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Windfarms, brothels and you
New Zealand is a home of remarkable God-given resources, resources we are obliged to harness and protect. Sometimes, in our zeal for development, we don’t strike the best balance between harnessing and protecting.
For example, pessimists among us will speculate that New Zealand is on the verge of an energy crisis. Energy production is struggling to keep up with the increasingly voracious appetite of Auckland’s laptops, Playstations, iPods and hair-straighteners (and Waikato’s electric fences). Electricity prices are rising. Meanwhile, renewable energy generation is decreasing. Hydro and wind generation went down 7.7% in the year ending June 2005, [1] placing more pressure on non-renewable sources such as thermal, coal and gas. The Gas Association of New Zealand acknowledges that Maui (New Zealand’s major gas field) will become uneconomical in 2007, but it lives in the hope that the gas production industry will soon be able to “find more”. [2]
Meridian Energy is proposing to build 70 wind turbines on property it owns in Makara, west of Wellington. “Project West Wind” is projected to provide electricity for 110,000 homes (or the equivalent of Wellington Central, Lower Hutt and Porirua combined). [3] This is a tiny fraction of New Zealand’s total appetite for electricity, unlikely to relieve much pressure in the electricity market. Yet even this small relief may prove to be out of reach. The barrier? The Resource Management Act (RMA) 1991.
The RMA is a very large statute designed to “promote the sustainable management of natural and physical resources”. [4] In conventional terms this means making sure we don’t cause undue harm to the environment. In other words, the RMA says whether Meridian can stick up 125-metre-long tubes of metal with great big fans on the end, as well as whether you can subdivide your property, add a deck onto your house, or discharge chemical waste into yonder babbling brook.
The statute itself is rather revolutionary. It was invented in the mid-’80s, in a decade all about reform and de-regulation. Traditional planning statutes follow what is known as the “command and control” principle. As its name suggests, the command and control principle says that in order to protect the environment the government should dictate how resources are to be used, and by whom.
So, for example, the local council could say that for the good of the environment cafés and restaurants can only be operated in certain areas, or that lawns on the north side of town can’t be trimmed shorter than 30 mm. The intention of the RMA was to get rid of this kind of meddling. To do this it included two key features.
The first is not so much something included as something excluded. The RMA expressly says that every possible activity is permitted – with a small number of exceptions – unless it breaches an express rule set by the relevant local council. [5] The Act itself prohibits almost no activities. It doesn’t contain any rules on how high you can build your house or where cell phone towers can be built. Instead it lays down general principles, and then provides a bunch of procedural rules which allow local authorities to regulate the environment.
Of course, this means very little if local authorities regulate oppressively. This is where the second feature kicks in – the concept known as “effects-based regulation”. This is a bit of jargon which means that – in theory – any rules set by a local council restrict environmental effects rather than activities per se. [6] For example, a local council shouldn’t make a rule that says “factories are forbidden on Pevensie Avenue”, but rather something like “discharges of carbon monoxide exceeding 10 mg/L are forbidden on Pevensie Avenue”. The obvious benefit of the latter approach is that landowners are free to do what they want with their land, provided their activity doesn’t damage the environment.
So the RMA is a magnificent statute which protects the environment without unduly interfering in people’s lives. In theory. Unfortunately the devil is in the detail. Because the Act fails to give a clear direction to local authorities, it has been applied more or less as a traditional planning statute by most councils – that is, they regulate activities rather than effects. Moreover, despite Parliament’s clear intention that restrictions be based on environmental effects only, courts and councils have agreed to also weigh up “social, cultural and economic” considerations. The end result of this is that in a vast number of resource consent decisions (big ones such as Project West Wind and minor ones such as suburban property subdivision), the result will turn upon the discretion of an elected councillor or an unelected bureaucrat who is permitted to consider not only environmental effects but practically anything he or she thinks relevant.
For instance, a council planner may refuse a resident from adding a shop onto his premises because in the planner’s opinion the shop will have bad social or economic effects. Note that it’s not because such a development is prohibited by the district plan, but rather because, upon weighing the costs and benefits of the proposal, the planner, an unelected official, thinks it’s unsuitable. The proposed shop may not even have any adverse ecological effects (in fact it may have positive effects), but the planner can still refuse the application based on his ideas of the social or economic good. And this happens in what is supposed to be a statute to regulate effects on the environment.
Everyone everywhere should strenuously oppose this kind of regulation. It’s nothing more than central planning in disguise. It is not what Parliament intended with the legislation, and it is a fundamental compromise of individual liberty for no other purpose than to enforce a local government’s view of good over all others.
For example, tussles between councils and brothel owners have been well publicised in the wake of the Prostitution Reform Act 2003. Some councils have sought to regulate the location of brothels via the RMA (considering the social effects of the activity on the surrounding neighbourhood). While the intentions are good, Christian planners should oppose such measures. The RMA is supposed to regulate ecological effects only, and preserving the Rule of Law is more important than the morality of individual cases. If councils can regulate brothels in this way, what’s to stop them from preventing the building of churches?
We must also avoid throwing out the environmentalist baby with the socialist bathwater. Unfortunately, environmentalism and leftist politics are often seen to go hand in hand. It is a sad reality that the environmentalist movement has been hijacked by those who believe resources should be centrally allocated, and this phenomenon has lead many Christian groups to avoid environmental causes – they’re seen as guilty by association with left-wing policies. But Christians everywhere must be environmental activists. Mainstream Greens are responsible for a lot of environmental legislation that’s ill-conceived (or ill-applied), and they share very few premises with us, but we must join forces with them to protect the Earth God has given us.
God assures us that His world is not going burn itself to a crisp at any moment, but that certainly shouldn’t stop us from doing everything we can to give effect to that promise. On the contrary, we should be provoked to do God’s will for our environment, including doing what we can to make our resource management legislation work properly.
Footnotes
[1] New Zealand Energy Statistics, June 2005 quarter from Statistics New Zealand
[2] Frequently Asked Questions of the NZ Gas Association
[3] Project West Wind from Meridian Energy
[4] Section 5 from the Resource Management Act 1991
[5] Section 9 from the Resource Management Act 1991
[6] Parliament made it abundantly clear that this was their intention. See, for example, Hansard 51b (July 1991), Resource Management Bill Third Reading, 3018–3020.