I wasn't around when Geoffrey Palmer dreamt up the Resource Management Act. I am sure it was well intentioned and I think when it started out it worked fairly well. This is patently no longer the case.
I work in one of the very few tower buildings on Auckland's North Shore - OK it's North Shore Hospital. It was opened in 1983, I think, with the tower block housing the wards - as it still does. The population drained by the Hospital has increased a tad since then but New Zealand is not World Champion of letting infrastructure lag behind requirements for nothing. That the Haus Sik is vastly too small for its current needs is hardly a State secret. But those wily gents with the big hair and the shoulder pads thought ahead in the early eighties. They put the piles down for a second tower block should it be needed in the future. Clever, eh? Well I'll give you the tip it is needed now. Easy peasy pull off the piling caps and put another eight stories over the canteen. Impossible. The piling no good? Nope. The Resource Management Act. There has to be 'years' of resource consent hearings before the first wheelbarrow of concrete is wheeled on site. Even then the current regulations deem that a matching eight stories is not even being asked for.
It is stupidity on a biblical scale. Who the hell do you have to get consent from? People who are going to get sick and won't be able to be treated in the hospital that doesn't exist if they don't give consent. What 'resource' is being used to put a second tower on a building that already has one and has provision for the second? Air - maybe. But that is all I can think of and there is stacks of air about. You don't have to waste a single native tree (it is going on top of an already existing building don't forget) and I cannot see a godwit nest on the canteen roof as I look out of my office window. There is no pa or marae on the pharmacy roof that I can discern. Customary fishing rights for the laundry? Beyond me.
Pak'n'Save. Ghastly shop. Who would willing go to a supermarket where you have to put your own groceries in a plastic bag (I flatly refuse to buy with money a reusable eco friendly shopping bag). More parochial RMA nonsense but this of an even sillier kind. Woolworth's, Countdown and Foodtown have a nice little monopoly of supermarkets in the Takapuna/Milford/Forrest Hill neck of the woods. They don't want the opposition coming in on their patch. They have, and are continuing, to use the RMA to stop this place opening. I mean it is built - has been for years - but lies there empty of stock or customers whilst Woolworths et al obfuscate with appeal after appeal under the provisions of the RMA. They have managed to drag this out for - wait for it - fourteen years. Their latest tack is there are not enough car park spaces and they are doing this just to protect the poor citizen from something or other. Oh, and also the embryo supermarket is not sited in accordance with zoning. One. The empty purveyor of groceries is only just visible from the road across a vast expanse of tarmac on which you could land a 747. Two. The site is in the middle of Wairau Park which is a light industrial/retail sprawl that could only have been designed by a town planner on serious drugs - at about the same time they planned to put a second tower on North Shore Hospital.
The RMA is a crock. It has morphed into a totally impractical, ferociously expensive bureaucratic behemoth that stands in the way of any progress - be that sensible or loony. It has also turned into an ideal weapon for commercial enterprise to wage war on each other with when no resource needs managing at all.
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