The Government has recently introduced two bills to replace the Resource Management Act. These bills will accelerate the destruction of nature and embed the crony capitalism that has become endemic under this Government. In this brief article I step through a case study of how the RMA really works in practice, and why the Government is changing it.

The RMA and regional councils have been two of the favourite bogeymen of the Luxon Government. And the allegedly negative impact of the RMA on agribusiness is a recurring theme in the government narrative, with the rules to protect freshwater a particular bugbear.

But often these criticisms are surprisingly vague, and just hearsay. The Minister in charge of replacing the RMA, Chris Bishop, makes criticisms of the RMA that are replete with unattributed anecdotes. He says that ‘Ministers continue to receive concerning reports of councils across the country applying stringent, unnecessary, and burdensome requirements when issuing new consents, particularly for our farmers and growers”. Yet when I asked for these ‘concerning reports’, they were unavailable, in fact, I was told by one of his many ministerial staff that Bishop had used the word ‘reports’ as a verb not a noun (I kid you not) and hence there were no ‘reports’ to provide to me!

The effect of this is to make it difficult to test the veracity of the criticisms of the RMA and regional councils, because they are couched in very general terms, whereas the resource issues and conflicts that the RMA manages are often very local and specific. This is deliberate, to create the vibe that the RMA is, according to the Prime Minister, ‘broken’ and hence they have licence to replace it.

But occasionally we get an insight into the on-the-ground reality of the RMA battles, which show what it’s really about. And that came this year with the case of the Santoft Irrigators. I’ve been digging into the issue with a bunch of Official Information Act requests, and it is revealing.

The Santoft Irrigators case has received a lot of ministerial attention. Minister for the Environment, Penny Simmonds, could not identify a single other example where she had directly intervened on behalf of a particular set of businesses in order to help them get their consents from a regional council. The Santoft Irrigators have had the attention of Chris Bishop, the Minister for RMA Reform, who directly contacted the regional council about the issue. They had meetings with two Ministers, Simmonds and Andrew Hoggard (Associate Agriculture), and contact with another, Todd McClay (Agriculture).

The alleged wrongs done to the Santoft Irrigators is an illuminating case study in the RMA and regional councils, and, as we shall see, the evidence is that the RMA and the regional council were acting to protect our shared common resources (groundwater), while the Santoft Irrigators were pursuing their own private interests (money) at the cost of the community and the environment. 

Yet it is the Irrigators who received a warm hearing from the Government, not the regional council, which is now slated for disestablishment, justified on the basis of Bishop’s vague homilies about councils telling people how they should live.

A letter of complaint from the Santoft Irrigators

The most recent cycle of conflict began with a letter of complaint in June 2025 to RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop. It was from a group of agribusinesses about delays in obtaining new resource consents to abstract groundwater, after their previous consents expired. 

These agribusinesses were based in the Santoft area of the Horizons Regional Council – roughly north west of Bulls, mostly to the west of SH3.

They are using irrigated water pumped up from bores, mostly to grow grass in sand dune country, mostly for dairy and other livestock, some of them running high intensity dairy but not all. For convenience I’ve called them the ‘Santoft Irrigators’ but not all irrigators in the area signed the letter of complaint. 

To give you a sense of them, one of the complainants is John O’Brien from the OB Group, running a huge intensive dairy operation with thousands of dairy cattle. OB had converted the sand dunes to intensive dairying over 2010 – 2017 by bulldozing the ancient sand dunes flat, drilling deep bores for irrigation water, installing centre pivot irrigation and adding fertiliser. Adding thousands of dairy cattle into porous sand dune country has had dramatic downstream impacts on places like Lake Koitiata, as the pollution runs through the sand and into the old sand dune lakes which are now highly polluted. OB’s revenue is not public but it would be many millions of dollars.

The Santoft Irrigators complained that the regional council was delaying their new water abstraction consents and the council was considering a reduction of their water takes by 30%. They stated that “to reduce irrigation by 30% on sand country is to effectively render irrigating the land futile, due to the low water-holding capacity of the soil.” 

