A rubberstamp for Shane Jones' bulldozer

Last month, the Environment Committee caused outrage by allowing only ten days for public submissions on the Fast-track Approvals Amendment Bill. At the time, I pointed out how this was an abuse of the parliamentary process, a ratfucking of our democracy which did not give submitters sufficient time to make the "high-quality" submissions elitist Ministers supposedly want, and which would undermine the legitimacy of parliament and the state.

The committee has now reported back on the bill, approving it despite 95% of submissions being opposed. They've recommended no changes, because they simply didn't give themselves time to do so, and because it has emerged that the bill is still being written: the regime plans to introduce substantial amendments at the committee stage, without even a pretence of public consultation or democratic process.

This isn't "consideration" or "scrutiny" of legislation - it's a rubberstamp for executive autocracy. And it's not "government by consent" - it's simply a naked exercise of power, to bulldoze through corrupt legislation and ensure that Shame Jones gets his payoffs. Which probably makes Jones and Bishop feel big and hard and powerful, but there's a cost to bulldozing through democracy like this. And now that the regime has bulldozed through the democratic limits to pass their law, opponents of both it and any specific projects rubberstamped may not feel constrained by thse limits in their methods of opposition. Which isn't great for our democracy or our society. But I guess the regime simply regards that as a problem for next quarter...

Companies who buy "consents" under this law should not expect either the next government or the public to treat them as legitimate. And the next government should legislatively nullify every single one of them under urgency. Because a bulldozer works both ways, and having driven it through our parliamentary process, Jones and co can hardly cry foul when someone else seizes control, kicks him off, and reverses it back over him and his mates.

Good riddance

The proposed Waimate garbage incinerator is dead:

The company behind a highly-controversial proposal to build a waste-to-energy plant in the Waimate District no longer has the land.

[...]

However, SIRRL director Paul Taylor said the sales and purchase agreement to purchase land from Murphy Farms, near Glenavy, lapsed at the end of last year.

The company gave no indication of where the plant may be located now it had lost the land.

So, South Island Resource Recovery may have got itself placed on National's corrupt fast-track list, but that list specifies the exact site, so they can no longer use it. And while they could find a new site and re-apply, they'd need to spend years gathering the required environmental data for the new site to support an application. Which means in practical terms that the whole thing is dead. Until of course it pops up in a new small town with a low-capacity local authority to start the whole scam again.

The corruption list

Yesterday the navy lost one of its newest ships in an accident. And so obviously, National used it as cover to release its list of projects to be rubber-stamped under its corrupt Muldoonist "fast-track" law. When the list of invitees was released, I called it "a who's who of New Zealand's dodgiest companies". The final list is a who's who of our most corrupt. Those willing to bribe ministers or simply trample all over our democracy is order to get their projects (briefly) approved.

Trans-Tasman Resources is there, with their seabed mine which has already been rejected by the Supreme Court and which would prevent the construction of a vital offshore windfarm. As is the South Island garbage incinerator, Oceana Gold's giant Waihi gold mine, and a host of other dirty mining and irrigation projects. Plus a bunch of housing developments to pay off the property developers. All wrapped up with a tiny amount of infrastructure and renewable energy projects for PR purposes (except: there's NZ's dodgiest solar farm company's Warkworth project; and a bunch of projects in the Mackenzie Country, which independent panels have already decided is not an acceptable place for solar farms; and a bunch of the wind projects are already consented).

Some of these filler projects might gain consent through the normal RMA process. The fact that their promoters have chosen to piss in our faces and shit on our democracy by pursuing fast-track authorisation tells us something ugly about them and their corporate mindset. And they need to be punished for that choice. So I'm not in favour of drawing any distinctions when the next government inevitably revisits this. Repeal the law, revoke all their consents without compensation, and make them do it properly or not at all.

The good news is that while the bill will be law by the end of the year, and the government thinks it will have the first approvals early (really mid) next year, there's really only an eighteen-month window for construction and profit before the next election and a potential change of government and policy. Every month of delay due to legal action, protests etc against these projects narrows that window. And if its narrowed enough, it will become too risky to start for fear that consent will be revoked and money wasted. So, we may not have to do too much against the worst of them to stop them - provided the left wins the next election.

