The need for integrated national planning

Maybe we need a new form of Resource Management Act?

OPINION: Mention the Resource Management Act(RMA) and most people recoil in horror – it has not been the source of good experiences for most people and has been fiddled with endlessly since it started in the late 1980s.  But we do badly need a legal framework for doing things.

New Zealanders are good and enthusiastic builders but we are individualistic and prefer to do things our own way and only when they are needed – the frontier mentality. That’s great for some things but it is certainly not great when it comes to things like the environment and the infrastructure.  In bath cases, you are talking about things where actions have a long lead time and have effects long beyond the time when things are done or built.

We also have a very bad habit in New Zealand of doing things on a one off basis, without thinking about the connections with other things.  We build another dairy farm without also doing things to manage the environmental effects, we are fond of building motorways to nowhere, eg the Wellington motorway network, and we have recently and very evidently failed to tie together closely related issues such as employment, immigration, housing and infrastructure.

The recent announcement by the Minister of Finance was a good example – $10 billion over 10 years to build new infrastructure!!  Great.  Problem is that we should have been starting the process years ago, it will mostly be needed within 10 years, and there is a big question over where we will find the construction work force to do the job.

The sensible approach to these things is to think ahead, then plan to have things in place when they are needed rather than after they are needed, to spread out workloads so they become manageable, and to give ourselves some flexibility to change tack if it turns out we got things slightly wring.  The flexibility element is very important because experience tells us we generally do get it wrong so adjustments have to be made.  We also need to have a much stronger sense of how things connect together – we should always be doing several things in parallel – not single projects in isolation.

Nothing in this is rocket science and I don’t know of any government body that is not well versed in the mechanics of forward planning.  And we do produce some splendid looking documents.  But somehow there is always a gap between plan and reality.

Part of that problem is our political process which runs in 3 year cycles and is a blatant invitation to shorter term planning. Like many others I would favour extending the parliamentary term – maybe to 5 years as in the UK to even 6 years – to provide a better incentive for longer term thinking and action.

Part of the answer used to be the RMA, but the RMA has really lost its way in too many competing influences.  We probably need to start again with something simple and tailored to the integration problem.  And as a nation we need to train ourselves out of our short-term habits and do some decent long term planning and execution.

By Bas Walker

This is another of Bas Walker’s posts on GrownUps.  Please look out for his articles, containing his Beachside Ponderings.