Te Rūnanga o Toa Rangatira chief executive Helmut Modlik. Photo: Ngāti Kahungunu Iwi Inc
One of the strongest critics of the government's fast-track consenting legislation is praising the coalition for listening and making changes.
The coalition is editing the most contentious part of the bill, which gave three ministers the ultimate sign-off power on projects.
Wellington iwi Ngāti Toa led a hīkoi of several thousand people Parliament earlier this year to make clear its opposition to the proposal.
Te Rūnanga o Toa Rangatira chief executive Helmut Modlik later told RNZ that concentration of power was "an overreach and dangerous".
Speaking after the changes were announced on Sunday, Modlik said he was "very pleased" the public had been listened to.
"I actually want to acknowledge them for listening. I was of the view and still am that they're trying to enable quicker and more cost-effective delivery of the built environment changes that we need.
"And in the first instance the balance wasn't quite right. We spoke, the nation spoke and they listened. So yeah, I want to acknowledge them for that."
Final decisions on projects would now sit with an expert panel, the same approach taken under the previous Labour government's fast-track process.
Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop said the coalition was always open to changing the regime and tweaking proposed laws was par for the course at Parliament.
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"We said we're always open to sensible changes as part of the legislation and all legislation goes through changes when it goes through Parliament, or the vast majority does.
"We've listened to concerns from submitters that they wanted the panel to be the final decision maker."
Bishop is now the sole minister in charge of referring projects to the expert panel, though he has to consult the environment minister and other relevant ministers as part of this process.
"By the end of the year there will be a one stop shop, fast track regime in place that makes it a lot easier to build houses, to develop mines, to build infrastructure that New Zealand needs," he said.
But Labour and the Greens are far from happy about the revamped legislation. Both said that it still allowed infrastructure projects to ride roughshod over the environment.
"The purpose of this bill, the facilitation of projects, overrides all of that other legislation with all of the environmental protections that come with it," Labour's environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said.
Hundreds of people gathered on the forecourt of Parliament in May to protest the fast-track legislation. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
"The expert panel is subject to the same overarching purpose in the bill which is to facilitate development, essentially at all costs," the Green Party's environment spokesperson Lan Pham said.
All parties spoken to by RNZ supported the final decision making power being moved from three ministers to an expert panel.
The Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said the coalition had no choice but to make the change, or face decades of legal action.
"Nobody wants to go into a project and not know where the liability lies. Who is going to be responsible if something goes wrong?
"And I think these are all the sorts of things that even those who wanted to do projects wanted clarity and certainty of."
The government has not revealed what projects had applied to be part of the regime but said it had received 386 applications.
Of those, 40 per cent were for housing and urban development, 24 per cent infrastructure, 18 per cent renewable energy, eight per cent primary industries, five per cent quarrying and five per cent mining.