I've posted before about the legitimising effect of the RMA process. Given the potential for protest, occupation etc, whether these projects proceed is ultimately a matter of public consent. But by choosing to pursue this process, these companies have basically surrendered any prospect of that. I hope they are made to regret it.

And round we go again...

One of Labour's few achievements last term was to finally move on RMA reform. Following an independent review and a select committee review of an exposure draft, both aimed at ironing out bugs and producing a compromise most people could live with, Labour passed the Natural and Built Environments Act just before the 2023 election. And then National immediately repealed it. Since then they've been picking holes in the legacy RMA regime to advantage their donors and cronies. And now they've announced grand plans to replace the entire Act again:

The Government has revealed its plans for a permanent replacement for the Resource Management Act, the 1991 law that has, for more than a decade, been a piñata of blame from politicians who accuse it of failing to adequately protect the environment while stifling development.

[...]

The coalition Government resurrected the RMA last year and today announced plans to kill it once again and replace it with two new pieces of legislation, which will be focused on allowing people to enjoy property rights. RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop and Under-Secretary to the Minister Responsible for RMA Reform Simon Court said the replacement would be passed before the next election.

Which probably sounds great to them and their donors and cronies. The problem is that the next government, can, will, and should immediately repeal it and revert to the old regime, just as National did. The development focus and the obvious role of corruption in the process makes its survival untenable, and its repeal by the next government a basic act of political hygiene.

(...and the same goes for practically every other significant policy of this government. Given its naked corruption, repealing everything they have done on day one and replacing it with SFO investigations into every donor and lobbyist who benefited is vital. Anything less sends a message that corruption pays).

If National wanted lasting policy change in this area, they'd be doing what Labour did, and setting up a multi-year programme of review and inquiry and compromise to build consensus. Instead, they're just pulling some rabid propertarian weirdo shit from a bunch of foreign billionaire-funded thinktanks and trying to impose it by fiat. Anyone who thinks such policy can or should last is either a fool, or trying to sell you something.

National's bulldozer dictatorship bill

This National government has been aggressively anti-environment, and is currently ramming through its corrupt Muldoonist "fast-track" legislation to give three ministers dictatorial powers over what gets built and where. But that's not the only thing they're doing. On Thursday they introduced a Resource Management (Freshwater and Other Matters) Amendment Bill, and the Order Paper says they'll be ramming it through its first reading on Tuesday. Obviously, this bill is about removing environmental protections which currently stop farmers from shitting in rivers and chainsawing native bush. But its far wider than that.

The RMA has an extensive system of national environmental standards and national policy statements, which are supposed to guide the plans and policies made by local authorities to cover matters of national importance. As I pointed out when Associate Environment Minister Andrew Hoggard purported to "suspend" one by press conference, there is an actual legal process required to change these. This requires either an independent board of inquiry, or, if control-freaked by a Minister, notification, consultation, an evaluation and decision-making according to legislated criteria. The bill basically guts all that.

Firstly, of course, it removes independent boards. These decisions will be made by Ministers, and only by Ministers, strengthening their role as a nexus of corruption in the system. Secondly, while those corrupt Ministers will still be required to notify the public of what they want to do, we won't be allowed to have a say. An objective criteria that we be given "adequate time and opportunity to make a submission" is replaced with a squishy one of "what the Minister considers to be adequate time..." We've seen what that means to National in their constant abuse of Parliamentary select committee submission windows to prevent public engagement.

As for evaluation, there'll be a special stove-piped process for these Ministerial diktats. They will still be required to assess effectiveness, environmental and economic (but not social or cultural) impacts, and reasonably practicable alternatives. But there's no longer a requirement to assess costs and benefits, or the risks of acting (or not acting) when information is uncertain. Worse, the requirement that national directions be "the most appropriate way to achieve the purpose of this Act" is removed; in fact, they will no longer be required to serve the purposes of the Act (or the other matters identified as important in the RMA) at all. And, as the final insult, there will no longer be a requirement to give reasons for the decision. This is likely cribbed from National's previous attacks on refugees, and like those, it is a recipe for legislated arbitrariness - a bulldozer dictatorship.

