Our submission on the Planning and Natural Environment Bills
13 February 2026
Lou Wickham
For those living under a rock, public submissions on two new bills reforming New Zealand’s entire resource management system closed today at 4:30 pm. We did our small part by proving a brief submission to select committee.
We left the detail to the experts, giving strong support for the submission of the Environmental Defence Society Incorporated (worth a read - check it out here). The focus of our submission was only one aspect of the Bills – the introduction of property rights to resource management in New Zealand.
We draw the Committee’s attention to New Zealand’s vote in support of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) resolution in 2022 that the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is a basic human right (A/RES/76/300). We acknowledged New Zealand’s vote was seen as a “political declaration” and did not create any legally binding obligations. However, we think it is important that New Zealand did vote in support of this political declaration and we noted it aligns with the overwhelming majority view of New Zealanders – that the right to breathe clean air should be a basic human right.
The reasons are simple.
People can last for weeks without food, days without water, but only a few minutes without clean air.
In practice, air pollution is an insidious killer – with long-term, continuous population-level exposure to pollution causing preventable ‘premature mortality’ (death) due to, amongst other things, lung cancer (IARC 2013).
We pointed out that if there was no air pollution from human-made sources in New Zealand, then about 3,300 deaths would have been avoided in 2016. This represented about 11% of all deaths in New Zealand in 2016.
It therefore seems manifestly unjust that the legal framework for resource management in New Zealand is being rewritten specifically to address the protection of perceived private (only) property rights.
Where is the protection of public (basic human) rights? Why is regulatory relief not being provided to people whose health is being directly compromised by other people’s emissions?
Other jurisdictions do this. The European Union’s recently revised Ambient Air Quality Directive (Directive 2024/2881), introduced compensation provisions for citizens affected by poor air quality:
Article 28(1) Right to Compensation: Member states must ensure that citizens have the right to claim and obtain compensation when their health has been damaged due to a violation of air quality rules set in the directive.
We requested that the legislation be redrafted to accord the same privileges to basic human rights as private property rights.
Copy of our submission here.