If you needed further evidence, and surely you don't, that the RMA is totally stuffed and ripe for the overhaul it is about to get then that evidence came to light yesterday.
Meridien Energy, which is owned by you and me, is paying $170,00 to DoC, which is owned by you and me, to shut up over a proposed wind farm in Central Otago. I stand up and say I am going to do something. I object to it. I transfer some money from my left hand trouser pocket to my right. I then stop objecting and go and do what I was going to do in the first place.
This country is nuts. We belly ache like mad (entirely reasonably) when the power goes off and then get all touchy feely and belly ache like mad when anything is put forward to rectify the situation. This is entirely unreasonable. Cake and eat it stuff. The instrument that has given mileage to this form of objection is the bloody Resource Management Act.
We can't dam any more rivers and we will use the RMA to to stop you doing it. Some damned endangered axolotl that no one outside of a research lab has ever seen might disappear (how can you disappear if you have never appeared in the first place). We can't have any more fossil fuel powered power stations because we can turn the RMA into a Moebius strip and use it to tell you the planet will fry in hell. Nuclear? We don't even need the RMA for that as it is in our DNA that nuclear will wreck our DNA and we'll all end up with six fingers covered in cancerous warts if we survive the inevitable holocaust when the plant blows up because we had it designed by vodka swilling nuclear scientists from 1970's Soviet Russia.
How about a nice cuddly wind farm? The RMA has a provision for visual pollution apparently and that is one of the bases for objection that is currently being used. DoC has presumably found some invertebrate that is unique to Central Otago that must be saved and Meridien is locked into appearing in Court until the end of time.
What are we left with to power our ever increasing population that does not live in caves and hunt bison with sharpened sticks? All I can think of is a perpetual motion machine as sold by that nice man who will turn all your lead into gold for you. And he'll probably run foul of the RMA as well. There is bound to be a clause in there specifically banning the Philosopher's Stone as it upsets the natural balance of the elements.
There is a way around all this and Meridien has found it. Dosh. You go round with a bag of gold (or lead) and dish it out in great (or in this case little - $170,00 hardly rates as beer money for the power generator) lumps to get people just to go away and not object to things. Hardly a novel concept the old bribe is it? The PM wants assurances that this largesse is not hush money. I wouldn't be holding your breath, John, because it is.
This, paradoxically, only reinforces the RMA. DoC, if they have half a brain (fat chance), will realise that have stumbled on a new revenue stream. Object to everything you can lay your eyes on and someone will pay you to go away.
In fact I can see this as a nice little earner for myself. Buy a bicycle, some socks to go with my sandals, some coke bottle bottom glasses and grow an inferior beard. I'm then ready to repair to the Public Library to find things to object to. The DB9 is getting ever closer.
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