No RMA reform that's worth a damn, with even worse promised

THE NATIONAL PARTY, SAYS John Key, promises to "reform" the Resource Management Act "within the first 100 days of our first term.

How?

Remember that National introduced the Resource Management Act back in 1991.  Remember that National's Nick Smith administered the Act as environment minister, without change, for three years to 1999 -- and he's on record as describing it as "far-sighted environmental legislation." 

What do they want to do to it now that they haven't wanted to do before? And what will Nick "far-sighted environmental legislation" Smith want to do to it anyway?

Do they want to put protection of New Zealander's property rights at the heart of the Act?  No.

Do they want to take power over your property away from planners and council bureaucrats?  No.

Are they promising anything that it will make projects like the Whangamata marina and Wellington's waterfront hotel any easier?  No, they aren't.

To make it easier for a builder to get a subdivision consent and lower the price of land to buyers?; or for a supermarket owner to build a new supermarket in the face of a competitor?; or a developer to build a new village in the face of council opposition?  No, of course not. 

Will they abolish the likes of development levies, and squash the huge delays and rises in consent costs that add thousands, and sometimes millions, to every private project in the country?  No, of course they won't.  Will they do anything at all to increase the supply of suitable land available on which to build houses, or to remove council planners the power to zone private land, and the power to set urban walls around New Zealand towns and cities?  No, emphatically not.

Not one of these things will happen under National.

OF THE FEW DETAILS released that actually describe what they would do in that first 100 days (and who now expects details from this lot?), all they really establish is they will make it easier for the government to "Think Big" -- requiring projects of so called "national significance" to be consented in nine months, or else.

That won't help you or I get our projects built or our property rights protected, but it would allow the government to steamroll over people's property rights to push through projects like the Waikato pylons.

They don't want to protect your property rights.  They don't want to make it easier for you to build, they only want to make it easier for them to build, using borrowed money.

They say, or at least, Nick Smith promised last year, that they will set up an "Environmental Protection Authority"? 

Does that sound like less bureaucracy and less of the stifling red tape that's strangling us all? 

The say, and Key promised this in his conference speech, to enact an emissions trading scheme. "My goal," says Key, "is to have such a scheme on the statute books within nine months of taking office."

Does that sound like less bureaucracy and less of the stifling red tape that's strangling us all? 

"We are determined to remove the handbrake the RMA places on growth," they say. "We are determined to let good ideas flourish in this country. We are going to get New Zealand moving again."

There is nothing reported from either Smith or Key to indicate any of that is true, nothing at all to indicate either will do anything to help New Zealanders get their property rights back -- and much, including that promised emissions trading scheme, to suggest otherwise.  This is just more new window dressing that looks just like the same old window dressing, with new impositions thrown in.

National are NOT the answer.