Mark Hooper: Federated Farmers resource management spokesperson on the newly announced reforms to the Resource Management Act

There’s relief over imminent changes to resource management rules on private farmland.  

The Government has announced a second amendment to the Resource Management Act, which will set new national directions for areas such as infrastructure, energy, and farming. 

Federated Farmers resource management spokesperson Mark Hooper told Ryan Bridge this change is less significant than the first but gives more freedom to the primary sector.  

He says the fact the government is addressing specific concerns within the highly productive land national policy statement is good to see. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The government is progressing a second Resource Management Act Amendment. Build.
This is they say, going to drive economic growth and productivity.
The big changes here for the farming sector highly productive land.
They're going to allow the construction of greenhouses or indoor
primary production facilities, and they are also going to allow

(00:20):
you to build new infrastructure like soul of Farms on
highly productive land in New Zealand. Joining us to discuss
this morning, Mark Hooper, National board member and RMA spokesperson
at Fed Farmers Mark, good morning, good morning, Good to
have you on the show. These are good changes. I'm
assuming that you will be welcoming them.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yeah. Look, I think the bigger picture here is to
see that the resource management reform program is kind of
on track. So you know, we've had this series of changes.
It goes back to the repair of the Natural Built

(01:00):
Environment Act, and then we've had the fast tracked legislation.
We've had Resource Management Amendment Bill one and was signaled
that we'd get bill too, And so the bigger picture
is of course a full replacement of the Resource Management Act,
which seems to be on the cards and is signaled
in this as well. And so as we kind of

(01:23):
continue on on that program, we see kind of incremental
changes occurring, and mainly they've been focused around fixing up
what you would call kind of unworkable rules to some extent,
So we saw quite a lot of that that affected
the agriculture sector and Resource Management Bill one and this

(01:45):
change for Resource Management Bill two. I guess it's perhaps
perhaps less significant broadly, but the key thing here is
that it's really good to see that the National Policy
Statement for highly productive Land is being addressed. There are
some concerns, broader concerns around it, and there's some specific concerns,

(02:07):
and what they've done is targeted here a couple of
the specific concerns, like the soul where.

Speaker 1 (02:12):
There was what you can do on highly productive land
because I imagine that if you want to get stuff
done at the moment, there's a whole bunch of hoops
you have to jump through.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
Yeah, well, it was an area where on these specific
things there was just a lack of clarity as to
what the consenting pathway might be right. And so the
concern is for a glasshouse or indoor farming kind of scenario,
you're not necessarily using the soil of that highly productive land,

(02:43):
and so that National Policy Statement kind of linked up
the highly productive land with being highly productive soils. So
if you put an intensive food production facility on a
piece of highly productive land, but you're not using the soil,
you can see that there's a little bit of a

(03:05):
little bit of a lack of clarity. They're a little
bit of ambiguity as to whether it fits the purposes
of the National Policy Statement or.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
Not, right, So that's why they're having to come up
with these kind of interim fixes if you like. This
is the government progressing the Second Resource Management Map Amendment Bill,
which is going to change a couple of things around
highly productive Landmark. Thank you very much for your time
this morning, Mark Cooper, who is with Fed Farmers. For
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(03:33):
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