Source: New Zealand Government
Good afternoon, everyone!
It’s great to be back at the Quarry NZ conference for another year, standing before an industry that builds New Zealand from the ground up.
You are the foundation—quite literally—of our country’s infrastructure, growth, and resilience.
As this Government continues to lay the groundwork for a stronger, more prosperous New Zealand, your role remains ever important, and I thank Wayne and his team for their continued advocacy and the opportunity for engagement with the sector.
Our broken planning system
It is no secret we are in a bit of a rut.
Yes, some things are turning a corner, but Kiwis are still struggling, and much of the blame lies at the feet of the RMA.
Got sky-high power bills? It’s hardly surprising when solar farm consents make you invite mana whenua for a karakia every time you want to cut down a native tree, and require compliance reports on cultural impacts years after completion.
Got eye-watering grocery bills? It’s hardly surprising when councils refuse to zone enough land for supermarkets, and when those like IKEA—still game enough to try to set up shop here—must consult seven different mana whenua groups to do cultural monitoring and provide reckons on technical matters like erosion and sediment control.
Can’t get on the housing market? It’s hardly surprising when the cost of building and consenting the enabling infrastructure means councils don’t want to zone for growth, and those same councils also seek to manage everything down to the colour of your front door.
We’ve all heard other stories about lizards, bats, and the rest. I recently heard of a roading project where one of the crews had to do morning inspections to pick up any snails that made it into the construction area during the night—apparently someone forgot to ask what’s likely to happen to the snails once the road opens… You cannot make this stuff up.
These are all real examples, and I could go on and on, but I won’t.
Over the last 30 years, the Resource Management Act has become the single biggest barrier to progress in this country.
The current system simply makes it too hard, too slow, and too costly to do anything, as if frustrating development to resist growth is somehow going to abate our inevitable need for it.
Nowhere is this felt more acutely than in quarrying. Access to high-quality aggregate, in the right places and in the right volumes, is essential.
A truckload of aggregate roughly doubles in price after 30 kilometres, yet despite councils being big aggregate customers, their planners won’t consent enough quarries where they are needed.
When you add to this the chilling effect these delays, costs, and uncertainties have on people’s willingness to invest time, money, and effort into New Zealand, it’s little wonder we get far too little infrastructure, and any development is delivered far too late.
We are bent out of all proportion, and our pursuit of investment, growth, and jobs for New Zealanders will continue to be kneecapped unless we rationalise this system, so rationalise we will.
What are we doing about it?
The Government is driving a lot of work to turn this around, in the RMA space and beyond.
In January, Minister Jones released a refreshed Minerals Strategy and Critical Minerals List—both of which are designed to signal a clear, enduring path for growth. Importantly, aggregate and sands are officially on the Critical Minerals List. That’s no small thing—it’s a recognition of the critical importance of your work.
You heard yesterday about the National Infrastructure Plan—a critical piece of work to ensure we have clear priorities and a pipeline of high-quality, vetted projects that will reduce the likelihood of wasteful vanity projects that end up needing the chop. We simply cannot afford such waste and disruption.
As Infrastructure Under-Secretary, I’ve developed and enhanced a range of procurement pathways and funding and financing tools—including PPPs and strategic leasing—to give us the right tools to deliver infrastructure more effectively.
You’ve heard from WorkSafe—my colleague Minister Brooke van Velden is working hard to rationalise health and safety requirements, consistent with the thrust of the broader work Regulation Minister David Seymour is doing on slashing unnecessary red tape.
In the RMA space, in our first year, Ministers Bishop and Jones introduced fast-track legislation to expedite approvals for nationally and regionally significant projects.
We’re also currently consulting on a raft of changes to RMA National Direction to provide earlier relief that will fold into our RMA replacement, something I know is particularly pertinent for the quarry sector.
RMA National Direction changes
There are over 20 pieces of National Direction that sit beneath the RMA. While they attempt to provide clarity, they have instead evolved into an amorphous, incoherent mess, and I know the quarrying sector has felt the brunt of this.
That is why specific changes for quarrying form a key part of the package currently out for public consultation.
The proposals seek to clarify that quarrying is much more than “aggregate extraction”—something currently unclear in the National Policy Statements for Indigenous Biodiversity and Highly Productive Land.
