Farmer Focus: Lobbying brings positive NZ legislation change

There has been a hectic five months of lobbying to help achieve positive legislative change in New Zealand.

The environment is managed in this country by the Resource Management Act, dating from 1991.

In short it is well past its use-by date, and our current centre-right coalition was determined to start afresh with fit for purpose environmental legislation.

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About the author

David Clark

Farmer Focus writer

David Clark runs a 463ha fully irrigated mixed farm with his wife Jayne at Valetta, on the Canterbury Plains of New Zealand’s south island. He grows 400ha of cereals, pulses, forage and vegetable seed crops, runs 1,000 Romney breeding ewes and finishes 8,000 lambs annually.

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We got tangled up in this with a need to renew our farming land use consent after only eight years. It should have been a straight-forward process given we are not making substantive changes.

But the Canterbury Regional Council does not do straightforward, it prefers expensive, legalistic and adversarial processes.

Its first request for further information spanned seven pages and covered everything from wanting to reassess the soils on our property, relitigating our “baseline years” of 2009-13, wanting to embed Maori policy into our consents, and requiring additional modelling.

This would have taken our costs to NZ$60,000 (£26,000).

We were faced with the written threat if we did not comply they would publicly notify our consents, hold a hearing and potentially decline our ability to farm.

What the regional council was attempting to do was embed stringent restrictions within consents that would otherwise not be required in the new act.

Time to act

I decided it was time to act and wrote to ministers representing all three coalition parties, which set off a chain of events engaging with government. This all gained pace when I went public with our story in a Facebook post that was shared a thousand times.

From there momentum built, hundreds of farmers came forward to share their stories. Public meetings were held and we hosted several government ministers on farm and in our home.

They listened, and now they have acted.

New legislation has gone through our Parliament tonight to introduce the replacement environmental legislation and under urgency, all consents have been rolled over and placed on hold until the new act is given effect to, which will take six to eight years.

This is a tremendous outcome for farming families right across NZ, but it has been a very tough five months.

The key now is to build back better with fit-for-purpose legislation that serves the environment, our society and our economic needs.