O'Rourke DenisDENIS O'ROURKE (NZ First): New Zealand First is very happy to vote in favour of this bill which has been the product of long years of work by the Law Commission and others. As I did in the first reading I want to especially acknowledge the late George Tanner QC and the late Warren Moyes of the Office of the Registrar-General of Land who were the specific people who really put the heavy work into producing this piece of legislation. Although it is a Government bill it is actually a bill that any Government of any flavour would be passing in New Zealand because it does mean a huge step up in quality for land registration in New Zealand. It modernises the whole system and makes electronic transactions very easy to achieve.It is overall a very good piece of legislation but it might have been better. It might have been better in a couple of ways that I want to mention. The first one relates to the question of what should a register of land record apart just from who is on the register? How far should it go? I do not think that this bill actually goes quite far enough. The opportunity has been lost to add valuable information that could have been included in this legislation.I refer to in particular the need for a register of foreign land ownership. That would have been very easy to incorporate into this bill and the opportunity has not been taken to do so. If you look at why that is important just look at what has been in the news recently with the announcement that Mount White Station in Canterbury is up for sale. It is not just an important and large piece of Canterbury's pastoral land but also an iconic sheep station that has been important not just as a sheep station but for tourism as well. People should really be able to find out whether that sort of land is being sold overseas. We will not know whether it is sold overseas or not but we do know that it has been advertised overseas and that that is quite likely.More and more properties are clearly going to overseas ownership. It is important that New Zealanders should be able to discover that without difficulty. They should be able to find out how much land is in overseas ownership what land is in overseas ownership and who owns that land. It is not very difficult information to put on a register. It is quite easy to do and quite inexpensive. The point is that there is currently no easy or accurate way to measure the amount of land held under the control of foreign nationals. Unlike other jurisdictions there is no official database of foreign ownership in this country and that is very sad and it is sad that this particular piece of legislation does not cover it. So in answer to my question of what should a register record it does need to record those details of the nationality of the buyer where the land is how much land there is and so on. It is sad that that is not being done because although foreign ownership is apparently—according to most commentators—somewhere between 1 percent and 3 percent that is growing and if it grows very much more the issues relating to that are going to be greater and greater.Some will say that the Overseas Investment Office collects data and you can get it from there. But actually you cannot because it does not collect the data properly or accurately and it is no good going to it. So that does not capture the information that we think should be there whereas this legislation could easily have done so. It could have provided a valuable resource for policy makers—for the Government itself—as well as the general public. People would then be able to accurately assess foreign landholdings not just across New Zealand but also within their own regions and communities. The register would provide transparency for all concerned New Zealanders. There are plenty of people in New Zealand concerned about this issue and they are not getting the information that they should be able to have. It is a very severe defect in this bill that that register has not been provided for when the opportunity was there to do so. It would not have been difficult and it would not have been complex and it would not have been expensive. So I regret that and New Zealand First regrets that.Moving on to another issue which relates to clause 57(3) I am going to repeat what I have said in previous stages of this bill that that is a problematic clause of the bill. If you look at clause 57(1) you will see that it provides for cancellation of a registration where it would be manifestly unjust" to maintain it. That is a very high bar to prove something to be manifestly unjust so you would have to have very good evidence and very persuasive evidence and that clause along with clause 57(2) are good provisions with an appropriately high standard to be reached. But then you get clause 57(3) and I think that it is very wrong and should not be there at all because what that does is it prevents cancellation unless the court finds in the negative that compensation could not properly address the injustice. Well what on earth has that really got to do with somebody who is applying who has a right to obtain title—what has that got to do with it? It really is not adequate or fair or just.If you consider that the high standard of the term "manifestly unjust" in clause 57(1) is met then there is no reason why the applicant should not be entitled to cancellation unless the court finds that for some very good reason justice should not be done. So what has happened is that the burden of proof is the wrong way round because clause 57(3) requires the applicant to prove the justice of it and it should be for the defendant as is normally the case to prove that it would be unjust for cancellation to be given instead of just compensation and after all clause 59 already exists to provide for compensation where that is applied for.What you would expect the person to do is to apply in the alternative for cancellation if that is the just and proper thing to happen—if the person can meet that high bar that I spoke of. But if that fails then compensation is normally what you would do. So why on earth is clause 57(3) there at all? What is it intended to achieve except to make the standard of proof so high for an applicant that it will be virtually impossible for such a person to get cancellation where that is justifiable? That clause should not be there. It achieves nothing but to make the standard not just very high but virtually impossible. That is not just. That is not proper. If a person is entitled to obtain title and to have the current registered proprietor cancelled then all they should have to do is to comply with clause 57(1) and (2) and let the defendant show that it would be unjust to do otherwise.That is the attitude that New Zealand First takes. I think most jurists would take the same attitude. I cannot for the life of me understand why that clause is there. I do not think it was in any previous legislation. So this is new but it is wrong. It will cause injustice and it should not be there.That is the other reason why I think that this bill represents some lost opportunities. The first reason was the lack of a foreign ownership register of land and this one is just a defect in the bill that was brought up during the previous stages and ignored by the Government members who apparently did not understand it. I listened to the speeches and I did not hear anyone give an argument about this. I think the Government Administration Committee got it wrong as well.I regret very much that that clause is there and I think in due course that clause will have to be repealed. It is a shame that the court will be hamstrung by clause 57(3) in the future in the way that that clause is written so that it will not be able to do justice in a particular case. But with those severe reservations New Zealand First will vote for the bill which overall is a very good piece of legislation."