The regional council was threatening their very livelihood, it seemed.

You can almost hear the political wheels turning in the National Party and Act Party politicians’ heads on receiving such a letter. Here were the long-suffering agribusiness owners, aka farmers, the Government had talked about so much, who were being thwarted by green bureaucracy. Moreover, one of these complaining agribusinesses was co-owned by Suze Redmayne – National Party MP and Party Whip with the biggest property portfolio in Parliament – so it must be true. What brilliant material for their PR campaign against the RMA and regional councils!

So, with alacrity, the Environment Minister Penny Simmonds invited the maligned business owners to a meeting with not one, not two, but three ministers of the Crown: Penny Simmonds, Todd McClay, Minister of Agriculture, and Andrew Hoggard, Associate Minister of Agriculture. Hoggard’s dairy farm is in a neighbouring district.

They met on August 14 2025 in Parliament, and it seems that only Ministers Simmonds and Hoggard could make it. Richard Redmayne, the husband of the National Party MP and co-owner of one of the businesses, Tunnel Hill farm worth $18m, also attended the meeting.

There are not many businesses in the country who can get a meeting with two ministers within two months of writing a letter of complaint. But these businesses had a story that was of great interest to the government, a story of the evils of the RMA and regional councils, and the fact they were well connected politically no doubt helped.

Following the meeting, on September 1, the Environment Minister Penny Simmonds whipped off a rather imperious letter to Michael McCartney, the CEO of the Horizons Regional Council. She set a meeting with Andrew Hoggard and Todd McClay, eight days later on September 9 at the Beehive at 3.15pm, and invited the CEO to attend. 

She wanted to know from the CEO of Horizons ‘why there have been delays [in issuing new water abstraction consents], and what needs to be done to achieve a timely solution for the affected farmers particularly given the Government’s commitment to helping the primary sector grow New Zealand’s economy.’ This was plainly putting the regional council under pressure to approve the consents to Redmayne and the others.

When Lan Pham MP released the letter to the media Simmonds said she was concerned about the impact of the delay on these businesses: “it’s wholly appropriate for me to meet with stakeholders from the primary sector and to engage with local authorities to discuss their performance in relation to the Resource Management Act.”

She later conceded, in response to my OIA, that this was the only letter to a regional council she had written which was about resource consents for particular businesses, rather than just the usual general complaints she makes about the RMA and general pressure on councils to approve consent applications.

Ms Simmonds September 1 letter also required a written briefing on the issue from the CEO of Horizons – to be delivered to her by email, in three days sharp. She was hot on the trail of this outrage.

And in due course, and on time, the briefing did arrive and, dear readers, it was illuminating and perhaps not quite what Penny, Todd and Andrew had hoped for.

The regional council response

It turned out that Horizons Regional Council had spent quite a lot of staff time and ratepayers money servicing the needs of the Santoft Irrigators (including the local National MP and Party Whip) going back to 2013. 

Amongst other things, in 2017 the Council contracted independent expert consultants to model the groundwater of the Santoft area and the broader Rangitīkei Groundwater Management Zone, following reports of declining water levels. The expert produced a long and detailed peer reviewed report. 

This report was updated in 2023 with further information and was again peer reviewed. When I asked the regional council, they estimated that just the most recent report and staff time cost Horizons ratepayers $200,000 in the last two years. It is worth noting that 70% of the Horizons ratepayers are urban.

The expert report found that groundwater levels were declining due to increased abstraction of groundwater for irrigation by agribusiness. This decline was expected to continue unless abstraction was reduced by 30%. 

In 2024 the Council commissioned a 160 page technical peer review of the 2023 report, which found that the model added to the knowledge of the groundwater system but the reviewers wanted further refinement on some technical aspects of the modelling to be more certain of the conclusions.

