New Zealand has become an obstruction economy

• Published date: 26 April 2024
• Author: Chris Bishop is the minister responsible for housing, infrastructure and Resource Management Act (RMA) reform. Chris Bishop
• Publication title: New Zealand Herald, The (Auckland, New Zealand)

New Zealand has become an obstruction economy. The coalition Government’s mission is to change that, by cutting through the red and green tape holding us back

Our Fast Track Approvals Bill will help rebuild the economy by making it faster and simpler to get regional and national projects consented and permitted.

It’s unacceptable that housing developments take years to get consent — if the consent is even granted — despite New Zealand experiencing a housing crisis.

It’s unacceptable that important roads that would help Kiwis get from A to B faster and more safely languish on paper rather than being built, just because getting consent takes so long and is so expensive.

It’s unacceptable that renewable energy projects that would help New Zealand meet our climate targets can take the best part of a decade just to get resource consent — and that’s before a single shovel goes in the ground.

The status quo is not an option. We have a housing crisis, an infrastructure deficit in the hundreds of billions of dollars, ambitious climate goals, and a stagnant economy.

The Infrastructure Commission estimates the current consenting processes cost a staggering $1.3 billion every year just to get the consent paperwork sorted. Its study also shows that within a recent five-year period the time taken to get a resource consent for key projects has nearly doubled.

The Fast Track Approvals Bill will help speed up development, while protecting the environment.

Even the previous Government recognised that our planning laws make it too difficult to do things — so it developed its own fast-track process, which involved ministers selecting projects, just like ours does.

Our proposal uses essentially the same framework, but strengthens it.

First, it applies to regionally and nationally significant projects (rather than smaller ones) and it also creates a “one-stop-shop” process.

So it doesn’t just deal with resource consents, it also deals with all the other things often needed for development, like conservation permits, heritage and so on. It makes sense to do all of that at the same time, rather than strung out over many years and with multiple different government agencies. That just costs time and money.

This one-stop shop will make a real difference. I recently met a housing developer who had...