Finally, decision-making. Under the current law, if Ministers decide to control-freak, they must still decide on the same basis as a board of inquiry would, taking account of the purposes of the Act and other matters of national importance (including ti Tiriti), and the submissions and evidence received. That's all gone. So, in deciding on environmental standards and policies under the RMA, Ministers won't need to consider the purpose of that law, legislated matters of national importance, other important values, or ti Tiriti. None of that will matter. Neither will what we say - Ministers won't be required to consider it at all. The clear implication is that Ministers will be making decisions counter to those purposes and values, counter to ti Tiriti. And with the concentration of powers making the Minister a nexus for corruption, it basically replaces the legislated values with the Minister's bank balance.

Oh, and the Minister won't even have to do that if they're changing a national direction for a bunch of reasons, including "chang[ing] the time frame for implementation" - meaning Ministers can indefinitely delay things on a whim, without notification or consultation.

As I said, this is basically a bulldozer dictatorship, which will gut our environmental protections for the benefit of vandals and polluters, while enabling Ministers to corruptly enrich themselves in the process. It is contrary to our values and to our constitutional norms for decision-making. It should not be allowed to pass. And if it is rammed through, it must be immediately removed, under urgency, by the next government.

More criminal miners

What is it with the mining industry? Its not enough for them to pillage the earth - they apparently can't even be bothered getting resource consent to do so:

The proponent behind a major mine near the Clutha River had already been undertaking activity in the area without a consent.

Hawkeswood Mining Ltd has applied to establish and operate an alluvial gold-mining operation in a rural resource area at 1346-1536 Teviot Rd, Millers Flat, Roxburgh.

The proposal will go to a hearing, but a Central Otago District Council spokeswoman confirmed activity was already happening near the planned mine without a consent.

Council planners have apparently recommended they be denied resource consent because of the impact on the local environment, and have issued them abatement notices. So instead the company plans to apply to Shane Jones for a fast-track "consent" instead. Which I think shows us again that the fast-track process is designed for criminals and vandals who would not be able to get consent by lawful means.

A who's who of New Zealand's dodgiest companies

Submissions on National's corrupt Muldoonist fast-track law are due today (have you submitted?), and just hours before they close, Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop has been forced to release the list of companies he invited to apply. I've spent the last hour going through it in an epic thread of bleats, and its basically a who's who of New Zealand's dodgiest companies.

In addition to the seabed miners who have been rejected by the Supreme Court, and the coal miners who have been rejected by the Environment Court, there's also:

• The irrigation company which poisons the local water and doesn't want to pay easement fees to use DoC land;
• the scrapyard company which can't be bothered getting resource consents, and whose scrapyards regularly catch fire;
• A company which wants to build an "equestrian centre" in Canterbury. I guess we know why they're on the list then;
• The Australian mining company whose plan to mine the barrytown flats has been rejected multiple times;
• The Auckland property development company who just happen to have a member of their family in the National caucus.

The last one so obviously fails the political hygiene test that you really have to wonder how it got through. Or maybe National really is as shamelessly corrupt as NZ First?

These are precisely the sorts of projects which should be going through robust processes to assess their merits and consistency with environmental bottom-lines. Instead, all of that is going to be bypassed, replaced with a Muldoonist rubber-stamp, so that the coalition parties can raise funds through corruption. Which just makes it all the more necessary for the next government to review every "consent" granted by this process, and legislatively cancel every one which should not have been granted.

Climate Change: Criminal ecocide

We are in the middle of a climate crisis. Last year was (again) the hottest year on record. NOAA has just announced another global coral bleaching event. Floods are threatening UK food security. So naturally, Shane Jones wants to make it easier to mine coal:

Resources Minister Shane Jones has announced changes to coal mine consenting he says reduce barriers to extraction and bring it into line with other types of mining.

The government's first Resource Management Amendment Bill, to be introduced next month, will make changes to the Resource Management Act, freshwater environmental standards, and the National Policy Statements for Freshwater Management and Biodiversity.

