RMLA submission to the Environment Committee on the Conservation Amendment Bill

This submission is made by the Resource Management Law Association | Te Kāhui Ture Taiao (RMLA) in relation to the Conservation Amendment Bill (the Bill).

The Bill introduces a new function of the Department in s 6(ea): to recognise the economic opportunities that arise from the use and development of land and other natural resources and historic resources managed by the Department, and to enable that use and development to the greatest extent practicable under this Act and other enactments. The same formulation is then carried through the instrument chain into the purpose of the NCPS (s 13D(2)(b)), the purpose of area plans, and the purpose of the new Part 3B concessions regime.

RMLA’s concern is one of legal soundness and clarity rather than policy. There is a material gap between the way the amendment was described in the Department’s Supplementary Analysis Report (SAR) of 15 April 2026 and the operative words of s 6(ea). The SAR described a function that would “allow development” subservient to conservation and relied repeatedly (some 17 times) on the formula “not inconsistent with conservation” to characterise the change as targeted and low impact. The words now proposed, being “to the greatest extent practicable under this Act and other enactments” do not appear in the SAR and carry no equivalent conservation qualifier.

That omission matters because s 6(ea) sits immediately alongside the recreation function in s 6(e), which the Bill retains with an express conservation limit (“to the extent consistent with their conservation”). The presence of a conservation rider on one limb of s 6, and its absence on the adjacent limb, is the kind of asymmetry to which a court will give weight when construing the section. On ordinary principles