Ian McLean Green candidate for Tauranga

There is no question that our Resource Management Act (RMA) is a world leader. Why?

It was the first such attempt to amalgamate environmental management into one act. At the time, it replaced all or part of over 50 other pieces of legislation, and was heralded as the most innovative attempt to achieve effective environmental management ever attempted.

It is routinely used by other governments for reference as they struggle to improve their own resource management in a world that is increasingly aware of the need for action on environmental protection.

Why then, do we find ourselves in the ludicrous situation where the Tauranga City Council is suing itself in the Environment Court over the essentially trivial question of how to (re)develop some pools? Surely, the RMA, as a world-leading piece of legislation, should have been able to deal with such a situation without resort to expensive court action.

Cornerstones principles of the RMA are ‘consultation' and ‘effects'. Two simple words, but they cost this country enormously.

Consultation is a process whereby ‘affected parties' of a proposal for change are enabled to comment on, and perhaps obstruct or even prevent, that change.

The scale of effects is linked to the requirement for consultation. The bigger the effects, the greater the consultation (and expense) required.

It therefore behoves developers to argue that effects are minor. In simple terms, there are two general approaches - major effects treated as minor or minor effects treated as unimportant.

Effects that are major, but have low probability, can be treated as minor. That argument has been used successfully to promote subdivision in places such as Bexley (Christchurch), where the likelihood of liquefaction was recognised, but discounted because of the low probability of earthquakes. Hindsight gives great vision, and the good people of Bexley are pretty unhappy with the view from today.

In the Mount Hot Pools scenario, the key effects were parking issues and the loss of a few camp sites. The surprising decision by the commissioner to refuse the resource consent to expand the pools was a triumph for the RMA, because it was made on the basis of ‘cumulative effects'. The effects were minor, but not unimportant.

It is extremely rare for a commissioner to decide that enough effects have accumulated that a line in the sand has been reached. The RMA provides very little direction on this issue and lawyers are skilled at arguing that any new effects of a proposed change are unimportant.

The current government has been working to ‘streamline' RMA processes, which translates as promoting development at the expense of the environment.

The Mount Hot Pools fiasco is an example where RMA processes actually worked to protect the environment.

Our council should stand by its commissioner, accept that the RMA did its job, and order its council-owned company to stop this silliness.

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