The Regional Council analysis of all this evidence led them to a concern that falling groundwater levels due to overabstraction would be bad for the natural environment affecting rivers and lakes, but also bad for all agribusinesses in the area, including those that don’t have an MP and Party Whip as a shareholder. This would breach their regional plan as well as the National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management. The council were (and still are) seeking further information from Santoft Irrigators on the impact of water extraction from their bores on neighbouring farmers’ bores.

And, there was the risk that the lower groundwater levels would lead to saltwater intrusion from the ocean, of which there was already some evidence. And I hardly need to tell you that would be a big problem for everyone, even including the special group getting the ministerial treatment.

As a consequence, the Regional Council staff were proposing to change new water abstraction consent conditions to try to stop the groundwater levels dropping even further. Those seeking new groundwater consents were offered the choice of shorter five year consents with fixed maximum extraction volumes, or longer 15 year consents with conditions that allowed the council to reduce abstraction if water levels kept falling. 

It was a precautionary approach to protect the groundwater in the face of falling well levels and some uncertainty about the groundwater modelling. Some of the consent holders in the region had accepted this reality and taken up the offer of the new consents but not so these Santoft Irrigators group – they were very unhappy at being asked to take this precautionary approach to protect the groundwater.

The briefing explained that staff conducted numerous workshops with the Santoft Irrigators, and had freely shared the expert reports, paid for by the largely urban ratepayers of Horizons Regional Council. The farmers claimed the report was wrong and that the farmers had their own data to prove it was wrong. They were invited to provide this data, but, according to Horizons, only one did.

Following this written briefing, provided by the Regional Council to the Minister, the meeting between the Ministers and the Horizons Regional Council staff went ahead on September 9. We have little record of it except that one of the Council staff recorded that Chris Bishop refused to attend without elected Councillors being present, and Penny Simmonds ended the meeting.

What we learned

The story on the surface seemed consistent with National’s anti-RMA rhetoric: the staff at Horizons Regional Council were wielding the RMA against these poor agribusiness owners to delay and place conditions on their consents to abstract water for irrigation, and in the process threatening their businesses. 

The reality as we’ve seen was very different:

  • Abstraction of groundwater by the Santoft Irrigators (and others), in order to irrigate their land to run thousands of dairy cattle and other uses, had resulted in declining groundwater levels; 
  • This was threatening the lakes and wetlands of the area, as well as other water users access to groundwater; 
  • In order to understand the situation the regional council was spending ratepayers money on expert reports and investigations, even though most ratepayers never caused the problem; 
  • The regional council was attempting to place conditions on new water abstraction consents to protect the environment and the broader community from falling water levels, ie to achieve public good outcomes; 
  • Some of the very businesses that were causing the problem were claiming they were the victims and were trying to overturn the regional council’s efforts to protect the region’s groundwater – from them.

It was a classic case of public interest regulation to protect the common good against private interest short term profits. There is of course absolutely nothing novel in this – businesses were trying to push environmental boundaries to maximise profits and regulators were doing their job of investigating and setting boundaries to protect the environment and other water users whose bores could dry up. 

What was disturbing was the Minister for the Environment intervened to pressure the regional council to capitulate to these businesses. And even more disturbing was the political connections of one of these businesses – Suze Redmayne MP will be a direct financial beneficiary if her business gets the abstraction consents.

In this Santoft Irrigator story we see a microcosm of the bigger RMA and regional council issues. The RMA has to manage conflicting resource usage demands – the irrigators want the water for their businesses, other land users will lose access to the water if their bores dry up, and the broader public interest in protecting nature will be impacted if the lakes and wetlands dry up. 

The Irrigators have the loudest voice and significant financial resources, and are deeply connected to the ruling regime. 

But the RMA, and the regional councils that operate it, are an obstacle to the irrigators getting ‘their’ water. The RMA and regional councils are protecting the public interest in groundwater and hence they are a problem.

It is these private interest demands for resources that really sits behind all the rhetoric about the problems of the RMA. They want to remove the laws and agencies that protect the public interest, so that they can get access to the water. And this resource conflict is repeated in region after region across the country.

