The Resource Management Act 1991 was an act of economic self-sabotage. Over three decades it inflated house prices by imposing what economists call a regulatory tax: the share of prices created by planning restrictions alone. In Auckland, that tax accounts for up to 56% of the average home price. Infrastructure consenting cost developers $1.29 billion a year.

Meanwhile, New Zealand’s product market regulation ranking has dropped to 20th in the OECD, down from 2nd in 1998.

What did we get in return? The RMA has not achieved its intended environmental purpose. Forty-five percent of our river length is now unswimmable. Seventy-four percent of indigenous freshwater fish are endangered.

The Act delivered crippling process costs while parts of the environment continued to deteriorate. It was the worst of both worlds.

The Government’s intent in replacing the RMA with a Planning Bill and a Natural Environment Bill is sound. Minister Bishop and Undersecretary Court have done a huge job. Making competitive urban land markets a statutory goal is progress.

But as the Initiative’s submission argues, the Government has made a deliberate choice we think is wrong. It has kept the Bills skeletal, with most substance left to national direction that Ministers can write and rewrite. The Government says this avoids the RMA’s mistake of putting too much detail in primary legislation.

We disagree. National direction shifts with political winds, and whoever forms the next government inherits maximum discretion to reshape the system without touching the Act. Property rights protections, cost-benefit requirements and competitive land market mechanisms belong in statute.

The Bills removed section 32, which (inadequately) required cost-benefit justifications before the Government could set binding rules. Nothing has taken its place.

Key goal terms like “unreasonably affect others” and “inappropriate development” are left undefined. The Government assumes existing case law will carry their meaning into the new Act. But legal meaning is framework-dependent. Courts will interpret these terms afresh, and those interpretations will cascade through the system.

The deeper problem is that the Bills were supposed to put respect for property rights at the heart of the new system. They make some progress by ruling out certain site-specific matters from council interference, but they fall well short.

Without these safeguards in the primary legislation, the Bills will not deliver what they promise.

We do not want to spend another three decades discovering we have simply replaced one dysfunctional planning system with another.

The New Zealand Initiative's submission, Planning Bill and Natural Environment Bill, was lodged on 13 February 2026.