It will remove additional controls for coal mining introduced by Labour that were set to end the consenting pathway for existing thermal coal mines from 31 December 2030.

This is the action of a glue-sniffing sociopath. We need to be ending coal, not enabling it. Instead, Jones seems to want to let the coal industry grub a few more dollars by setting fire to the planet.

This criminal act of ecocide cannot be allowed to stand. The next government needs to make it a priority to revoke fossil fuel mining permits and consents, with no compensation, and shut down this murderous industry for good.

Muldoonism, solar farms, and legitimacy

NewsHub had an article yesterday about progress on Aotearoa's largest solar farm, at "The Point" in the Mackenzie Country. 420MW, right next to a grid connection and transmission infrastructure, and next to dams - meaning it can work in tandem with them to maximise water storage. Its exactly the sort of project we need to decarbonise the country and Electrify All The Things, but there's a problem: the entire Mackenzie basin is (for good reason) designated an "outstanding natural landscape". And its easy to see how a giant solar array would interfere with that landscape.

Other companies have obtained resource consent for similar sized solar projects by the simple expedient of not trying to put them in an outstanding natural landscape. But rather than doing that, or attempting to convince the district council or EPA that their project can fit into the landscape, these developers are considering applying for "consent" through National's corrupt Muldoonist "fast-track" legislation, so they can just drive a bulldozer through the whole thing. I'd urge them not to, because by doing so, they would fundamentally delegitimise their project, and invite a future government to not just fully review any corruptly-gained "consent", but potentially legislatively cancel it and impose a make-good order for any work done. Meaning they'd need to tear down whatever they build and restore the landscape. Which is obviously a suboptimal outcome for the developers, and for Aotearoa.

There's an obvious parallel between this project, and Project Hayes, Meridian's plan for a giant wind-farm in Central Otago, or the Turitea Wind Farm, which was built in a designated reserve. In both cases the choice to try develop a valued and protected landscape made the projects highly doubtful from the outset, and made the default response "nice, but maybe somewhere else please" - its not like we're short of great sites for wind or solar farms, after all. And in both cases the RMA process explored the environmental impacts and what could be done to mitigate them, and the appeals process tested that process and ensured it met accepted standards. Hayes was abandoned during the appeals when Meridian accepted that they could just build somewhere else. Turitea meanwhile won its appeals, and gained public acceptance as a result. Which highlights a key value of the slow, participatory RMA and appeals process: it legitimises the outcome. No political party threatened to cancel the consent, and no protestors tried to occupy the site or sabotage the project. While some people (including myself) may have disliked the outcome, it was the result of an obviously fair process, and so basically legitimate.

Muldoonist Ministerial fiat does not impart any of this legitimacy, especially when it comes with an accompanying whiff of corruption (how much has NZ First been given by interested developers through its secret bribe foundation? We don't know.) Which is why it is legitimate to review and if necessary cancel "consents" obtained through such a process.

We need more solar farms. But we need them consented by a legitimate process which fairly assesses environmental impacts and mitigations. Sometimes "not there" is the proper outcome of such a process. Developers should accept that. If they don't, and if they instead resort to corruption, they have only themselves to blame when they face the consequences.

The return of Muldoon

For forty years, Robert Muldoon has been a dirty word in our politics. His style of government was so repulsive and authoritarian that the backlash to it helped set and entrench our constitutional norms. His pig-headedness over forcing through Think Big eventually gave us the RMA, with its participation and consultation rights. The backlash to his secrecy forced him to pass the OIA. His top-down control of Cabinet by holding the finance portfolio gave us a since-unbroken norm that the Prime Minister cannot also be Finance Minister, because it is too great a concentration of power. His abuses of the "elected dictatorship" and election "victories" where he won fewer votes than the Labour opposition laid the basis for our modern constitution and MMP.

All of which now seems awfully familiar. People are noting the similarities in abuse of the parliamentary process, and in the steamrolling through of pet projects. And now there's another one: "legislating" by press-release, with Associate Environment Minister Andrew Hoggard purporting today to "suspend" the Significant Natural Area provisions of the National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity:

Associate Environment Minister Andrew Hoggard has today announced that the Government has agreed to suspend the requirement for councils to comply with the Significant Natural Areas (SNA) provisions of the National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity for three years, while it replaces the Resource Management Act (RMA).

