Under the current RMA regime

Legal, institutional, and cultural changes are needed, but in the meantime, you can:

• Report any suspicious dumping and earthworks activities you see to Council, or at least enquire about whether there is resource consent for these activities. Follow up on your complaint to see if Council took any action. Otherwise, your initial complaint may not be investigated. Take photos and videos, which can also act as a deterrent. Time and date stamp these photos. Send them to Council as evidence. 
• If your enquiries reveal that these activities have been consented, ask Council to monitor them to see if the operator is breaching the consent. Just because the site has consent doesn’t mean the consent is not being breached, nor that Council is actually monitoring it for compliance. 
• Ask others in your neighbourhood to make the same enquiries to Council to increase the strength of your complaints.
• If you are feeling plucky, follow suspicious-looking, often unmarked, dump trucks to see which development sites they are picking waste up from and which dumpsite they are dropping it off to. Take photos that include the locations and number plates of these dump trucks and send them to Council. 
• Shine the light on this issue that has been hidden for far too long by looking out for the signs now that you can recognise them, and spreading the word.

In the future

Environmental compliance, monitoring and enforcement (CME) is extremely vulnerable to business interests, and this political influence needs to be removed. One way is to separate resource consenting functions from follow-up CME functions. Consenting could remain with councils, while CME could be taken off their hopelessly compromised hands and given to a centralised agency with a regional presence (that, as a local body, would be key/essential to enforcement). Such an agency would need to be independent, well-funded, well-staffed, and highly trained and competent in CME functions.

It’s going to cost us money to do this. Forty years of deregulation have conditioned us to baulk at any increase in the regulatory budget. But deregulation aimed at “setting the market free” has also set environmental criminals free. Any new national enforcer must be well resourced. It must treat serious environmental offending as a crime rather than a mere regulatory breach. And it must be free from conflicts of interest over the economic growth imperative that plagues Council’s compliance, monitoring and enforcement arm. 

The United Kingdom is ahead of us on this issue. It has established a waste crime unit that works with Police and has the power to recover the proceeds of waste crimes. This last factor could potentially help any New Zealand agency become partially self-funding, and was acknowledged by the coalition government’s expert advisory group on RMA reform as a likely funding source.

We have an opportunity here, as the government wants to replace the RMA during this term. On 24 March 2025, the government announced that one of the new system’s features will be the establishment of a national compliance and enforcement regulator to take over from Council, whom it considers is doing the job poorly. However, this national regulator will not be included in the RMA replacement bills coming out this year, and will be worked out later on (if at all?) Once again, waste criminals can, in the meantime, continue to offend without consequence in the Waitākere Ranges heritage area. Friends of Swanson Foothills urges us all to make submissions requesting that a government agency dedicated to stopping environmental crimes and sticking to proper legal procedure be included in these bills. 

The previous Labour government did not take up its review panel’s recommendations to establish regional CME hubs (supported by central government) when enacting its RMA replacement laws.  

It will therefore require immense political will and probably take successive governments before an independent CME agency is launched. However, we must keep working to make this happen in the long term, in order to stop the increasing environmental looting that is happening in our country at the expense of the rest of Nature and our future generations.