ACT’s Record

ACT has driven practical changes in Government that let farmers farm. These include:

• Stopping new SNA mapping: ACT secured a three-year suspension of the national requirement for councils to identify and map new Significant Natural Areas.

• Fixing winter grazing and stock-exclusion rules: The Government repealed Labour’s impractical intensive winter grazing consent rules and removed the low-slope map from stock-exclusion regulations.

• Pausing costly freshwater farm plans: ACT secured a nationwide pause to the compulsory rollout of Labour’s costly and unworkable freshwater farm-plan system.

• Keeping agriculture out of the ETS: The Government changed the law to stop agriculture entering the Emissions Trading Scheme and disestablished He Waka Eke Noa.

• Resetting the methane target: The Government replaced Labour’s 2050 biogenic methane target of 24–47 per cent with a more realistic target of 14–24 per cent below 2017 levels. Food production must now be considered when emissions budgets are set.

• Removing the Te Mana o te Wai hierarchy from consenting: Resource-consent applicants no longer have to demonstrate that their activities follow the hierarchy of obligations contained in the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management.

• Scrapping Labour’s anti-farming policies: ACT helped scrap the ute tax and restore 90-day trials for all employers.

• Clarifying landowner liability: ACT Minister Brooke van Velden secured passage of health and safety reforms clarifying landowners’ responsibilities when hunters, trampers, and other recreational users enter their properties.

The coalition Government has not gone as far as ACT would like, but it has gone further than it would have without ACT.