What the fast-track list doesn’t tell us

The list of projects to be included in the Fast-Track Approvals Bill has finally been released. Which seems to have been received, as described by the Environmental Defence Society, as “some good, some bad”.

This position misses the point – that the bill is enabling the squandering of national economic rents in the absence of an obvious vision or plan. That is, it commits resources to a list of projects compiled for short-term political ends without due consideration of other possibilities.

Many critics of the bill have conceded that consenting processes could do with a shake-up, and few would deny the prospect of a boost in economic dynamism. My question is whether the list is anything more than a lolly scramble for landed interests?

There are few details about specific projects – the inevitable consequence or perhaps the point of fast-tracking is that the public don’t get a chance to ask for the details. We should expect, and demand to know how the projects are supposed to relate to each other and what they seek to achieve.

Without a clearly articulated vision of how the projects are to contribute to our national future, we are left to read their purpose from between lines of the list, as I have.

Ritualised developmentalism

The ministers driving the programme, Chris Bishop and Shane Jones, say the projects will be addressing a housing crisis, an infrastructure deficit, and energy insecurity.Fast-tracking will see new houses, roads, and energy plants. But it is unclear how, and to what extent the projects will address the crisis, deficit, or insecurity to which the ministers refer – real or otherwise.

Will building new housing estates on the edges of Auckland, for example, resolve the challenge of rapidly rising house prices for the middle classes or the absence of housing for often large low-income households? Is the issue really a question of supply?

We might also ask how and if building housing estates in Auckland is connected to wind farm construction, mining or salmon farming off the coast of Stewart Island; and how and if each is linked to national significance.

Jones and Bishop gesture towards ‘boosting’ or ‘rebuilding’ the economy, especially in the regions, but given their Government has torn away at parts of the state and related consultancy sectors, a fuller explanation is required. Are we to assume that state workers have lost their jobs to manufacture an economic crisis that will justify the new projects, or even to offset the inflationary pressures that will be unleashed through the construction associated with the fast-track projects?

New houses, roads, and energy plants will create jobs and multiplier effects in the short run – maybe even a boom in construction. But where will the workers (and the investment) come from, how will communities and environments be affected, and then what happens? Will the small suite of proposed aquaculture and mining initiatives really stimulate long-term regional development?

The list lacks a future-focused development vision against which we might hold to account the ministers or their expert assessment panels. In its absence, the bill is our right to voice for what appears to be a one-off round of rent grabs followed by generations of commodity production.

The list looks like a retro Edmonds Cookbook recipe for renewing New Zealand’s rent-based economy – land development, commodities, and the activities that bind them (finance, insurance, infrastructure, and real estate). It was pineapple and ham pizza and tripe with onions and milk then, and it will be the same again.

Thinking about rents

What do I mean by national economic rents, as mentioned above?  

Loosely interpreted, they are the unearned returns to holding monopoly assets – a super-premium that accrues from ‘having rather than doing’, as Brett Christophers, a professor at Sweden’s Uppsala University and author of the Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? put it, or owning assets rather than creating distinctive value via entrepreneurialism or developing new technologies.

Economic rents are derived from multiple sources of monopoly: control over scarce land, resources, or attractive qualities such as proximity to other assets; regulation that in one way or other locks in initial advantages (consents, urban limits, trading licences, place-based brands, and patents); or anti-competitive controls over data or platforms of access to it (internet search engines).

Such rents are the holy grail at the heart of contemporary capitalist dynamics. They might be ‘earned’ through community endowments or collective intergenerational hard work but are commonly locked into private ownership by property rights regimes and inequitable historical processes.

Invariably tied to physical places, rents offer competitive advantages and sources of national and regional wealth. They can be state controlled as is the case of the sovereign investment funds of oil states, but can be stewarded by governments in other ways to achieve development.  

The proposed fast-track projects assign rights to extract rents, but it is unclear at what price and for the creation of what future. Will, for instance, salmon farmers pay royalties on the ocean space or pay for their land-based discharges? Who exactly will pay for, and benefit from, the new and/or repaired roads? These are the questions crystallised by rent-based framework, and that we should be asking.

We need to ask these questions lest we squander the opportunities that economic rents present to the nation, by giving them away to the landed wealthy and their political lobbyists.

The Fast-Track Amendment Bill list includes several projects that emphasise positive environmental futures and others driven by iwi that have collective goals and responsibilities to communities. There is much to be learned from teasing these apart as models.

This, however, has not been articulated within the list, or by its proponents. Instead, it foreshadows a process of enclosure – a privatisation of public resources, rights and opportunities to determine futures collectively (including national reputations for good governance and clean environments). This may shut out the sun and preclude other visions of the future as surely as the unexpected arrival of a three-storey house next door.

At precisely the moment Fonterra is divesting brands whose values have been built behind protective legislation, the turning over of resources to commodity production and rents to private interests the list of projects is at best uninspiring. It would be more encouraging to see a smaller, better-defended list that was tied to a vision and involved collectivising rents and encouraging entrepreneurialism through emphases on restorative and circular economy, social enterprise, contemporary public housing, and collective ownership.