlements.

Dr Eric Crampton: Consenting, Carbon, and Councils

Policy problems should be dealt with by the level and part of government best placed to deal with them.

Good public policy should recognise subsidiarity. Local problems should be dealt with locally. But not all problems are local. A council issuing its own currency to address perceived failures in national-level monetary policy would not be a great idea.

Henry Cooke: What next for the Ministry for the Environment?

While idly sifting through Treasury’s proactive release of mini-Budget papers, I spotted an interesting line.

“Due to the sensitive nature of the proposals being put forward, the Climate Implications of Policy Assessment (CIPA) team has not been consulted to review these results.”

Damien Grant: Housing market so tightly regulated we’ve created landed gentry

Did you know it costs 50% more to build a house here than it does in Australia? I didn’t, and was surprised to see Chris Luxon promising to do something about it last week.

I mean, I know his party campaigned on housing affordability, but many of his supporters own property and if he does something about high house prices not everyone is going to be pleased.

Point of Order: More policies are stopped or slowed to help save $1bn for bread-and-butter spending.....

...but RMA “reforms” escape the cull

It was a big day for the stopping or slowing of a second tranche of government programmes, an exercise which Beehive publicists are pitching as measures to allow the Government to focus more time, energy and resources on “the bread and butter issues” facing New Zealanders.

This affirms, of course, that since the 2020 general election, the bread- and-butter issues facing New Zealanders had been lowered (or forgotten?) in the Government’s priorities.

Hence the Government’s popularity had wilted, its poll support had shrunk and Jacinda Ardern – remember her ? – had bailed out as Prime Minister when it looked like the Nats and ACT were on course to win the election this year.

Roger Partridge: Why Hipkins should call time on RMA reforms

In combination, these principles promise a worse quagmire than the RMA they are intended to replace.

At 11:59pm on Sunday, submissions close on Environment Minister David Parker’s Natural and Built Environment Bill.

One minute to midnight on the Sunday of Waitangi weekend is a strange deadline for submissions on a once-in-a-generation proposal to reform the Resource Management Act.

Yet Sunday is the extended deadline for submissions on the Bill. The extension followed howls of protest as submitters scrambled to respond to an 810-page Bill introduced into Parliament only shortly before the summer holiday recess.

But undue haste is not the main problem with Parker’s Bill. The more fundamental issue is incoherence.

Frank Newman: Straight Talk - Dump the RMA

If the government wants to get New Zealand working it should get rid of the Resource Management Act (RMA). Even one of its architects, Geoffrey Palmer, has said it's broken. It is, and has been for quite some time, which is why it's so frustrating that the problem has been allowed to persist for so long, more so because National's tinkering during its last term made it worse not better.

The RMA started out with great intentions. 

Frank Newman: RMA reforms pass into law

Last week the National and Maori parties passed their Resource Management Act (RMA) reforms though Parliament. There was an air of arrogance from Environment Minister Nick Smith as the Bill passed through the House - knowing full well that he had the 59 National votes and a proxy for the two Maori Party votes in a 121 member Parliament.

In my view the National Party has made a strategic error in passing this unpopular amendment by making the RMA a bigger "Frankenstein".

Stephen Franks: Doubling down for Nick Smith

I was obliged to spend all yesterday on unplanned responding to calls about Dr Nick Smith’s Resource Legislation Amendment Bill. It could be passed by Parliament this week.

Yet New Zealand is just waking up to what desperately bad legislation it is. Some beneficial provisions are badly overdue, but it tries to fix other weeping RMA sores by forcing Councils  to plaster them with Ministerial acne cream. It is so prescriptive it could be a Green bill, rejecting property rights as a cure for Planners Paralysis, and instead subjecting local authorities to detailed Ministerial decrees.

Michael Coote: Unitary Plan deadline fast approaching

Just weeks remain before submissions on the proposed Auckland unitary plan close on Friday, February 28, 2014. After that, those who have failed to get their word in edgeways and asked for the right to speak at subsequent Resource Management Act (RMA) hearings will be shut out of direct input into the process.

The deadline is salient not least because Auckland Council under mayor Len Brown is attempting to use the unitary plan to foist a race-based constitution upon Auckland that will permanently elevate its part-Maori inhabitants to legal and public policy supremacy over all other residents and ratepayers.

Frank Newman: Heritage hassles

A decision by the Environment Court has blocked the demolition of an earthquake prone building in Wellington. That has reignited the debate about how much of the past should be preserved and who should bear the cost of protecting items of heritage value.

The Court acknowledged the Harcourts Building on Lambton Quay has “significant seismicity issues” and can't be rented out but said the building contributed strongly to the “Lambton Quay streetscape”. Having no commercial value did not justify its demolition, the Court said.

Frank Newman: RMA a failure

The Resource management Act is about to get another makeover, the 21^st since the legislation became law in 1991. The new changes are to be announced within the new few weeks and expected to take up to three years to put into effect. Twenty-one changes in 22 years is a clear admission that the Act is not working, and never has.

Frank Newman: Housing for the poor?

According to an article appearing in today’s NZ Herald government officials have been in touch with the country’s largest house builders to ask them what is “stopping them putting up big swathes of new housing, particularly aimed at the more affordable end.”

What is unusual about the question is that they need to ask it at all. The reasons are pretty obvious to anyone living on planet earth. The Minister is reported to have said, “The most unfair aspect of it is that there's no housing being built for people in the lowest quartile of income. Like none”.

Frank Newman: Environmental activism

When the Resource Management Act (RMA) was first introduced it was with the expectation that it would empower communities. It has done the opposite. It’s evolved into a web of rules and regulations created by environmental activists to advance their preservationist views. The effect has been to increase land prices and stifle economic growth and social wellbeing in the provinces. Rural folk are not happy, and are saying so in greater numbers.

The question I ask is how is it that an “enabling” piece of legislation like the RMA has grow into what it is today?

Frank Newman: RMA and land prices

Last week the Economist magazine ran an article reporting New Zealand has one the world's most over-valued housing markets. This may explain why. It involves a well-intentioned individual and a scruffy piece of land on the Tutukaka Coast 30 minutes north east of Whangarei.

The 6.6 hectares (16 acres) had been a forestry block that backed onto a coastal settlement. The pines were removed in 2005, and Pampas grass has been thriving ever since. He bought the land in 2006, with the intention of rezoning it from Coastal Countryside to Living. The proposal was for a low density residential development comprising 24 sections. A substantial area was to be set aside as a reserve for native revegetation, and included covenants preventing residents for owning dogs and cats, lest their pets prey upon local Kiwi which have been returning to the Coast is significant numbers.

Lindsay Perigo: Eco-Fascism in NZ—Beginning of the End?

If the Green Party calls them "a major assault on the [Resource Management] Act and on sustainable development" then, sight unseen, I'm for them.

The advisory group set up by the government after the Canterbury earthquakes to examine quake-related issues relevant to the Act has apparently exceeded its brief in a most edifying way. It has proposed a significant rewrite of this singularly fascist legislation, under which property owners have been viciously persecuted and prosecuted for some 20 years now. It has recommended the removal of the mandate to local bodies to protect coastal areas, wetlands, lakes and rivers, and indigenous flora and fauna.