SOLO-NZ Press Release: Wot about Rodney, Wodney?

September 28, 2009

If you live in Rodney and want to erect a flagpole on your land, don't do it without Resource Consent or you could go to jail for two years. Ditto if you want to build a chook-house or fell a tree.

Typical RMA fascism? Well, yes, says SOLO Principal Lindsay Perigo—but with the additional iniquity in this instance of being snuk through a back alley.

To quote Federated Farmers:

"Rodney District Council deceived its constituents this week by brokering a behind closed doors deal with the Environmental Defence Society.

"The deal, revealed publicly last week at a meeting in Helensville, resulted in the implementation of a new west coast rural policy area into council’s district plan in exchange for the society’s withdrawal of an Environment Court appeal of the plan. ...

“The plan change requires farmers to obtain resource consents for new farm buildings and certain types of fencing. It also introduces more stringent rules for earthworks, wetland modification and tree and bush removal."

"The question I have," says Perigo, “is: where is Rodney? Rodney Hide, ACT leader, Minister of Local Government, purported critic of the RMA, was supposedly put there to bring an end to this de facto nationalisation of private property. The kind of nonsense where the owner of a North Shore lifestyle block was fined $25,000 for turning a bog into a duck-pond would supposedly cease.

"Yes, Rodney has to contend with Environment Minister Nick Smith, wetter than a duck-pond and flat-earth believer that the planet is warming and man is to blame, when it's actually cooling and man has nothing to do with it.

"But if Rodney can threaten to resign (rightly) over separate seats for Mordi, why is he not jumping up and down over the separation of landowners from their land? Why has he not, aesthetic considerations aside, impaled Nick Smith on the flagpole of liberty?

"Until he does this, or something deliciously similar, we can only assume Rodney is weally a Wodney," Perigo concludes.

ENDS

© Scoop Media