Overhauling the urban planning process, to make life easier for whom?

Once again, this National-led Government is on the move.

Seizing the opportunity of Auckland’s new super-sized bureaucracy, Environment Minister Nick Smith has leapt into the public eye to announce he’s going to free up the rules of the Resource Management Act to make life easier for … for … for whom?

Will he be freeing up the rules so that property-owners can build on and develop their own properties without first jumping into the maw of a bureaucracy now made much bigger?

Hell no.

Will he be getting rid of all the rules and regulations that mean you sometimes have to wait years and pay thousands of dollars just to build a bigger garage?

You’ve got be joking!

Will he be removing the restrictions on using urban land, so that land prices might finally have a chance to be affordable again?

Nothing could be further from Nick Smith’s small mind.

What he proposes is not to make life easier for home-owners, property-owners and would-be home-builders. The people he wants to make things easier for are the planners. The busybodies. The unproductive aresholes to whom you already have to go cap in hand to ask permission to produce. The gorgeous bastards who have already got your property by the balls.

This, according to this government, is what it means to “overhaul the urban planning process”:

The Environment Minister has launched a plan to overhaul urban planning and development policies to speed up the planning process.
    Nick Smith and new Auckland mayor Len Brown released a discussion document on Tuesday night on changes to how approval is sought for land use, transport and public works in cities.
    The proposals include changes to the Resource Management, Land Transport and Public Works acts…

Changes that will allow planners to write bigger and more bossy planning documents, and to give their infrastructure-building colleagues greater and greater ability to slip all the regulatory leashes that will still bind everybody else.

This is what this government still thinks is “simplifying and streamlining” the planning process.

Dr Smith says current planning systems are cumbersome and inefficient. He hopes a bill will go before Parliament early next year…

It’s sure as hell true that “current planning systems are cumbersome and inefficient”—not to mention iniquitous—but once again we see confirmed that the focus of this government is not on making life easier for the ordinary New Zealanders who actually keep this country moving. They want instead to make the country safer for big government. They want to make our lives harder, while making it easier for all the bastards who get in our way.

And Auckland’s super-sized bureaucracy has just gone and made it all worse. 

That’s worse for you and I. But much, much better for them.

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