ACT’s Bill of Rights plan hands courts the power to define property rights

The election line that isn’t just an election line

When property lawyer Joanna Pidgeon of Pidgeon Judd went on the Mike Hosking Breakfast on 24 August 2026 to unpack ACT’s ‘equal rights for all’ policy, she landed on the point most commentators skated past. ACT wants to add property rights to the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990, giving property the same protected status as freedom of expression and freedom from discrimination. Parliament has repeatedly declined to do this before, and the gaps it left have been filled by the courts. Do it now, and Pidgeon warned the change could trigger constant legal challenges.

That is the tension business owners should focus on. Property rights are being taken seriously for the first time in a generation, but the way you protect them determines whether you get legal certainty or a litigation machine.

Three tracks, not one policy

The Bill of Rights proposal is the visible tip of a much larger shift moving on three fronts at once.

The first is ACT’s Regulatory Standards Bill, the fourth attempt at such legislation since 2011. It requires agencies to disclose whether new laws comply with principles including that legislation should not take or impair property without justification or fair compensation. It is a disclosure regime, not a rights regime. As Dr Eddie Clark, senior lecturer in public law at Victoria University of Wellington, explained in 2025, the bill makes it ‘very clear that absolutely nothing in the act can found litigation by a private individual.’ His read on its purpose was sharper: the bill was ‘trying to… shift the Overton window on regulation.’ ACT leader David Seymour was blunter still, telling the NZ Herald in 2025 that it ‘does not give anybody any additional legal rights.’

The RMA overhaul is the real prize for business

The second track is the one that actually changes the cost of doing business. In 2025, Minister for RMA Reform Chris Bishop called the resource management overhaul the ‘single largest economic reform in a generation’, with an estimated 46 percent of resource consents set to become unnecessary and $13 billion in compliance savings over 30 years.

The philosophical pivot is explicit. A 2024 Cabinet paper noted the RMA had ‘increasingly treated land use as a privilege rather than a right,’ against a backdrop of roughly 40,000 resource consents issued annually and infrastructure consenting costing $1.3 billion a year. When RNZ examined the shift in 2024, it noted property rights enjoyment was already a premise of the current RMA, just not its guiding principle, hinting the practical change may be more incremental than the rhetoric suggests.

Where the litigation actually lives

The third track is where the caution belongs. The regulatory relief framework embedded in the new Planning and Natural Environment bills requires councils to consider compensating landowners – through rate reductions, extra development rights, land swaps or cash – where planning rules significantly affect their land.

That is precisely the mechanism that worries the experts. In August 2026, planning law commentator Dr Greg Severinsen warned the framework ‘risks creating the most bureaucratic, expensive and legally contested part of the new system,’ predicting ‘a wave of litigation unlike anything we’ve seen under the Resource Management Act.’ Consultant Martin Jenkins estimated councils could face costs between $7 million and $2 billion nationally. A range that wide is not a policy, it is an admission that nobody knows how the courts will read it, and ratepayers wear the difference.

The Bill of Rights version is the most durable and the least predictable

Adding property rights to the Bill of Rights Act would be the most legally significant of the three. The Act already forces courts to prefer any meaning of legislation consistent with protected rights. Extend that to property and every planning rule, zoning change and compulsory acquisition would have to be read through a property rights lens.

That is durable protection. It is also, as Pidgeon flagged, the point at which courts rather than Parliament start defining what ‘property rights’ actually means. That is exactly what happened after 1990, when case law gave the Bill of Rights teeth Parliament never explicitly legislated.

For business, the honest verdict is that the principle is sound and overdue, but the answer to ‘certainty or litigation’ depends entirely on which mechanism you are looking at. Disclosure rules are low-risk. Consent reduction is a concrete win. Regulatory relief is a live hazard. And a Bill of Rights amendment hands the final call to judges, which is either the strongest safeguard on offer or the biggest wildcard, depending on how the courts run with it.

Sources

• Joanna Pidgeon: Pidgeon Judd Property Lawyer discusses ACT’s ‘equal rights for all’ policy (2026-08-24)
• Regulatory relief will turn planning into a bureaucratic and litigious nightmare (2026-08-04)
• Major planning overhaul puts private property rights first (2025-12-09)
• Regulatory Standards Bill: Does David Seymour’s bill allow companies to sue for compensation? (2025-06-24)
• Criticism overstates Regulatory Standards Bill’s effects – public law expert (2025-06-19)
• Replacing the Resource Management Act 1991 – Cabinet paper (2024-10-22)
• The big change to the Resource Management Act very little is known about (2024-10-21)