Christopher Luxon announced the release of the Expert Advisory Group (EAG) blueprint for resource management reform today. Bankside Barrister and EAG Chair, Janette Campbell provides an overview of the EAG’s recommendations.
The EAG was established six months ago, in September 2024, comprising experts with technical knowledge spanning resource management law, planning, and Te Ao Māori, and entrusted with providing guidance on transforming New Zealand’s resource management system.
Like many practitioners, we had all endured the shortcomings of the current system and were committed to creating a framework that responds proportionately to the issues raised, and one that we have the collective capacity to implement.
Our extensive firsthand experience in resource management has proved invaluable. In this report, we have sought to design a proportionate and pragmatic system to manage planning and environmental issues.
Some of the key features of our recommendations are:
- Replacing the RMA with two separate Acts: a Planning Act focussed on regulating the use, development and enjoyment of land, and a Natural Environment Act focused on the use, protection and enhancement of the natural environment.
- Setting national goals in the two pieces of legislation.
- Treaty of Waitangi: providing more specificity about how the RMA’s protections for Māori interests are applied
- Having a succinct National Policy Direction for each Act that resolves conflicts between environmental protection and development and, where that is not possible, provides direction on how conflicts can be reconciled through subsequent processes.
- Eliminating Regional Policy Statements.
- Having meaningful Spatial Plans.
- Producing one Regulatory Plan per region.
- Creating Nationally Standardised Zones under the Planning Act, but also allowing an exceptions pathway if bespoke zonings are needed.
- Setting environmental limits nationally or setting processes for local limit setting.
- Addressing reverse sensitivity issues by specifying that those who “come to the nuisance” cannot complain about it, but also allowing reasonable expansion of existing activity.
- Requiring Councils to charge for using natural resources to recover costs and enable overallocated resources to be managed back to within environmental limits over time.
- Establishing a Planning Tribunal to offer speedy, low-cost conciliation and administrative review of Council functions.
- Creating a new national compliance and enforcement regulator with a regional presence.
The Cabinet paper further informs the direction of environmental and planning law reform. There will be a substantial work programme to take the EAG recommendations that Cabinet has chosen to advance and turn them into legislation. The new legislation is expected to be introduced in Parliament this year, with the usual opportunities for submissions to the Select Committee.
The Minister has today reaffirmed the Government’s aspiration to pass this new approach into law before the general election in 2026.
Further reading
The NZ Government, National Infrastructure Plan to provide a 30-year roadmap, August 2024
Bankside Chambers, Janette Campbell announced as Chair of Expert Advisory Group in RMA transformation, September 2024
1News, Rewriting the rules: What replacing the RMA will look like, October 2024
RNZ, Christopher Luxon reveals Resource Management Act reform, 24 March 2025
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