The Fast-track Approvals Act supplies the clearest examples. Panels have now approved Mercury's Mahinerangi wind expansion and advanced Lodestone's Haldon solar farm, applying the Act's test of whether adverse effects are out of proportion to a project's regional and national benefits.

That is a more directed question than the one courts used to ask under the old RMA framework. It still involves judgement, but it gives panels a clear instruction to weigh adverse effects against regional and national benefits, with the purpose of the Act given the greatest weight.

Measuring effects

That approach produced approval in both cases, but not because the effects were slight. At Haldon, the Lodestone panel accepted the effects package could not be shown to achieve no net loss for the most sensitive values, including the critically endangered outwash gravel ecosystem.

At Mahinerangi, the panel accepted the project only after late agreement with Ōtākou Rūnaka, changes to conditions and the removal of turbines from the Thomas Block and adjoining QEII covenant area.

The Pūkaki decision was made under the same Act, but pushes the argument further, into territory the fast-track regime did not create but has now been asked to referee. The panel found New Zealand has no purpose-built mechanism for deciding when a strategic hydro reserve should be preserved rather than drawn down, just an "uncoordinated combination" of RMA regional plans and Electricity Act triggers that nobody designed as a system.

Faced with that gap, the panel had to decide for itself how much weight Transpower, Meridian, the Electricity Authority and central government each carried on a question none of them owns outright. It also had to accept serious infrastructure risk around Genesis' Tekapo B power station, including a worst-case estimate it did not treat as determinative, before approving Meridian's temporary access to deeper Pūkaki storage.

Climate law

The Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Bill takes the same underlying question and answers it in the opposite direction.

Rather than leaving climate-harm liability to be worked out case by case through the courts, the Government wants it kept inside the statutory climate framework set by Parliament and the executive. Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith calls that a "whole-of-economy" approach, as against what he casts as an ad-hoc judicial one.

The bill's timing, arriving before Smith v Fonterra reaches a substantive hearing, makes the intent explicit: certain kinds of environmental liability should not be decided by judges at all.

The Conservation Amendment Bill complicates any tidy version of this story. There, the Government retreated from expanding its own discretion over conservation land disposal after 75,000 submissions and sustained public pressure. That shows this week's pattern is not simply one of accumulating executive power by default. Public process still matters.

But the unresolved fight has shifted to clause 6, and to whether economic use and development should sit inside the Conservation Act's purpose. That is the same argument again: who decides what trade-offs are acceptable, and how much protection should be locked into law before ministers, panels, companies or courts begin weighing the benefits.

This story is republished from Energy and Environment as part of a copy sharing arrangement.