Latest / Early Edition with Ryan Bridge / Mark Hooper: Federated Farmers resource management spokesperson on the newly announced reforms to the Resource Management Act

Transcript

Mark Hooper: Federated Farmers resource management spokesperson on the newly announced reforms to the Resource Management Act · Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: The government is progressing a second Resource Management Act Amendment. Build.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: This is they say, going to drive economic growth and productivity.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: The big changes here for the farming sector highly productive land.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: They're going to allow the construction of greenhouses or indoor
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: primary production facilities, and they are also going to allow
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: you to build new infrastructure like soul of Farms on
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: highly productive land in New Zealand. Joining us to discuss
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: this morning, Mark Hooper, National board member and RMA spokesperson
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: at Fed Farmers Mark, good morning, good morning, Good to
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: have you on the show. These are good changes. I'm
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: assuming that you will be welcoming them.
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Look, I think the bigger picture here is to
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: see that the resource management reform program is kind of
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: on track. So you know, we've had this series of changes.
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: It goes back to the repair of the Natural Built
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: Environment Act, and then we've had the fast tracked legislation.
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: We've had Resource Management Amendment Bill one and was signaled
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: that we'd get bill too, And so the bigger picture
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: is of course a full replacement of the Resource Management Act,
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: which seems to be on the cards and is signaled
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: in this as well. And so as we kind of
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: continue on on that program, we see kind of incremental
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: changes occurring, and mainly they've been focused around fixing up
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: what you would call kind of unworkable rules to some extent,
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: So we saw quite a lot of that that affected
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: the agriculture sector and Resource Management Bill one and this
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: change for Resource Management Bill two. I guess it's perhaps
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: perhaps less significant broadly, but the key thing here is
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: that it's really good to see that the National Policy
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: Statement for highly productive Land is being addressed. There are
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: some concerns, broader concerns around it, and there's some specific concerns,
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: and what they've done is targeted here a couple of
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: the specific concerns, like the soul where.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: There was what you can do on highly productive land
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: because I imagine that if you want to get stuff
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: done at the moment, there's a whole bunch of hoops
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: you have to jump through.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, it was an area where on these specific
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: things there was just a lack of clarity as to
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: what the consenting pathway might be right. And so the
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: concern is for a glasshouse or indoor farming kind of scenario,
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: you're not necessarily using the soil of that highly productive land,
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: and so that National Policy Statement kind of linked up
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: the highly productive land with being highly productive soils. So
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: if you put an intensive food production facility on a
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: piece of highly productive land, but you're not using the soil,
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: you can see that there's a little bit of a
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: little bit of a lack of clarity. They're a little
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: bit of ambiguity as to whether it fits the purposes
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: of the National Policy Statement or.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: Not, right, So that's why they're having to come up
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: with these kind of interim fixes if you like. This
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: is the government progressing the Second Resource Management Map Amendment Bill,
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: which is going to change a couple of things around
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: highly productive Landmark. Thank you very much for your time
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: this morning, Mark Cooper, who is with Fed Farmers. For
• 3:29
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• 3:33
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• 3:35
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