The problem is that there is an actual legal process required to change a National Policy Statement, requiring public notification and submissions, and a board of inquiry or independent report. The government hasn't done any of it. And until it happens (or the government rams through an amendment under urgency), the law is still the law. Muldoon learned that the hard way in Fitzgerald v Muldoon; you'd think both Ministers and public servants would be aware enough of that case to stop Hoggard from making a similar mistake.

A giant Henry VIII clause

National introduced its corrupt Muldoonist resource-consent fast-track legislation to the House on Thursday, and rammed it through its first reading. Having read the bill, it is every bid as bad as signalled, taking selected resource consent decisions away from independent panels and putting them directly in the hands of Ministers. Its the sort of thing we haven't seen since Muldoon, and with good reason: it throws any pretence of merits-based assessment out the window, replacing it with a contest to see who can bribe or lobby the Minister the most to get their pet project through. Which is not how decisions in this country are meant to work.

So who benefits from this corrupt steamroller process? Who needs it? Who is it for? We can start with who doesn't need it: renewable energy projects. Because with very few exceptions, they find it very easy to get resource consent, give or take a few conditions about noise setbacks and monitoring (and solar projects don't even need that). Ditto roads: they get resource consent very easily as well. And normal housing projects. Or indeed, any normal project whatsoever. The RMA is really about mitigating adverse effects, which means restricting or imposing conditions on projects which do that. A project has to be truly terrible or just outright illegal to have an application actually declined.

And that's who this process is for: projects which cannot get resource consent under the current system. Coal mines in reserves. Polluting fish farms in pristine natural environments. Water schemes which would flood conservation land. Waste dumps which make people sick. Offshore mining schemes found to be illegal by the Supreme Court.

A common theme linking these projects is that they blatantly violate the law. They are terrible projects, with significant, unmitigable effects on key environmental values. But rather than fix them so they comply with our environmental standards, the companies pushing them have decided to lobby Ministers instead. And rather than respecting the law, or using a democratic process to change it, National's solution is to give Ministers the power to overturn it on a case-by-case basis for their donors and cronies. And that's the real horror here: once you unpack it, the entire law is just one giant Henry VIII clause, allowing Shane Jones to effectively rewrite and overturn statute on a whim, for the benefit of whoever gave him the most money.

That is not democratic. It is not consistent with the rule of law, or with our values as a country. Instead, it is corrupt, authoritarian, and arbitrary. But I guess that's what the National Party stands for now.

Saying what needed to be said

National today announced that it would be introducing its corrupt Muldoonist resource consent fast-track legislation to the House today, and ramming it through its first reading under urgency. Unusually, the list of projects that will be pre-approved will not be included in the bill, but will be added later, so the public will not have a chance to scrutinise it and submit on it at select committee. Which smacks of yet another attempt to limit public scrutiny, in violation of our constitutional norms.

Labour has been weak on this, but today in Question Time James Shaw said what needed to be said, asking RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop (at 4:30s]:

is he aware that rushing legislation with such extraordinary executive powers through parliament under urgency with little public scrutiny creates a risk that any of the projects that are approved as a result of this bill could find themselves subject to future scrutiny, which could include the loss of the consent, possibly without compensation.

And all Bishop could do is splutter about the need to avoid "sovereign risk". But creating such risk is the point: what is legislated can be un-legislated. And where the legislation is passed by an abusive process, contrary to our constitutional norms, and to be honest, simply corrupt, repeal and cancellation without compensation is a necessity. Those bribing Ministers to have their projects included on their Muldoonist list need to be very aware of that.

(The next stage to keep them aware is obviously a Member's Bill. But that'll have to wait until the fast-track law actually passes).

As for Bishop, its a bit fucking rich of him, having just so viciously demonstrated how policy can change when the government does, to complain that a future government might not respect his decisions. Unlike Bishop, the Greens will at least do it with a proper select committee process, allowing everyone to be heard, and for the law to be considered legitimate. Though "stopping people from profiting from an ongoing crime" might in fact be one of the few justifications for all-stages urgency...

