This is an update on our campaign to Stop the Land Grab and we ask for your thoughts on Groundswell Radio.

Stop the Land Grab

You may have heard about Significant Natural Areas (SNAs). These are classifications councils can apply to local land that let them control what kinds of activities can happen on that land.

Created by the Resource Management Act and with vague, broad criteria that let bureaucrats run amok with arbitrary rulings, SNAs can go as far as stopping landowners from keeping stock on their own land – even without meaningful reference to the environmental impacts or the financial impact on the landowner.

This makes the natural environment a liability for the landowner and punishes them harder the more they’ve done to care for it. In theory (as this can’t be encouraged, of course) a landowner who has native bush on their land is incentivised to burn it off before the council inspector finds it and bans them from ever doing anything else with the land.

And why would anyone go about creating new areas of native bush on their land? It’s just asking for your land to be effectively taken off you. Completely the reverse of sensible efforts like the QEII National Trust and their covenant scheme.  

The declaration by a council that your land can’t be used anymore due to an SNA also doesn’t do away with your mortgage. The bank still expects to get paid no matter whether you can use the land or not. Worse still if the valuer comes around or you need to sell up and no buyers are interested in land with those kinds of restrictions.

Besides how bad it is when the land is assessed according to the rules, councils regularly get it wrong and fighting their decisions is just choosing between bureaucratic compliance and a bureaucratic fight. See the examples our environment spokesperson Jamie McFadden deals with in his videos on our Facebook page – supposed wetlands on dry land – or the Adrian Page case where his local council knowingly used an invalidated test for whether a wetland exists and then pursued him until he spent time in jail.

SNAs go against every principle of commonsense conservation. The incentives are backwards, the process is costly and invasive, and the closest person to the resource – the landowner – is treated as its adversary, instead of its guardian.

But it’s not just SNAs. The law that requires councils to map SNAs also establishes a long list of different land classifications that all have the same outcome: private landowners lose the use of their land to arbitrary bureaucracy.

This law is Section 6 of the Resource Management Act (RMA). You might see the different classifications mentioned in different situations, so here’s the list and their acronyms your might see:

• Outstanding Natural Landscapes (ONL)

• Outstanding Natural Features (ONF)

• Significant Natural Features (SNF)

• Rural Scenic Landscapes (RSL)

• Rural Scenic (RS)

• Sites and Areas of Significance to Māori (SASM)

But usually, any time the effects of SNAs are mentioned, the rest of the land classifications could be having the same effect in a different situation (sometimes it’s the same situation, as land can have multiple classifications applying different rules).

To avoid that mouthful, we’re calling all these classifications the Land Grab because that’s what it is: the government coming for your land without paying for it and without a fair process.

It’s simple. Stop the Land Grab. Pause the land classifications now. Repeal RMA Section 6.

The Government has recognised the threat SNAs pose and are planning to make changes in the coming RMA reforms. They’ve told councils to stop mapping SNAs while new legislation is on the way.

But some councils have been going ahead anyway, saying that they'll continue while the law is still on the books. After some back and forth, the Government has said that they will legislate this year to suspend the requirement on councils, so at least they won't have that excuse.

Now that's all well and good, but it leaves out the rest of Section 6. Requirements for new SNAs might be suspended, but the rest of the land classifications are still in force and still threatening both landowners’ property rights and the commonsense conservation efforts that will actually preserve our natural environment.

That's why we're telling the Government to suspend all the Section 6 land classifications now and then repeal them all in their planned RMA reforms.

Groundswell Radio

We’re reviewing Groundswell Radio to consider whether to start another season and what direction to take.

Please let us know if you listened (or didn’t!) and what you liked or found most useful from it, along with what changes you would like to see.

Thank you again for your support.

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Kind regards,

Bryce, Laurie, Mel and the Team at Groundswell NZ

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