Eric shows that, under the right ministers, the government’s replacement legislation should be an improvement on the existing RMA.
 
But being better than the RMA is a very low bar. That alone is not a good enough reason to pass these bills. And legislation that only works under the right minister is risky. My case is that Parliament should pause them and allow the government to fix them properly.
 
The bills provide a framework, but ministers would still decide too many important details later. Those details include which activities need consents, zoning, housing density, environmental limit setting, public notification rules and the meaning of the bills’ main goals. A pro-housing, pro-development minister could make this system faster and more enabling. A different minister could make it even slower and more expensive than the RMA. The more a minister can decide, the more vested interests will lobby the minister.
 
That risk might be tolerable if the design were sound. It is not. The National-ACT coalition agreement and Cabinet's 2024 principles put property rights at the centre of reform. By the time the bills were introduced, that promise had been weakened. The select committee could not fix it because it had to work within a philosophical approach favouring top-down regulation and planning over one based on property rights and the use of market-based tools to deal with environmental impacts.
 
The bills’ regulatory relief provisions apply only to a few factors and do not have to match the landowner's loss. The committee removed the alternatives to first-in first-served water allocation. The bills still have no property rights presumption, no cost-benefit discipline on national direction, too little legislative support for competitive urban land markets. The bills’ plethora of unranked objectives and vague wording will provoke the litigation that plagued the RMA. There will almost certainly be detail buried deep in the bills’ clauses which cause nasty surprises come implementation.
 
All three opposition parties oppose the bills, and the system would not take effect until the end of the decade. Legislation rushed through prior to election is unlikely to last. The last RMA replacement was repealed within weeks of the 2023 election. Substantial amendments will likely be needed next year even if there is no change in government.
 
Eric makes the case for pass and repair. My case is repair, then pass. Oliver Hartwich will provide his own assessment and explain his decision in next week's Insights.