Climate Change: Dragging their feet again

In June 2020 the government finally took some concrete action on climate change, repealing an odious provision in the RMA which prevented local authorities from considering it in resource consent decisions. It was a good move, which meant that big polluters like the Huntly power station or Glenbrook steel mill or Methanex's methanol plants could be forced to adopt new technology to reduce their emissions, or to offset them with native forest, or even denied resource consent altogether if it was not practical to do so. Of course, implementation was delayed until the end of this year, but now the government has decided that that's too soon to start cutting emissions, and delayed it by the maximum amount possible, until November 2022:

The government has quietly delayed by a year a deadline for councils to consider climate gas emissions when deciding whether to grant consents.

[...]

Changes to the Resource Management Act slated for the end of the year would have made regional councils take climate emissions into account when making rules and giving permission for businesses to use industrial fossil fuel boilers.

Cabinet has now agreed to delay that until 30 November 2022, subject to final Cabinet approval.

In an email update to submitters, the Environment Ministry says the reason for the delay is to give time to work out how to treat greenhouse gas emissions that do not come from industrial heat processes while work is still being doing to complete the RMA reforms underway.

James Shaw is right: this fails to show the urgency we need in cutting emissions. Instead, despite having declared a climate emergency, Labour is pursuing the same old Augustinian climate policy: they want to cut emissions, but not just yet.

A failure of enforcement

Yesterday, Silver Fern Farms was fined $337,000 over a potentially lethal ammonia leak. Today RNZ reports that they've subcontracted some of their waste business to Whanganui's Tasman Tanning, which has an appalling environmental record:

Tasman Tanning's plant in Whanganui was already the country's leader in breaching trade wastewater consents before it took on the new work, which is likely to increase the waste it produces.

[...]

An RNZ investigation revealed the Tasman Tanning plant in Whanganui clocked up 570 fat, sulphide and chromium breaches over the past year.

This meant the sludge from the city's wastewater treatment plant was so contaminated with chromium, a toxic heavy metal, it had to be stored instead of being sent to landfill.

Some of the Whanganui breaches resulted in faecal bacteria from the city's wastewater treatment plant entering the ocean.

Which invites the obvious question: how does a company which breaches its resources consents more than once a day even still have them? Why hasn't the Council done something to stop them? While they've complained about an inability to issue fines without going to court, there are mechanisms available: notably, they can issue an abatement notice for violating the consent. Then, when it is breached, prosecute (because breaching an abatement notice is a criminal offence), and start imposing fines that way (councils get to keep fines for RMA breaches if they prosecute). Seek enforcement orders to force mitigation, and when they are breached, seek an order cancelling the consent under s314(1)(e).

Alternatively, if they don't want to go the full way with prosecution, they can issue an abatement notice, then simply start issuing infringement notices. Breaching an abatement notice is an infringement offence, with a $750 fine per offence. And again, the Council gets to keep it. And at over $400,000 a year, you'd hope that would provide an incentive for this polluter to comply (and if not, it establishes a track record of violations to justify cancellation).

A council which doesn't do this when faced with persistent non-compliance are a) chickenshits; and b) ought to be voted out on their arses for not doing their jobs. Because enforcing the law is their job, and if they refuse to do it, they're as bad as the environmental criminals they're corruptly protecting.

The secret advice on Labour's RMA "fast-track"

Back in June, Labour steamrolled the COVID-19 Recovery (Fast-track Consenting) Bill into law, using urgency and a sham select committee process which left too little time for submitters to respond effectively. The law created a separate "fast-track" process for resource consents for "shovel-ready" projects, which cuts the public out of environmental decision-making while creating a nexus for corruption. Ostensibly, this is to prop up the economy and support jobs in the wake of the pandemic. But advice released under the Official Information Act suggests it might not in fact be all that effective.

