Need for big RMA overhaul – business groups

The Resource Management Act is failing both to allow sufficient development and to protect the environment, a coalition of environmental, business and infrastructure lobby groups claim. 

An Environmental Defence Society report says poor implementation is a major part of the reason for the 25-year-old Act's failure but legislative reform is not the only answer for a law that was ground-breaking when passed in 1991. Since then there have been numerous attempts at reform.

The government is making a third attempt at reform since the 2008 election, although its Resource Legislation Amendment Bill has become bogged down in a parliamentary committee where it is months behind schedule.

The report is the second in a series of three prepared by the Environmental Defence Society (EDS), with funding from three business groups, the Auckland-based Employers and Manufacturers Association, the Property Council of New Zealand, and the NZ Council for Infrastructure Development.

"While the business side of the argument was well developed and the business industry organisations had strongly advocated the system was a handbrake on development and productivity, what was missing from the conversation was an empirical element relating to the environmental impact," the four groups said in a jointly crafted statement. The EDS research "found the RMA had not met the environmental outcomes expected of it, and that the wider issue of how the nation's resources are managed was suboptimal.

"The challenge is far from dissipating. Projected population and economic growth will only sharpen pressures on the environment and restructuring of economic systems will be required to achieve genuine sustainability," the report says.

EDS only agreed to undertake the research as long as the funders accepted "we need to manage natural resources subject to bottom lines and limits," says its chief executive, Gary Taylor. "Getting an understanding of how well the present system delivers on that aspiration seems a useful contribution to the wider reform discussions."

The third report in the series will include recommendations for the future, and a debate has been running for some time about whether the RMA is too ambitious by including both economic development and environmental goals in one piece of legislation and should be split back into two separate pieces of law, as was the case before 1991.

However, the report cautions against assuming more law reform is the obvious answer.

The 86-page report concludes "the environmental outcomes of the RMA have not met expectations, largely as a result of poor implementation While aspirations were high, the outcomes have not ultimately reflected the desires set down in 1991."

Overall implementation of the RMA had been "weak" and the performance of institutions charged with ensuring good environmental outcomes had been "variable and often poor."

This was particularly so at the local government level and in what the report described as "incorrect jurisprudence" – court decisions that reached what EDS judged to be the wrong outcomes to uphold the provisions of the RMA.

"There has been little consequence for poor performance and thus little drive for improvement by some agencies," the report says. "The oversight body – the Environment Ministry – has been historically quite remiss in adjudicating the implementation of the RMA, and many regional councils have been slow to hold their district and city councils to account."

The evidence also suggested that existing resource users were inherently favoured over alternative users and that efforts to manage cumulative environmental effects had been particularly unsuccessful.

Yet interviews conducted for the report found a high level of loyalty to the RMA and its sustainable resource management principles.

"That the principles can resonate still so loudly 25 years on is a testament to their strength," the report says.

"This drives home the message that poor implementation is the major failing of the RMA system. It calls into question whether large-scale change will really achieve more if the implementation issues are so profound.

"Perhaps more pragmatically, this finding demonstrates that any future reform of the system must play close heed to power relationships, funding models, distribution of capacity and expertise and accountability if it is to achieve materially improved environmental outcomes."

(BusinessDesk)