The Planning Bill and Natural Environment Bill promise simpler rules, faster consents and a sharper focus on property rights, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s extract from The Bulletin.
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New rules for a new era
The government has formally launched its long-trailed replacement for the Resource Management Act, confirming that by 2029 the 34-year-old regime will give way to two new laws: the Planning Bill and the Natural Environment Bill. As Lyric Waiwiri-Smith details in The Spinoff, the bills promise a simpler system with far fewer consents and standardised rules, all managed via a national digital planning and consenting platform called ePlan.
Internal layouts, facades and other “visual amenity” matters are no longer considered part of the planning system, meaning councils will lose the power to regulate things like the colour of a housing development. In their place, the new laws centre planning decisions on clearer environmental limits and consistent national standards. The overarching aim, ministers say, is a planning system that protects the environment while significantly lowering costs and enabling development at greater speed. RMA reform minister Chris Bishop called the package “a once-in-a-generation shift towards choice, freedom and opportunity”.
Bishop champions the ‘abundance agenda’
The RMA overhaul also cements Bishop’s emergence as what Joel MacManus dubs a de facto “minister for abundance”, borrowing the language of Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s influential book. As MacManus writes this morning, rather than treating development as something to be cautiously rationed, Bishop has spent the government’s term clearing regulatory pathways for both public and private projects, sometimes siding with left-leaning mayors and sometimes infuriating conservative councillors. He has forced intensification in Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland, championed the fast-track approvals regime and consistently framed housing and infrastructure as matters of national urgency rather than local taste.
That single-minded focus on development helps make the minister a global outlier, MacManus argues. “Thanks to New Zealand’s notoriously fast legislative system, you could fairly make the argument that Bishop has done more over the past two years to advance the abundance agenda than any other politician in the world.”
Pleased reactions and a note of regret
Developers have broadly welcomed the new laws. Christchurch construction expert Mike Blackburn told The Post the reforms would allow more housing to be built more quickly. He was especially pleased that local authorities would no longer be able to “meddle” in developers’ design choices. “Councils should not be able to tell you where to put a bathroom or the front door in a house, and now they won’t be able to,” he said.
The changes come two years almost to the day since the coalition repealed Labour’s own dual-law replacement for the RMA. Stuff’s Lloyd Burr asked former Labour minister Andrew Little whether he saw any similarities between the two sets of reforms. “When you look at the six years of work that went into the Labour reforms … to be repealed in a matter of months,” Little said. “Then, two years on, to get two pieces of legislation whose names all but mirror the two previous pieces of legislation, and with a set of principles that are very close to the principles of Labour’s legislation, people have to judge for themselves whether a wholesale repeal at that time was warranted.”
How we got here
Today’s announcement lands after more than three decades of struggle to modernise the resource-management system. As Charlie Mitchell explained last year in a deep dive for The Press, the RMA, passed in 1991, was a visionary attempt to balance environmental protection with development. But it grew bloated through successive amendments and wildly inconsistent local interpretation, creating a minefield for developers and an explosion of planning documents among councils, “thickets of bureaucracy [spreading] like gorse across the landscape”.
Labour’s last major attempt to fix the system came in August 2023, when it passed the Spatial Planning Act and the Natural and Built Environment Act. Those laws barely lasted four months: after winning the 2023 election, National temporarily restored the RMA as a stopgap while it prepared its own replacement. That replacement is finally here; time will tell whether this one will prove more successful than its much-maligned predecessor.
