Marlborough Mayor Nadine Taylor today urged members of the Environment Select Committee in Wellington to protect Marlborough’s planning independence and retain certainty for its key industries.

“I’m calling on MPs to protect Marlborough’s status as its own planning region and to safeguard our new planning framework - both are critical to the region’s economy and longterm sustainability.”

Mayor Taylor appeared before the select committee this morning to present Marlborough District Council’s submission on the Planning Bill and Natural Environment Bill, noting that the reforms will significantly shape how councils, communities and industries interact with the planning system for decades to come.

“Marlborough is uniquely placed as a unitary authority, managing both regional and district functions across more than one million hectares of land, and one of New Zealand’s most intricate coastlines,” Mayor Taylor said.

“Our geography, climate and the industries we support are distinct. Parliament has recognised these differences in previous reform processes - I am asking the select committee to confirm that Marlborough remains a separate planning region.”

Mayor Taylor told the MPs that Marlborough’s newly operative secondgeneration Marlborough Environment Plan (MEP) - a combined regional and district plan - provided stable, integrated and wellunderstood rules for resource users, and it should be deemed fully operative under the new legislation until 2033.

“The MEP is the product of more than a decade of work, with extensive involvement from iwi, industry and the community, and an investment of around $10 million. Industry partners have invested millions more. It’s a sophisticated and newly-settled planning framework that gives confidence to businesses and enables longterm investment decisions, ” she said.

Mayor Taylor emphasised the critical importance of certainty for Marlborough’s key industries, including wine, aquaculture, forestry, farming and tourism.

“One example is our water allocation framework, which underpins the operational viability and financial borrowing capacity of our viticulture sector,” she said. “Nearly 90% of New Zealand’s wine exports are produced here in Marlborough. Our growers and commercial lenders rely on the stability of the current plan. Requiring us to unravel this new framework now would be unnecessarily destabilising.”

She asked the select committee to include a specific legislative provision in Schedule 1 of the Planning Bill to deem the MEP fully operative for a defined period, or alternatively the ability to apply to have a longer transition during which the MEP would continue to apply.

“This is about protecting the stability of Marlborough’s economy and protecting ratepayers,” Mayor Taylor said. “With proposed rates capping, councils face real limits on funding new planning processes. Marlborough ratepayers should not be asked to repeat a process they have just completed.”

Mayor Taylor also urged the Committee to address gaps in how the new planning system integrates land use planning with natural resource management.

“Under the new Bills, developments such as wineries may require separate approvals under separate plans, with separate notification pathways,” she said. “At a local level, our industries and developers just want certainty. We want to ensure these activities can be considered together to reduce cost, complexity and duplication.”

She recommended enabling combined hearings or mechanisms allowing decisionmakers to consider provisions across both plans where activities overlap.

Mayor Taylor said Marlborough’s request is pragmatic, evidencebased and designed to ensure a smooth transition to the new system.

“Marlborough has demonstrated over 30 years that integrated planning works. We are simply asking that the certainty our industries currently rely on is preserved while the new national planning system beds in.”

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