Copyright farmersweekly
Reading Time: 2 minutes The recent Federated Farmers survey on consenting costs makes sobering reading. The organisation is to be congratulated for taking the bull by the horns and completing a watertight survey on unnecessary costs and excessive bureaucracy. Its members will thank it. I must confess to having no idea of the crazy costs that are foisted on farmers for no discernible benefit. For a start and dealing with the average costs of consents, if you include consultants’ fees they are $39,882. That’s almost $800 a week and for what benefit to either the farmer or the environment? It gets better as the costs in Canterbury run at $60,000 followed by Horizons at $45,000. How can that be justified? Feds vice-president Colin Hurst is a pretty straightforward character but he certainly had a head of steam on this one. He told me that in Canterbury there are 6000 farmers, with half needing consents just to farm and that is ridiculous. That the regional council is treating all consents as new consents. That history is being ignored. That’s bureaucratic bloody-mindedness. He believes the consent circus is creating uncertainty and that is hindering investment, which is understandable. The process is a nightmare. For a start a farmer needs to apply for a consent six months before the existing document runs out. That a lot of consents are down to three or four years, creating a highly expensive treadmill. That you have a bureaucratic shambles in the consenting process but there is no enforcement, which just highlights the complete waste of time the charade is encouraging. Hurst believes that the process prioritises paperwork over any practical environmental outcome. He believes farmers are being asked to provide extensive technical data, ecological assessments and full Overseer remodelling even when farming systems haven’t changed. There is no consistency in the regional council approach. Feds gives the example of a farmer with two farms, one in a nutrient allocation red zone and another in a green zone. The consent for the red zone went through painlessly while that for the green zone was causing significant problems. The entire process is, in my view, corrupt. You have a regional council making rules under current legislation. That legislation is about to be redundant. It then complicates the situation and charges the farmer a fortune for doing so. The farmer must, by law, play the silly game. The regional council is ecstatic, earning a fortune for rules it has created under soon-to-be-irrelevant legislation that isn’t policed. It is nothing more than milking a farmer to create an income stream over a system that is as much use as a bicycle would be to a fish. Politicians from the coalition partners of National, ACT and NZ First have been briefed at length and yet absolutely nothing has been done when there is an easy fix. That is decreeing that consents are on hold until the Resource Management Act reforms are completed. That would mean that farmers would be able to stop playing silly, irrelevant games. Is that too much to ask?
