"[Chris] Bishop’s primary responsibility, other than completing Steven Joyce’s highway from Warkworth to Whangarei, is reforming the RMA. ... [G]iven how central the reform of the Resource Management Act has been to this government, it defies comprehension that National didn't arrive with a draft ready to go. ...
"The excellent folk at the NZ Initiative have done an analysis of the two proposed [replacement] laws [which eventually emerged]: the Natural Environment and the Planning Bills. Nick Clark, the researcher, concluded, '...in the translation from principles to legislative text, something has gone wrong. Key elements have been weakened, complexity has crept back in, and an extraordinary amount of the systems' substance has been deferred to secondary instruments that do not yet exist.' ...
"The desire to place property rights at the heart of the legislation has been superseded by placing mana whenua into their customary central role in managing the land. ...
"[Also, i]f passed, these bills will not be the final word. That will be left to ‘secondary legislation’, or regulation; binding rules made by the minister of the day that determine how the law is to be applied. The proposal is for parliament to delegate its authority to the executive with minimal oversight. This time next year, Minister Swarbrick could use this secondary legislation to mandate her own vision into reality.
"Did we vote for that? ...
"[T]he bureaucratic class ... has magnificently undermined his agenda. This should have been self-evident thirty months ago ... "~ Damien Grant from his post 'Chris Bishop has emerged as the main pretender to a shaky crown. How shall we assess his performance?'
Wednesday, 29 April 2026
"Chris Bishop’s primary responsibility is reforming the RMA. ... The bureaucratic class has magnificently undermined his agenda."
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and it's going to get worse, with the new mega Ministry of Cities, Environment, Regions and Transport. Taking the de-growth culture of MfE, the pro-local government culture of DIA, the "state should plan housing" culture of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (didn't use to have one of those) with the blend of regulation, planning and mild understanding of markets of MoT. Bishop might think he can drive its culture, but he can't change it when it is absorbing a dominant culture of central planning, control and more fundamentally, antagonism to anything contrary to the de-growth anti-capitalism of the last government. Wellington is a city that now votes in far-left activist Green candidates as MPs, far removed from the 1990s when it would vote in centrists like Peter Dunne, or even National and ACT candidates at the height of the at least market facing Bolger/Shipley years.
The whole job of replacing the RMA should have be put into a small group of officials working with Crown law to draft it from scratch, with some advice from MfE on transitional provisions only. I fear a second term Nat government, like all of them, will be too focused on "wow we could win a third term if we don't upset anyone" like they've always been, as well as "let's stop Winston from backing Labour next time".
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