Published in the National Business Review of 9 July 2004
Out in the eastern corner of Petone is the unremarkable Heretaunga Street. Not to be confused with the suburb of Heretaunga, which is in Upper Hutt and has a rather better social cachet to it.

This Heretaunga Street is a mixture of early 20th century cottages painted in a pastiche of late Victoriana colours, and dull 1930's, 1940's bungalows. An ordinary and unremarkable suburban street enlivened only by the car upholstery business on the corner and the Brahma Kumari Yoga Centre opposite.

It is one block back from the main shopping thoroughfare, Jackson Street.

However in Heretaunga Street a battle has waged over a developer's plans to build student flats, a battle neatly illustrating some of the pitfalls of the Resource Management Act.

In 2003 developer Jenny Clarke sought permission from the Hutt City Council to build 56 student flats (The Wellington Institute of Technology is nearby). The council decided that there was no need for a resource consent hearing.

Nationally about 80 per cent of such applications are approved without notifications (and therefore without the opportunity for public objections and without hearings). The Hutt City Council's rate for approval without hearing is over 90 per cent, one of the highest in the country.

The neighbours took the case to the High Court, which ruled that the application should be notified. Jenny Clarke then proposed to build eight town houses on the site, but last week withdrew the application in the face of further opposition from residents and the council.

The Council's planning officer had recommended that the new application be declined. The residents suspected that the eight town houses were student flats in another guise, a claim Ms Clarke described as absurd.

The upshot of all the activity is that no amenity is being built, thus depriving the community of a useful development.

The residents have spent many thousands of dollars simply to gain the right to have their voice heard on an important development in their street.

The council has upset both residents and the developer by its original decision to grant consent without a hearing, a decision that triggered the battle and a chain of expenditure.

And the developer has now retreated burned by the experience and likely deterred from doing it again.

This looks like a lose, lose, lose situation all round. No doubt all the individual parties could have conducted themselves better, and perhaps a high-density development is not appropriate in a suburban street.

So how is it that the proposal got approved in the first place, which then led to the fight to overturn it?

If the law and the application of the law had been firm and clear, then a lot of time, energy and money would have been saved.

On a visit to Lower Hutt last week, National's finance spokesman John Key said the party planned to replace the Resource Management Act.

He told a party meeting that National's thinking was to build in a national interest criterion so that local interests could not prevent nationally important projects from proceeding.

This would prevent vexatious claims where parties were opposing a development in order to extract money from the developer and would ensure more certainty of both process and outcome for the developer.

The application of law should be both predictable and reliable, he said.