The recently completed Resource Management Act (RMA) review includes a damned scary recommendation. One assumes a Labour government will introduce it quickly, knowing that an apathetic population is never going to read the 531-page report, let alone debate the salient points.
The proposal is to give councils the power to cancel existing use rights.
The report doesn’t go in to detail about why this is desirable or justifiable, and I doubt most of the politicians (who will be instructed to vote for it along party lines) know what it even means.
Long before the RMA, people had built up farms and businesses around the use of resources on their land. An excellent example of this was Western Springs Speedway. It had been in operation since 1929. As Auckland expanded, poor people built houses close by without a problem. However, in recent years, rich people have moved in and started complaining about the noise. They demanded the speedway be shut down.
But the RMA had an important protection. If you had an existing right to use a resource, such as using land for a noisy speedway, then you could continue indefinitely. You did not need to apply for a new resource consent. The rich residents knew about the noise before they moved in, and could choose to fit noise insulation to their homes. So their complaints fell on deaf ears…or should have.
Auckland council put enormous pressure on the Speedway to shut down, restricting the number of events and opposing any improvements to the site.
The solution was simple and obvious. Help the Speedway relocate to a better site with appropriate compensation. But the council and the rich residents didn’t want to pay any compensation – they just demanded the Speedway move or shut down. What has happened to the deep-rooted Kiwi sense of fairness?
If councils are given the power to arbitrarily cancel existing use rights, then farmers and factories, in particular, are in serious danger. The right to use your own bore water for irrigation will be gone. The factory in the way of a suburb expansion will simply be rezoned and made illegal.
There will be no compensation. There will be no certainty for investment. The gravy train of consultants and bureaucrats will make money from even more consents just to allow businesses to keep running.
Hamilton City Council has recently used the Public Works Act to steal land from residents for a new road, paying $1 for land valued several hundred thousand times that. This proposal will make it even easier. Start by simply cancelling their rights to use the land, then offer a pittance for it. Be certain that councils will use and abuse that power.
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