They seek to address inconsistent and prohibitive thresholds for quarries around “significant natural areas” and “highly productive land” to lift the unnecessary burden of proving a particular quarry’s benefits could not be achieved using other resources in New Zealand.
They also recognise that there are technical, logistical, and operational factors that need to be considered around wetlands, not just whether there is a functional need for a quarry in a particular location—if you took that approach to its limit, we’d soon be importing aggregate from the East Coast of Australia!
Also among the package of proposals is a new instrument that fills a long-lived void in our resource management system.
Until now, there has been nowhere in the RMA nor its National Direction that has recognised the national importance of infrastructure.
This has left infrastructure suffocated beneath environmental protection and excessive precaution, stifling development out of all proportion to the risk needing to be managed.
That is why I have led the development of a new National Policy Statement for Infrastructure.
This new NPS will fix patchy, inconsistent rules and put infrastructure where it belongs: front and centre.
Given the critical importance of quarrying activities, I have made sure these have been explicitly recognised. The same goes for waste infrastructure, because we also need a simpler pathway to consent the disposal of unsuitable and contaminated materials.
All these changes will take effect in consenting decisions under the current RMA while we get on with replacing the RMA for good, which is the next thing I want to cover off.
RMA replacement
I believe the single most important commitment in the ACT-National coalition agreement is full replacement of the RMA with a system based on property rights.
The national direction changes are important, and their policy intent will be carried over insofar as it remains relevant, but panel-beating a lemon will only take us so far.
The concept of “integrated management” in the RMA has created a behemoth that seeks to manage everything out of all proportion to the risks, and it has failed both the environment and human development in the process.
That is why we are dis-integrating the system into a Planning Act and a Natural Environment Act. This will direct a sharper focus on identifying the real problems the system must solve—like achieving environmental limits—and will reduce unnecessary imposition on people’s property rights in the process.
Increased standardisation will further streamline this narrowed system—there’s no reason not to codify what we already know how to do well, and this will lead to consenting by exception rather than default. We cannot have 38,000 resource consents per year, packed with pages of absurd conditions. It is completely unnecessary.
Focusing on front-loading people’s involvement into national direction and the planning process will also stop every Tom, Dick, and Harry from all corners of the country inserting their opinions into your consent application.
And why not front-load any required Māori engagement? I’ve heard from iwi leaders who themselves are frustrated with the burden of reviewing other people’s consents rather than progressing their own projects. Where there are obligations to consult Māori groups, their input would be much more useful at the national direction or planning stages than down in consenting.
Shifting to spatial planning will help identify regionally significant matters and areas in advance, reducing uncertainty, cost, and conflict. Combined with the Infrastructure Commission’s great work on identifying New Zealand’s aggregate resources, this provides a great opportunity for future growth.
And what if planners don’t get on board with the new system?
We have a low-cost disputes process coming in the form of a Planning Tribunal, so when councils ask for information that is not necessary to manage risks, or seek to impose arbitrary conditions, they will be held to account quickly and publicly.
There’s a lot more to it, but what is clear is that under this new system things will be much faster, cheaper, more rational, and more certain.
It will mean better utilisation of the natural resources we are blessed with in New Zealand, so we can extract, process, and build, baby, build.
Timing
You’re probably wondering—is this not going to take years?
We recognise both the need for wholesale reform as well as the very real pain people continue to experience here and now, and we have sought to balance that.
Fast-track is already law, as are some initial targeted RMA amendments.
RMA Amendment Bill 2 has gone through Select Committee.
We have this suite of national direction out for consultation, set to take effect late 2025 to early 2026, which I encourage you to engage on.
Meanwhile, we have been working tirelessly to shape up the new system for introduction by the end of the year, passing by mid-2026, and the bulk of implementation through 2027.
Conclusion
All of this recognises that if we want to build a better New Zealand, we first need to make it easier to build. And if we want to make it easier to build, we need better access to our key resources.
We need to recognise quarrying for the cornerstone it is.
So thank you for what you do every day. Thank you for supplying the materials that make New Zealand possible.
Let’s keep working together to unlock our country’s full potential—one truckload of rock at a time.