(The pathway to learning this is sadly typical. I requested the advice in May, the day the government announced it would be introducing legislation. Ministry for the Environment gave themselves an extension for "consultation", which ensured that it would not arrive until after the law had passed, incidentally preventing it from informing anyone's submissions. They then withheld a bunch of it as "confidential", so I complained to the Ombudsman. They released some more two weeks ago, but still withheld the really interesting stuff withheld as "still under consideration", despite the fact that the law it related to was passed months beforehand. So I went back to the Ombudsman, who clearly told them that their decision-making didn't pass the laugh test, so here we are...)

The interesting document is here. Paragraphs 9 through 19 were originally redacted. As for why, its not because they were "under consideration" - again, the law had passed, so the decisions had been made - because they basicly completely undercut the case for the law. MfE thought that the number of developments wanting to use the mechanism "may be relatively small. The far bigger determinant for major projects proceeding or not is money, especially for public infrastructure". They had no estimate of whether a Ministerial rubberstamp would actually be any faster than the usual process. Instead, they thought that the existing "call-in" process could be used just as effectively. Or, judging by that comment about money, just funding stuff. They had no idea whether the law would be effective. And they had no idea whether the system would be used by private developers because they hadn't asked.

Reading this, its hard to escape the conclusion that the government panicked and surrendered to the worst demands of the "rip up the RMA" brigade in a desperate effort to be seen to be Doing Something. Despite advice saying that that was all it would be. So in the end, it might not be that harmful to our environment. The damage done to our democracy, OTOH, and to institutional protections against corruption, is far more severe.

And meanwhile, the danger this law was supposed to mitigate, a huge Covid-recession, seems not to have eventuated. Which seems to make the entire thing unnecessary. In which case, we might as well repeal it, before it actually does do some damage. Changing that "second" to a "first" - or to "six months" - should do the trick.

Farmers earning their reputation again

New Zealand farmers routinely complain about the public viewing them as environmental vandals. At the same time, they're opposing basic environmental regulation:

Federated Farmers has asked that a wide-ranging plan change setting water use rules for South Canterbury remove all references to the protection of “indigenous fish”.

[...]

In its submission, Federated Farmers says there needs to be ‘’thorough analysis and discussion about the identification and value of these habitats, how widespread they are likely to become, what areas will be covered by them and what the impacts will be, especially economic impacts’’.

“Until this is done, Federated Farmers is opposed to all references to indigenous freshwater species habitat,’’ the submission says.

The underlying argument here is that we don't know enough to know what we need to protect. But if that's the case, then the precautionary principle suggests we should protect it all, then work out what doesn't need protecting. Leaving stuff unprotected is a recipe for environmental destruction and predatory delay.

The good news here is that the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management requires councils to protect the habitats of indigenous freshwater species, so they literally can't do what the farmers demand. Better, the "best information" clause requires that where information is uncertain, decision-makers must interpret it so as to give best effect to the NPS - that is, to habitat protection, via a hierarchy of values which places ecosystem health above economic development. So Federated Farmers should lose this argument, and if the Council illegally bows to their demands, the courts will correct them.

More dirty dairying

The Waikato Regional Council is actually enforcing the RMA for once:

Three Waikato farmers have been fined a total of $116,100 for illegally discharging farm effluent.

[...]

Gerard Wolvers from South Waikato, who has farmed for nearly 50 years, was convicted on three charges after an unknown amount of effluent ended up in a stream.

The discharges happened over two days in April 2018 and were reported to the council by a member of the public.

An estimated 3-400,000 litres of effluent had been pumped into a paddock where it formed a flow path across farmland.

Wolvers was fined $61,600.

The other two were fined $28,000 and $26,500 respectively. But these sorts of offences are happening with depressing regularity (here's an example prosecuted yesterday), so maybe the fines need to increase, so its not just a cost of doing business?

A once-in-a-generation change

Back in 2019, the government asked for a comprehensive, independent review of the Resource Management Act and associated legislation. That review has now reported back and recommended a complete repeal and re-enactment. Despite the headlines, this is not a "scrapping" - we're still going to have a resource management law, with planning and consenting functions. But who does what, and what legislation its in, will change.

