Mark Hooper: Federated Farmers RMA Reform Spokesperson on RMA reform

Farmers are hoping an RMA shake-up will deliver a faster, cheaper consenting system.

The Government's today announcing significant changes to consenting as part of a shake-up to the Resource Management Act.

It's expected to slash the need for consents in 46% of cases that currently need them.

Federated Farmers' spokesperson Mark Hooper told Andrew Dickens layers of added costs hold farmers back from getting on with normal farm operations.

He says they have to go through expert planners, consultants, and iwi for consents, which takes time and is a large bureaucratic cost.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So the government is announcing this major shakeup of the
Resource Management Actor at one o'clock today. Will bring you
everything as it happens. Regional councils have already been slashed,
but now the government's eyeing up a forty to fifty
percent cut in the number of consents required. Zoning is
getting a clean up too, trimming down from the one
and seventy five zones we've got at the moment. And
apparently there's some new agency that will over environmental concerns.

(00:23):
So I'm joined now by Federated Farmer's ROMA Reform spokesperson
Mark Hooper, who joins with kill Mark, Good morning, this
is what you've been wanting for years.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Yeah, well, that's right. We have been campaigning around this
for a long time.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
And with your campaigning, have you been coming up with
the ideas and you've been helping the government, you know,
in their time in opposition. Because I heard the EMA
guy yesterday he's been working on reform and reform ideas
and presenting it to politicians for eight years. Have you, guys,
fed Farmer has been doing the same.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah, yeah, I think ours goes back for a good
twenty odd years in some form or another. But certainly,
you know, since the term of the previous government, you know,
we've been pretty pretty proactive around this and particularly focusing
I guess, a really really quite simple message that the
current system is broken, that it's too expensive, it's too

(01:18):
time consuming, and it's too unpredictable. So really we're looking
for a good outcome, which is fast, the cheaper better.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
I said a bit earlier in the program, though, the
reason the garram A balloon to become this cancerous growth
around our economy is because too many people actually did
some stuff and actually ruined the environment. Will there be
environmental safeguards you reckon from what you know.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yeah, absolutely there will be. I mean, one of the
reasons you mentioned there in the intro cutting consents by
you know, up to fifty percent. So that's around the
basis of having a good set of national standards for
common activities things like farming, vegetable growing, various thing that

(02:00):
we need just to kind of run. If you have
good national standards around there, you've still got environmental conditions
in place, and as long as those conditions have been met,
then that becomes a permitted activity and cuts down the
number of consents.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
So mistery Craig. This year Christopher Luckx at the Prime Minister,
reckoned that this would cut the costs of consents required
by farmers by forty six percent. Now what is that
going to do to the farmer's bottom line and what
is that going to do in terms of what they
can do going forward to make their operations better.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
Yeah, well, I think this is the big thing, is
that really we've got to get back to a position
where we can have a growth economy and we've got
to look at what are the things that are holding
us back, and it's this ability to get on and
do things. It's all the additional cost associated with what
would otherwise be a standard farming activity. So it's having

(02:53):
to get all of the expert planners, the consultants, the
extra e wee constation at a consent level, all this
sort of thing. It all takes time, slow things down,
adds a huge amount of bureaucratic costs. So it's going
to help enormously.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
Well, Mark, we wait for one o'clock and I thank
you so much for your time today. For more from
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