My opening remarks to the Environment Committee this morning on the Natural and Built Environments bill, which will replace the RMA:
Any planning system must allow trade-offs between competing outcomes.
Property rights confront owners with some but not all of these trade-offs.
The reforms should be based on understanding which trade-offs the planning system needs to solve, who is best placed to make decisions, and how.
This bill proposes the Minister for the Environment can decide everything using regulation.
This is not a credible approach. With the best will, the Minister cannot deliver a framework which makes sense of so much complexity. Decisions should be devolved to the lowest level, and with checks and balances, which regulation does not do.
The main goal of these reforms should be to improve housing affordability. The RMA has substantially contributed to the housing crisis. Quite simply, the new system must make it easier…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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