Simon Court - Speech to ACT Rally 2025

Speech to ACT Rally 2025, Sunday 13 July, 2025

Good afternoon! Let’s talk about the cost of living.

Why is it so expensive to buy groceries, to rent or own a home, to keep the lights on, or to drive on safe roads?

It’s because it’s too hard to build anything in this country.

A supermarket. A house. A road. A power station. It often takes longer to get permission than to actually build. That’s insane.

Look at IKEA in Auckland. They were told they had to invite seven different iwi groups to conduct “cultural monitoring, karakia, and other ceremonies” at every stage of construction.

They had to consult iwi on erosion control, stormwater treatment, fencing, planting, walkways — you name it.

They even had to grant iwi on-demand access to the worksite for monitoring. You can’t make this stuff up.

It’s not an isolated case. I recently obtained resource consents for two proposed solar farms in Central Hawke’s Bay.

Those consents demanded inviting iwi to say a prayer whenever a native plant was removed, building a public viewing area, and providing detailed planting plans down to what species would go where and how far apart.

And these are just the projects that survive.

Too many die before they start, buried under layers of objections from people whose property or environment isn’t even affected.

And those rights to object are not awarded equally — they depend on your ancestry.

When vetoes don’t kill a project outright, we bury it in a lasagna of conditions so thick that investors simply give up.

One of those solar companies went bust before a single shovel touched the ground.

Many others take one look at our rules and invest overseas. It’s killing opportunity, jobs, and progress in New Zealand.

And let’s be honest about what it’s doing to our culture.

Some developers now offer these conditions proactively, hoping councils will approve them faster. You pay for this culture of compliance in your power bill and at the checkout.

The root cause is the Resource Management Act – the RMA.

The 30-year old law designed to allow development and protect the environment has failed miserably at both.

That’s why ACT is leading the charge to scrap it — and replace it entirely with a new system based on property rights, common sense, and the radical idea that humans can have nice things.

It will say that your land is your land and you can do with it what you like, so long as you’re not harming others’ property or the environment.

Under ACT’s reforms, homes will get built.

We will have infrastructure like a first-world country without arguing for a generation about where it goes and what gets built first.

And new energy generation will become feasible again – coal, gas, hydro, solar, and maybe, one day, even nuclear.

Because New Zealand must be a first-world country where people don’t shiver in winter or fear blackouts.

Where businesses can expand. Where people can afford to own a home.

Because the alternative is what we see now. A generation is on the brink of giving up, leaving for Australia, while anyone bright who’s left behind has to work all the harder to keep the ship afloat.

If young people see no chance of owning their own property, they’ll have no problem voting to tax someone else’s.

ACT says: enough.

We’re driving RMA reform that will make New Zealand affordable again. We will pass the new system in 2026, for implementation in 2027.

But let me be crystal clear: None of this happens without ACT in government.

We’re the only party that has always said: Burn the RMA to the ground and start over.

So in 2026, we’ll be back, asking for your vote. Because to finish the job, to deliver the future, to embed a property-rights-based system, we need ACT in the room.

No more delays. No more excuses. It’s time to build.

Thank you.