Resource Management Act

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• Support the use of the Resource Management Act to identify and protect important habitats on private land against over cultivation, over fertilisation, intensive stocking rates, infilling of aquatic habitats and wetlands, and inappropriate flood defences. Also ensure  local authorities are given clear directions on how significant natural areas are to be protected.
• Uphold the original principles of the RMA — environmental protection and public participation.
• Increase environmental legal aid, first established by a Green Party Budget bid in 2000, so that citizens' groups can take part in RMA cases with good legal, planning and scientific advice.
• Develop National Policy Statements and National Environmental Standards, to set environmental bottom lines with councils able to set higher standards where appropriate.
• Encourage councils to enforce consent conditions to protect the environment. (more here)

• Labour will restore the reputation of the RMA by standardising and simplifying rules which can and should be standardised across different local and regional authorities. 
• Labour will simplify and shorten the increasingly complex and expensive RMA processes to reduce both delay and cost. 
• We will achieve this not by removing people’s rights to participate, but by working with the Environment Court to encourage shorter hearings and limit expensive and complex opinion expert evidence. (more here)

• Action Section 33 of the RMA which allows local authorities to hand over functions, powers and duties to iwi. (more here)

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