07 May 2005

The Ministry for the Environment (MFE) is asking Parliament to change the Resource Management Act 1993 so that regional councils are assigned legal responsibility for the cleanup of thousands of sites, which were contaminated prior to 1991.

There are a number of significant issues attached to this policy proposal, especially since much of the contamination was legal at the time. Read More MFE is now focused on billing landowners regardless of the fairness of the case instead of focussing on holding accountable those responsible for the pollution. MFE proposes that:

• Firstly, councils will look for the polluter to pay;
• Secondly, where the polluter is no longer the landowner the current owner will be made to pay for the contamination clean up.

In a document recently released by the Sustainability Council it is pointed out that in 1999 MFE stated that strict liability on the landowner is inequitable and contrary to natural justice if the current owners has to bear liability for effects they did not cause and which they could not reasonably have been expected to know about. Click to read the full document Contaminated Land: Pass the Parcel

Strict liability means that you as an individual will be held liable to the law even if you did not contribute to it.

The document further reports that originally an alternative package had been approved by Cabinet in 1999, which would have:

• Given the current owner the defence that if they had taken reasonable steps to check the property was not contaminated before it was purchased, they could not be held liable; and
• Allowed the original polluter to be billed for the cleanup even if they are not the current landowner