ACT listens to farmers at the brink: Immediate relief for farmers renewing consents

ACT MP Andrew Hoggard says resource consent rollovers announced today show how ACT listens to farmers, and deliver a badly needed circuit breaker for farms threatened by ideological regional councils.

“Across the country, councils have turned consent renewal into a bureaucratic nightmare. Farmers looking to renew their consents are staring down the barrel of costly conditions that make no sense on farm and will soon be redundant anyway.

“The warning signs were clear in September, when David Seymour and I met Canterbury farmers who had been hung out to dry. Some were staring down hundreds of thousands in legal and consultant fees simply to renew existing consents. Farmers told us they urgently needed a transition pathway that didn’t see them punished by a dying system while a new one is being built. We listened.

“Consent renewals have been hanging over productive farms like a guillotine. Rolling them over until a better planning system is in place means farmers can keep farming as they are, without upending their activities on the basis of a council plan that is set to be rescoped. It is immediate relief for people who have been pushed to the brink.

“The move reins in regional councils that have overreached. Some councils have used the RMA as a weapon. They’ve made life harder for the very people who keep our regions alive.

“This is transitional relief while the Government implements the new planning system. Under the system shaped by Simon Court and Chris Bishop, councils will need to rewrite their plans to match a property-rights approach. It won’t be about questioning your right to farm. It will be about sensible conditions that match actual environmental risk.

“This announcement continues ACT’s record of backing rural New Zealand. We’ve already stopped new SNAs, axed the Ute Tax, kept agriculture out of the ETS, fixed methane settings, and now delivered certainty on consents. Farmers asked for help, ACT heard them and acted.”