This is at the heart of the lobby to destroy the RMA and regional councils – it is not about consents for garages.

And of course it is the reason that Federated Farmers are celebrating the demise of the RMA and regional councils.

Not just about taking water – it’s also about dumping pollution

This is all pretty bad, but it’s not just about taking too much water. These very same businesses have been engaged in a long term battle to prevent nitrogen limits too – and they are on the verge of success as a result of law changes that Suze Redmayne and her Government MP colleagues have already made to the RMA.

Horizons Regional Council tried to introduce limits to the amount of nitrogen that these and other farms could leach into the groundwater under the One Plan. They have been subject to extensive legal action with the latest decision from the Environment Court pending.

In the meantime Lake Koitiata is heavily polluted from agribusiness on the sand dunes, and other water bodies such as the Rangitikei River have been degrading over the last decade.  For context, 4500 tonnes a year of urea was used just in the Rangitikei district. 

The ongoing degradation of freshwater makes it harder for the Santoft Irrigators to argue that they should be allowed to keep polluting. This is because under the old section 107 of the RMA, councils could not give a consent to discharge pollution, like nitrate into groundwater, if it would cause ‘significant adverse effects on aquatic life’. 

The Santoft Irrigators, pouring water, cow urine and urea on the sand, want consents that allow them to keep doing this but, given the degraded state of freshwater, this will very likely cause significant adverse effects on aquatic life in Lake Koitiata and elsewhere.

And this is where the law change comes in. Suze Redmayne and her Government MPs have now changed section 107 so that a council can grant a pollution discharge consent that causes ‘significant adverse effects on aquatic life’, if the water is already polluted and if there is some vague plan to improve things in the future.

So the increasingly polluted state of the rivers and lakes, polluted by agribusiness, has moved from being a reason not to grant a consent for more pollution, to being a reason that a pollution consent could be issued. Charming.

Suze Redmayne was a member of Parliament’s Primary Production Select Committee which examined the Resource Management (Freshwater and Other Matters) Amendment Bill which recommended these changes to section 107. The Government MPs on the committee added these changes after public submissions closed, so the public never had the chance to even submit on the changes or to point out the obvious conflicts of interest on the committee. 

In my view, the change to section 107 is likely to be highly consequential to the Environment Court case which would affect the Santoft Irrigators consents. This change makes it more likely that Redmayne’s business, and the other Santoft Irrigators, can get their pollution consents in spite of the regional councils efforts to try to reduce pollution in the catchment.  

It’s crony capitalism

We have become so accustomed to seeing politicians use public office to advance their personal interests – think of Trump – that the reason we need regulators acting in the public interest has faded from the narrative. 

But we need them more than ever.

Because here is a sad truth – some fishing companies are so short sighted that they target their trawl nets at the breeding events of fish like orange roughy, even as the stocks collapse, meaning even fewer fish in the future. And some agribusinesses will suck up the last of the freshwater in the ground even if it means that saltwater will intrude and spoil it for everyone and every living thing. And if these businesses have political connections they may try to pull some strings to get their way.

That’s why agribusinesses and fishing businesses can never be left in charge of allocating these finite natural resources. 

Having ministers going in to bat for a particular set of businesses, with close ties to the ruling regime, so they can drain the groundwater and pollute the sand lakes, at the expense of all other users and nature, is not cracking down on green bureaucracy, it is crony capitalism.

Crony capitalism won’t make New Zealanders rich – it will make the cronies rich in the short term, and make us all poorer in the long term by drying up our wells, destroying the natural environment that gives us true wealth. 

The Luxon Government’s campaign against environmental protection, regional councils and the RMA is just crony capitalism, but with a caveat: It is crony capitalism with a mindset so small that getting water for your MP’s well blinds you to the collapse in groundwater across a whole region.

Governing for the nation, rather than for the agribusiness faction, means being a guardian of the water of the nation, and not just the well of your Party Whip. The RMA is not our enemy, short-term narrow-minded greed is our enemy.