Changes are made to the notification provisions of the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA) introduced by the Resource Legislation Amendment Act 2017 (RLAA17) which come into effect on 18 October 2017.

The new notification decision process retains the current two stage process. Public notification is addressed first and limited notification is being then addressed if public notification is not required. The process is however fundamentally different — the consent authority must move through a sequential mandatory step-by-step process to make its notification decision. Sections 95A and 95B have been replaced with this step-by-step process: