Sage EugenieEUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Thank you. Well it is a very long time since I did land law at university and it was quite an interesting exercise being part of the Government Administration Committee and taking another look at those fundamental principles of our land registration system. I do congratulate Hon Ruth Dyson who is chair of that committee on the very collegial way in which it was chaired and I think that is why we are seeing a fair degree of unanimity on the bill though New Zealand First may differ.I think the bill as others have said is a modernisation a simplification and a bringing of the paper-based registration system into the digital age in recognition that our land transfer system our registration system is now done electronically unlike places like Australia where I understand there is still a fair degree of paper-based transfers. It is a big bill it is a substantial bill but those principles of the Torrens system stay intact. They are that the register of lands that describes and records the ownership of estates and interests in lands is found in the one place; is accurate so that people do not have to go elsewhere to find out the key facts relating to title; and provides security of ownership. That indefeasibility is a fundamental part of that so once a transaction has been registered it cannot be set aside except in the case of fraud. Of course it is this certainty that allows people to have transactions involving land with the degree of certainty as to what they are doing—they are buying land that they understand they can buy; those transactions are properly registered; the State guarantees the accuracy of those transfers of those rights; and there will be compensation if there has been an error in the way that the system operates.As others have said there were quite substantial submissions from bankers on clause 54 I think it was pointing out that those changes in relation to mortgage fraud where someone was pretending to be the mortgagor or to have the authority of the mortgagor and the requirements around verification of identity were going to create major compliance costs for the bank and that the changes were in fact going further than the identity verification rules in other legislation. Bankers said that in the system of e-dealings there are already quite robust identity standards on conveyancers that currently banks rely on solicitors and rely on the conveyancers and that these new requirements which were originally proposed would have significant compliance costs because the banks would be needing to double-check what the conveyancers had done. Those submissions were quite convincing. I would like to acknowledge the Minister here who actually let the select committee get on with its work consider the submissions and make a decision here rather than taking that authority as we see with a number of other bills which are being done by a Minister rather than allowing a select committee to make a choice.One of the other areas where there were a lot of submissions was around the issue of legal executives and the New Zealand Institute of Legal Executives calling for fellows of the institute to be allowed the authority to certify instruments for registration where they were undertaking that work under the supervision of a lawyer. I think there will be a number of disappointed legal executives because it was the committee's decision even though there were a lot of submissions supporting the legal executives from a number of law firms that what was required here was actually a change to the legislation around lawyers and conveyancers—employment legislation or professional legislation—rather than to this bill. So it was seen as an issue that was outside the scope of the bill and that the lawyers and conveyancers legislation should be amended instead.One of the other issues was around manifest injustice and the concerns of the Law Society and others was that while recognising the importance of providing compensation where there had been an error in the operation of the registration system we must ensure that this was very clearly defined so that you did not get an undermining of indefeasibility by giving the court a wide power to undo registered ownership. Here the advice of officials was that the case law showed that there was a very high threshold to allowing situations of manifest injustice and allowing compensation and that the select committee actually tighten the provisions here. It does have a very high threshold so that concept of indefeasibility is protected.So it has been a very technical bill and like others I would also like to encourage the Government to deal with the major issue in this area of land transfer which is the sale of land to overseas investors. The Government has really been sitting on its hands here. It has been pretending that business as usual is continuing when that is not the case. We have had the major collapse in dairy payouts and the effects of this on a debt-ridden industry. With the high level of debt in the dairy sector with dairy pay-outs going so low with the Reserve Bank predicting that in an industry that has a debt liability of around $48 billion 44 percent of those loans being non-performing what will happen? People will want to quit their properties. So New Zealand is facing the prospect of a double disaster—not only the dairying slump flowing through to the rest of the economy but also the Government's very lax rules on the sale of land to overseas interests meaning that we are at risk of large tracts of very productive land being sold off overseas. National's dairy strategy has not only been a personal disaster for a lot of families as well as for the environment and is not only putting families at breaking point but is going to be a long-term disaster for our country if we lose a lot of land to overseas interest. The Government has got to take responsibility for this because although Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) leads in terms of our land transfer system—the registration system Landonline; and the electronic transfers—here the other part of LINZ the Overseas Investment Office is totally hopeless. We need a major law change to rule out the sale of productive land overseas. They have done that in China in Switzerland in Canada in Argentina in Thailand in Japan in Ireland and in India but we do not do it in New Zealand. The Government needs to change the law so that we can get overseas investment through long-term leases rather than the sale of productive land. That is the major change to our land transfer system that we need to have following on the heels of this one but under this Government we are not going to get that.