Minister: Balance had swung ‘too far’ towards environment
An overhaul of the country’s cornerstone environmental law by the previous Government tipped the balance too far toward environmental protection, the Minister for the Environment says.
It came before an acknowledgment from another Minister that the recent budget had likely increased climate pollution.
Government Ministers have been facing questions during “scrutiny week”, where they appear before select committees to answer questions from MPs.
Yesterday morning, Minister for the Environment Penny Simmonds was asked about the decision to bin the previous Government’s Resource Management Act (RMA) replacement, which took many years to develop and cost more than $100 million.
The current Government has since allocated $92m to develop its own RMA replacement.
When questioned about the decision to start from scratch, Simmonds said the replacement law was worse than the RMA and would not have allowed enough development.
“We consider that the work that was done in this space by the previous Government was in fact not going to address many of the issues that we saw, but in fact make it much worse,” she said.
Its replacement, expected to come next year, appears likely to water down environmental protections. Simmonds spoke bluntly about the Government’s view that development was being hamstrung.
“Resource Management is an incredibly important part of what we do,” she said.
“It’s getting that balance between the actions that we take, and environmental protection ... we consider that the balance had swung too far towards environmental protection at the cost of not being able to get things done.
“We consider there does need to be a rebalancing,” she added. “Not a disregard of the environment, but a rebalancing.”
It echoed a common theme from Ministers this week: The Government had a mandate to reduce spending, and it would be doing so.
This had a particularly stark effect in environmental discussions. Minister for Conservation Tama Potaka on Tuesday said the funding shortfall for conservation could require picking and choosing which species to prioritise saving.
Similarly, Simmonds framed her plans for the environment portfolio in economic terms, while acknowledging the need to protect and restore the environment.
“The reality is we are working in a fiscally constrained environment,” she said.
“The funding isn’t unlimited. We had to pull back on some of our funding to the environment ministry. But that is making us look at how we can be more efficient and better organised and work more collaboratively.”
The Ministry for the Environment (MfE) faces particularly severe cuts, with its workforce expected to shrink by a third.
Part of that was likely before this Government took power due to the wind-up of the RMA reform process. The cuts have nevertheless impacted some of its core work programmes, including funding for freshwater improvement.
‘A critical decade’
Later in the day, Minister of Climate Change Simon Watts was questioned about the Government’s plan to reduce climate pollution.
In his opening remarks, Watts said the Government had prioritised climate change, and this would be a “critical decade” for making progress.
“To reduce the impacts of climate change, we need to meet both our domestic and international targets and New Zealand needs to reduce its emissions,” he said.
The view was met with scepticism by opposition MPs, who questioned Watts about the budget and recent policy decisions. The Government announced last week that it would scrap plans for agriculture to enter the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and instead work with the industry to find other ways to reduce biogenic methane emissions.
The government has also reversed a ban on offshore oil and gas exploration and scrapped a fund for decarbonising industry.
Upon questioning, Watts acknowledged he had received advice that the recent budget would increase climate emissions, but said the amount was insignificant.
An official clarified the figures were – between 2026-2030 – 19,000t of additional pollution, and 260,000t of reduced abatement (meaning emissions reductions from policies that are now scrapped).
Labour MP Megan Woods said she estimated around $3b worth of climate initiatives had been taken out of the budget – a figure Watts did not dispute.
“We’re talking about your Government going through the budget and taking a knife to $3b worth of climate initiatives that had been funded through previous budgets,” Woods said.
“This is not just a failure to add new initiatives, it is you actively making a choice to cut initiatives that were already in place.”
Woods and Green Party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick asked Watts to identify one budget initiative that would promote switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
He did not answer directly, but said the Government was committed to meeting its targets.
“I appreciate the political nature of that line ... the quantification of the emissions reductions related to the initiatives this Government has chosen to stop are inconsequential in regards to the direction of travel in achieving our targets,” he said.
“My focus is on achieving the outcome, which is the targets and the emissions reduction. What I know is, what [policies] we have stopped were not going to make a material impact in terms of achieving that target.”