Executive Summary
We thank the Select Committee for the opportunity to submit on the Natural Environment Bill (NEB) and the Planning Bill.
Greenpeace opposes these Bills. They will replace our country’s main environmental protection law, the RMA, with laws that will enable more environmental harm. In many cases, such as species extinction, this harm will be permanent and irreversible.
The Government has clear evidence of the severely degraded and deteriorating state of New Zealand’s environment in its national state of the environment reports.
These reports consistently show that polluted drinking water, dirty rivers, eroding topsoil, collapsing biodiversity, and climate-driven disasters continue to escalate. This is because successive Governments have failed to adequately legislate to protect nature and its life supporting systems on which we depend.
Today’s political decisions are depriving future generations of the clean water, fertile soils, habitable climate, and thriving ecosystems that are essential for their survival.
The Government must change course quickly. It is vital that our environmental protection law is strengthened so that it restores what has been damaged, prevents further harm, and prepares our communities for the climate challenges ahead.
Yet, these Bills do more than just roll back existing environmental protections – they contain harmful new proposals.
The most egregious proposal is that the public should have to pay companies to stop polluting the environment or harming nature. This has been given the perverse name “regulatory relief”. The predictable result will be mass regulatory retreat, as Councils abandon necessary environmental protections because they are simply too expensive.
The Bills strip current environmental protections of any legal certainty going forward in Aotearoa. They allow Ministers and Councils to deprioritise critical environmental protections in favour of short-term economic and ‘development’ goals.
At the same time, regulators are hamstrung from using effective tools – direct caps, rules and prohibitions – to prevent further breaches of environmental limits. Vague, undefined terminology in the Bills opens the door to lengthy and costly litigation.
These Bills provide industries with the exact tools they need to further delay regulatory action, enabling them to continue damaging the environment while pushing the escalating costs of their harm onto the public.
And importantly, these Bills get the fundamentals wrong. They prioritise property and fail to protect people’s rights to clean water, clean air, and a healthy environment.
They do not recognise that a healthy environment is the very foundation of human wellbeing and our economy. They treat nature as merely a resource to be allocated or exploited for short term commercial profit. They omit climate change, the most pressing and existential issue facing humanity.
In this submission we give recommendations for amendments to the most problematic elements. However our key recommendation is that these bills are rejected in their entirety, because, the RMA provides much stronger environmental protections than what is proposed here. In summary, the most problematic proposals include:
- Regulatory relief clauses, including the “specified topics” and general pathway.
- Barriers preventing Councils from using resource caps (direct input and land-use controls), including vague and restrictive “feasibility” tests.
- The removal of legal certainty of environmental protection, via an incomplete list of environmental goals with no statutory hierarchy above other goals
- The absence of climate change from our new “environmental” law.
- The override of the Wildlife Act, allowing Councils to authorise the killing and harming of protected native wildlife and marine mammals.
- Problematic environmental limit setting processes which allow the inclusion of economic considerations in the setting of limits.
- The weakened Te Tiriti o Waitangi provisions, and narrowing of Māori participation in environmental decision-making.
- Reduced public participation and legal standing, preventing environmental watchdogs and the public from engaging in environmental decision-making.
At their heart these Bills prioritise corporate property rights at the expense of nature, and the public interest. This is a major step backwards for Aotearoa.
Aotearoa can and should be a country that protects its rivers, its wildlife, and its people.
But this Government has outlined a clear plan in these Bills to legislate for more environmental harm and has had the immense short-sightedness and lack of care for future generations to call it progress.
We urge the select committee to reject these Bills and instead focus on updating our laws to restore clean rivers, healthy soils, and abundant biodiversity.
Add your name now to demand Chris Bishop abandon his dangerous RMA reform plan.
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