Current solutions to unlawful development activities and illegal dumping

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

• Report any suspicious demolition, development, dumping, and earthworks activities you see to your council.
• Ask Council whether there is a 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.
• If you feel comfortable enough to do so, take photos and videos of the activities, persons involved, and vehicle number plates, which can also act as a deterrent to the environmental offenders. Time and date stamp these photos. Send them to Council as evidence.
• If your enquiries reveal that these activities have been consented, ask your council to monitor them to see if the operator is breaching the consent. Just because the site has a consent does not mean that it is not being breached, nor that Council is actively monitoring it for compliance. Levels of council monitoring are low, and councils often cite a lack of funds as the reason. However, councils can charge for monitoring under section 36 of the Resource Management Act (RMA), so it appears that councils’ lack of will rather than lack of funding has resulted in a lack of monitoring.
• Ask other concerned neighbours to make the same enquiries to your council to increase the strength of your complaints.
• After gauging the situation and weighing up the risks, and if you feel comfortable enough with the risks: follow suspicious-looking, often unmarked, dump trucks to see which development sites they are picking up waste from and which dumpsite they are dropping it off to.
• Take photos that include the locations and number plates of offending dump trucks. Time and date stamp these photos and send them to Council.
• Check that your council has flagged all RMA breaches (such as the presence of an illegal dumpsite on the property) on the property’s LIM report and property file. These records will likely affect any future sale of the property.
• Shine the light on the hidden issues of unlawful developments and illegal dumping by looking out for the signs and spreading the word.
• VOTE for a mayor, councillors, local board members, and political parties that will take real, concrete action on stopping environmental crimes rather than making a token gesture (or not answering at all).

Future solutions to environmental crimes

Environmental compliance, monitoring and enforcement (CME) is extremely vulnerable to business interests. One way to remove such strong political influence is to separate resource consenting functions from follow-up CME functions, aligning with democracy’s principle of the separation of powers in order to prevent their abuse. Consenting could remain with councils, while CME could be taken off their hopelessly compromised hands and given to an independent government agency with a regional presence (which would help with enforcement). Such an agency would need to be well-funded, well-staffed, and well-trained in CME functions.

It’s going to cost us money to do this, because the justice system costs money. It costs money to uphold the law, to prosecute crimes, and to deter present and future offenders. Forty years of deregulation may 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. And racked up a price tag for their campaign against Nature that we will hand down to future generations, or perhaps even ourselves as we are beginning to feel the “death by a thousand cuts” of earth’s immune system.

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 Aotearoa 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. It has announced that one of the new system’s features will be the establishment of a national compliance and enforcement regulator to take over from councils, whom it considers to be 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.

Friends of Swanson Foothills urges us all to make submissions requesting that a government agency dedicated to stopping environmental crimes 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 created. However, we must keep working to make this happen in the long term, in order to stop Aotearoa New Zealand’s continuing descent into environmental lawlessness.

Our own solutions to environmental development crimes

Bruce Babbitt, a former US Secretary of the Interior once said, “Don’t expect me to do the right thing, make me do it.”

You would expect councils to do the CME job that they are mandated and paid by ratepayers to do. Regrettably, we cannot rely on local or central government to be the custodians of anything. We must always keep pressuring councils, and eventually government, to fulfil their CME roles, and never stop doing so. We cannot take our eye off the ball for even one second, not even when we think the “deal is done”.

The eminent ecologist-historian Geoff Park answers the question of “who guards the guards?” with the sobering insight that we do.

So we must, at the same time as relentlessly pushing local and central government, stop entirely outsourcing the role of Kaitiaki/guardianship to them.

We can work to give Nature a breather, for example, by addressing the urban sprawl that causes unlawful development activities, the illegal dumping of development waste, and the habitat destruction that ensues.

We can take up the mantle of Kaitiaki/guardianship ourselves, in whatever creative and surprising ways that may arise.