By Bernard Hickey
Labour Leader David Cunliffe has offered bipartisan support to the National Government for Resource Management Act (RMA) reforms to improve housing affordability, but Prime Minister John Key has rejected it as a hollow promise.
Cunliffe made the offer in a news conference after Labour's parliamentary caucus meeting and after Prime Minister John Key criticised Labour yesterday for blocking RMA and other reforms to improve the supply of land for housing and the speed of consenting.
Key said late on Monday that opposition from Labour, New Zealand First, United Future and the Green Party had forced him to 'park' RMA reform until after the September 20 election.
Cunliffe said the RMA reforms suggested by the Government, but not yet proposed to Parliament, were in two parts. The first part was designed to speed up consent processes, and the second part was to revise the core principles of the RMA, Cunliffe said.
"I'd like to invite the Government to consult the Labour Opposition on the first part. We're willing to assist, if the text is reasonable, to speed up measures on housing affordability and potentially offer bipartisan support on that part of the bill. We would not, however, support measures which would undermine the core principles of the Resource Management Act," he said.
"We think because the printer left the housing chapter out of the Budget, we think it would be really good to put the gas pedal on measures to improve affordability for New Zealanders, and we'd like to offer support for that, depending on the context and detail," he said.
"I make the offer in good faith and I hope the Prime Minister will look seriously at it," he said.
PM rejects offer
Prime Minister John Key later rejected the offer as a "hollow promise" and that the consenting part of the Governemnt's RMA reforms and the second part around prioritising environmental protection over economic development could not be split out.
"They are essentially saying 'oh well, they'd support one part of it', but the bits that would actually make a difference to speed up the release of land and therefore make housing more affordable, that's the bit they are cutting out of their support. It just doesn't work. It's a hollow promise," Key told reporters before entering Parliament for Question Time.
"In the end if they really have the courage of their convictions and they are sure they are right, well, why wouldn't we just send it off to a select committee and every New Zealander that has a view on this or has expertise in this could make their case to the select committee. It's not going to get out of a select committee this side of an election. In fact it's barely going to get to a select committee this side of an election," Key said.
English wants more urgency
Meanwhile, Finance Minister Bill English questioned the urgency of the Auckland Council in speeding up housing consenting and reminded it the Government had the power to take over consenting centrally as a last-resort measure.
National's parliamentary caucus meeting he wanted to see the Auckland Council follow through on its special housing area announcements creating the potential for 33,000 new consents. "They have designated the areas, but we want to see them processing the necessary consents for those more quickly than used to be the case because there is a lot of catching up to do. The government can only go so far. To go much further than we have we'd have to start over-riding the powers of the local council, and we are not keen to do that," English said.
"The government has taken what was originally going to be a ten year process of planned changes in Auckland and worked with the council to shorten that up to about three years. And we have gone about as fast as we could by the time they did their public consultation. We got legislation passed and now it all hinges on the Auckland City Council's will to get on with the job of allowing houses to be built so New Zealanders can have reasonably priced housing in the Auckland market," English said.
"They have come quite a long way, but there is still some way to go to show the urgency that is required to deal with the fact that many New Zealanders aren't going to Australia and that's creating more demand for housing," English said.
"We would like things to move a lot faster, but we've had to work with the Councils because it is they who make the decisions. It's a bit like the teachers who actually teach the kids in the classrooms, in the end you've got to work with them and the same with the Auckland City Council. They've had pretty positive leadership in this area. I think they have yet to show the kind of urgency about really changing how they do business, that actually their decisions have an impact on the whole economy, they have an impact on thousands of households so they need to understand that impact and get on with the job," he said.
English returned to the prospect of over-riding the Council in a later exchange about the 33,000 sections designated under Special Housing Areas.
"It needs decisions from the Auckland Council to get them in. The only other way would be that we, the government, take over the consenting. And I don't think Auckland wants that and certainly the City Council don't want that. But they do need to understand that their decisions have an interest on the wider economy, there is very wide public interest in the housing - getting it more affordable - and they have the key decision making role. No one else can do it for them," he said.
