Ana Coculescu
Ana helps private and government clients align environmental and business needs, so what they build lasts. In practice, that means Ana advises on environmental and resource management law across a project's life cycle: from the early planning stages through to RMA consenting and compliance.
Ana has worked on commercial and residential developments as well as on infrastructure projects (energy, transport, waste) over the past 20 years across Australia and New Zealand. She has held roles in private practice, NGOs and government bodies, before being called to the Bar in March 2026.
In addition to resource management, Ana's practice covers other aspects of environmental law: the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme, biodiversity conservation, compulsory acquisition of land, contaminated land management, hazardous substances, local government, the Official Information Act, and waste management.
Ana is also active in the ESG space, especially the governance aspect of environmental regulation which includes both obtaining approvals and, importantly, ensuring compliance with them.
Brave new world: C&E options under new RMA
The RMA replacements, currently known as the Planning Bill and the Environment Protection Bill, look set to uncover a brave new world for planning and environmental compliance and enforcement.
One where, for more (or most?) activities, there is no gatekeeper, so compliance and enforcement become the main tools ensuring the integrity of the planning and environmental regimes.
As an early checkpoint disappears for activities no longer requiring consent, this takes away the regulators’ ability to refuse or impose additional conditions on what is proposed. Another consequence, if the system works as intended, is that proponents would not have to advise consent authorities of their plans, resulting in an information gap around the activities undertaken.
How will you run this system?
The statutory framework for compliance and enforcement will be the same across New Zealand. It will allow some discretion for regulators to make choices around elements of the process.
New Zealand is not the first jurisdiction to move in this direction, as others have also sought to streamline consenting and can provide lived examples of what worked and what didn’t in their systems.
This presentation aims to outline options for compliance and enforcement systems from other jurisdictions that, similarly to NZ, have aimed to limit consenting.
I will discuss:
compliance and enforcement examples from two Australian states, Queensland (which has a code compliance regime, allowing development to go through without regulatory oversight when projects start) and New South Wales (which has a strong record of environmental prosecutions) – including differences between those regimes and NZ; and
the relationship between the regulator and participants - the elements required under administrative law (such as independence, transparency, natural justice) and how Queensland and NSW have put these in practice.