The actual report is over 500 pages long, so it will take time for everyone to digest. But looking at the consenting chapter, all those RMA-haters who complain about "red tape" and process (AKA local democracy) are unlikely to be happy. There will still be planning rules forbidding them from doing whatever they want. If they want to do things, they will still need to submit information on what they want to do and its environmental impacts to local councils. If their proposal is controversial or has significant impacts, they will still have to be publicly notified and seek submissions. They will still have to pay attention to Māori interests. The big thing that will change is that plans will be clearer (well, that's the intention anyway) about what is allowed and what is not, public notification requirements will be specified in advance, and a Māori voice will be built into the system. Oh, and "existing use" rights (e.g. old irrigation consents) can be rolled back and there'll be new attention paid to cumulative effects. This isn't a relaxation by any measure.

Oh, and the panel told the government firmly that they need to sort out water ownership with Māori, and that the current fudge (where the government sticks its fingers in its ears and says endlessly "no-one owns water" while ignoring the entire history of this country) is fucking everything up and that the government needs to reach a settlement ASAP.

The last time any government took this sort of look at planning legislation was in ~1990, and its what gave us the RMA. If acted upon, this report is likely to change our planning regime for a generation. The next Parliament will be doing this, so think about that when you vote.

Another environmental crime

A farmer in Te Anau has slashed and burned 800 hectares of native forest:

A Te Anau farmer accused of slashing and burning down 800 hectares of native forest in two years has been served with an interim court order to stop.

Southland District Council says Peter Chartres caused irreparable damage to flora and fauna when he cleared mānuka on his property to make room for pasture - ignoring an abatement notice in 2015 and multiple warnings he needed resource consent to clear trees older than 20 years.

Chartres denies he has done anything wrong and plans to oppose a permanent court order the council is applying for.

800 hectares of native forest isn't just a loss of native habitat and biodiversity - its a loss of carbon as well. Using the look-up tables, 800 hectares of indigenous forest of at least 20 years of age is at least 126,960 tons of carbon, worth at least $4.2 million at current prices (I wonder if he paid for it, or committed carbon fraud?). But its worse in the long-term, because at peak native forest soaks up well over a thousand tons per hectare. Which means this orc's destruction spree cost us at least 800,000 tons of long-term carbon storage, enough to soak up 1% of one year's emissions.

A court order is a good start. But acting without resource consent and ignoring an abatement notice is an actual crime, punishable by 2 years in jail and a fine of up to $300,000. This orc should be prosecuted. Or are farmers above the law?

Steamrolling democracy again

After a sham select committee process which waste submitters' time, the government is planning to use urgency today to steamroll its Muldoonist RMA fast track bill through Parliament.

I've talked before about what's wrong with the Bill. As mentioned above, its pure Muldoonism, bypassing the participatory RMA process with a Ministerial rubber-stamp. This isn't just bad because it is undemocratic and authoriatarian and creates a nexus for corruption - it will also deprive the decision-making panels of the evidence they need to make good decisions. And we'll be stuck with the consequences of those poor decisions for decades to come.

Perhaps in an effort to mitigate this - or rather, give the impression that it is mitigating this - the Bill requires consenting panels to notify and invite comments from a select group of environmental NGOs. Effectively these groups are being statutorily appointed as proxies for the whole of New Zealand. But they will receive no resources to do the job they are being asked to do, have only ten working days to respond to any submission, and it is not clear whether they are legally allowed to tell anyone about it or crowdsource public comments so they can make high-quality submissions and present the evidence that the panels need to see. Its even worse when you consider the threshold the Minister, with their choice of listed projects, has set: 30-50 jobs. In terms of your project, that's basicly the size of your local supermarket. And its the government's apparent position that any project of that scale should go through the Minister - perhaps greasing the party's palm on the way - and then through the rubberstamp process. Which means that if the law works as apparently intended, these NGOs are going to be swamped. Even if there is extremely strong gatekeeping from the Minister, and it is only a handful of projects a month, they are not going to be able to effectively do the job the government is demanding of them (for free).

But then, maybe that's the point. The RMA is an adversarial system. And you break an adversarial system by massively outgunning and overworking one side. But the consequence of that is that a) the system doesn't work properly; and b) the results are not perceived as legitimate. What the government gains in speed from its rubberstamp may very well be lost to protests and occupations.