Asked what would trigger a central over-ride on consenting, he said: "Under the Housing Accord that was always a back up option. Up to now Auckland has met all the conditions of the Housing Accord. They have designated a large number of sections to come into the supply line. They know need to actually execute the consents - both the development consents and the building consents - for that to occur. They've reorganised themselves in Auckland around a single unit in the council. That's big step forward so there is a one-stop shop, but they really do need to crank up the speed at which they are issuing those consents because it is the main constraint now on improving our housing supply and flattening out the house market a bit."
He was then asked if he saw the Government stepping in.
"I don't foresee that, but they do need to understand the wider implication of their decision making. So the fact that planners in Auckland might have personal preferences about what the city should look like is less important than the fact that New Zealanders believe it is fair to have affordable housing, and in fact the government is subsidising the gap between incomes and housing to some extent, and if we could get better decisions there would be less need for that."
He said housing in Auckland was less affordable than it should be.
"What we do know is that, on average, our houses are more expensive than they need to be and I think there is now general agreement that getting more houses on the ground quicker is the most important thing we can do. It's a matter of everyone playing their part to execute that, and right now I would say the bottleneck is the ability of the Auckland city council to process the consents.
Later, Housing Minister Nick Smith said the Auckland Council was making good progress and he had a good working relationship with the Council and Mayor Len Brown.
"There's a big mountain to climb. We some way from having to intervene with those powers in that bill. I remain confident that I will not need those additional powers to get things to move in Auckland," he said, adding he was also in discussions over Housing Accords in Wellington, Queenstown and Bay of Plenty, and was hopeful of having several more accords in place before the September 20 election.
Adams on RMA
Earlier and before Cunliffe's offer, Environment Minister Amy Adams said the RMA reforms were aimed at making more land available for housing.
She said the 21 year old Act had been amended very 15 months during its life.
"If you look at what we are proposing to add into section six, what we are adding in are provisions that specifically talk about the need to provide for land for population growth, the need to think about infrastructure and caring better for our natural hazards, and I struggle to see what is so offensive about any of those provisions," she said.
Reaction
Big business lobby group Business New Zealand said the Government's proposed reforms "would have gone a long way towards fixing the current pathology of the RMA, which sees positive development deferred or bogged down in litigation, cost and uncertainty."
“New Zealanders need to know which parties would support a fundamental first-principles review of resource management law. If it is politically impossible to fix what is wrong with the RMA, then it is probably time to start again," Business NZ said.
(Updated with more detail from Adams, reaction from Business NZ, comments from Bill English, Nick Smith, Adds video)
7 Comments
It is time to start again - 1991 was a long time ago, The intent of the RMA for integrated resource management (i.e., one statute for air, land, water, coast and built environment) and a more permissive (i.e., build whatever you want wherever you want) planning regime have not worked in the way intended. We would do better by starting over.
I think as a country we've matured beyond the utopian market ideals of the 1984 Labour Goivernment. I'm not sure that effects-based management works all that well in the real world - as it has failed to deal properly with cumulative effects. I think that society in general is more aware and more accepting of the fact that even in our sparsely populated NZ there are such things as environmental limits and we can (and have) exceeded them in the past - and are now facing the need for remedial/repair related initiatives (e.g., our central NI lakes; our deforested, eroding hill country etc.).
A new statute would recognise such and it could integrate transport, mining, fisheries and other resource management issues that the RMA did not. We could move well forward with a more focused national plan for both the protection and the exploitation of our environment - because at the end of the day, we are always going to need to do both.
The RMA is unfixable - you only have to look at the length and complexity of district/city plans to know that.
And here was I thinking National would have to go along with this. Guess I was wrong. The political risk is now that Labour moves something in parliment to speed up consenting using National's own legislation and gets the support of National's current partners in Government. The political damage from blocking your own legislation supported by your own confidence partners to do something about an election hot-button issue would be massive.
I honestly really thought the only option for National would be to go "we will support the fast tracking, though we think it is ineffective by itself, so if you want a real solution of RMA reform vote for us". Nope. Are they actually trying to be seen as holding the housing market hostage?
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