Sage Eugenie: Land Transfer Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Land Transfer Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 15 March 2016. Volume:712;Page:9690. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. The Green Party is pleased to support the Land Transfer Bill to go to a select committee. It is quite a technical bill obviously so we will be very interested in submissions. The fact that the bill is the Government’s response to the Law Commission’s very comprehensive 2010 report A New Land Transfer Act and it closely resembles the commission’s draft land tenure bill is reassuring. When the commission did that report its recommendations were aimed at modifying simplifying and consolidating the land transfer legislation because—Chris Bishop: That’s right.EUGENIE SAGE: —as others have noted—thank you Mr Bishop—the Act was passed in 1952 and it has not been updated for nearly 60 years. It obviously has not kept pace with technology as the Act was based around a paper-based manual transfer system for land registration and now land registration is almost entirely electronic. Nor did we see back in the 1950s the same degree of sophistication around mortgagee and mortgage fraud that we are seeing today. So it consolidates existing legislation by repealing the Land Transfer Act 1952 the Land Transfer Amendment Act 1963 and the Land Transfer (Computer Registers and Electronic Lodgment) Amendment Act.This whole system of land registration that we have in New Zealand is the basis for secure title. It is the basis for people being confident when they buy and sell land because it ensures that there is a central public register that describes and records all of the material facts that relate to a particular property. It ensures that title is secure and that people do not have to go behind that title to search out relevant information in relation to that particular area of land. I have got only a very limited understanding of land law and I look forward to getting more understanding if I am on the select committee but the State through our land transfer system guarantees indefeasible title and that means that title cannot be annulled or made void and it protects any registered proprietor against the claims of someone who is claiming ownership of that. It also protects the owner—and it protects sellers too—against any encumbrances or estates or interests that do not appear on the title. So the register is intended to reflect as accurately as possible the true state of title to land so that people do not have to search elsewhere.The State supports the whole Torrens title system by guaranteeing the accuracy of the rights that are registered with the land transfer register. Anyone who is deprived of land or of an interest or estate in land because there has been a mistake in the way title is entered in the land transfer register is entitled to take legal proceedings against the Government to recover damages. So my understanding is that the bill has some new clauses around mortgage fraud and this concept of indefeasible title in order to clarify the powers that the registrar has to correct the register and around compensation if there has been a loss because of the way the land transfer system has operated. Those powers include giving the High Court the discretion to intervene in cases where there might be an obvious injustice and the discretion to correct and adjust the compensation in certain cases. The bill also requires mortgagees to know the identity of mortgagors as they have no entitlement in cases of identity fraud.My understanding too is that the Law Commission consulted quite widely in developing the draft bill that was tabled in Parliament—both publicly and with interested stakeholders. But there are still concerns that the Green Party has around the relationship between the Land Transfer Act and Te Ture Whenua Maori Act which my colleague Marama Davidson will talk about more because there is further work needed there and perhaps a major investigation.As other speakers have noted with the current collapse in dairy prices this bill which deals with changes to the way land transfers occur is going to have a major impact potentially if there is land sold because of the collapse in the dairy payout because of the milk lake that we have got in Europe the signs that the dairy industry changes may be structural rather than just cyclical and the major stress that a lot of farmers are under. Dairy New Zealand has predicted that 85 percent of dairy farmers are unlikely to make a profit this season a recent Federated Farmers poll showed that 11 percent of dairy farmers are now under pressure from their banks over their mortgages and farm consultant Peter Fraser has warned that around 25 percent are vulnerable. We have had the Reserve Bank predicting that up to 44 percent of dairy farm loans in this very heavily indebted industry—where debt totals around $38 billion—are going to be at risk of becoming non-performing.So if you have got that sort of crisis—if banks are putting pressure on farmers and farmers are being pushed to sell—then the likely buyers are obviously overseas owners and that is where there is a major gap in legislation because the Government is just saying that dairy farmers are expected to get through. It has done nothing substantial to tighten the legislation to protect productive New Zealand farmland from being sold and transferred to overseas owners. So we are facing the prospect of a double disaster if the dairying slump continues and flows through to the rest of the economy and if the Government’s very lax laws around overseas land sales mean that huge tracts of productive land are sold offshore.In China Switzerland Canada the USA Argentina Thailand Japan Ireland India and Korea there is much stronger legislation that bans the sale of farmland to non-country owners. If the Government tightened the laws on overseas ownership there would be likely to be a substantial increase in interest in leasing land. Although this bill in itself might seem non-controversial the fact that the Government has failed to prevent the sell-off of farmland to overseas interests and to adequately control that means that the land transfer process will occur more often and that is a major gap in the law that needs to be plugged.The Green Party is supporting this bill’s referral to a select committee but the bill does not address that major problem with overseas ownership of farmland. Thank you.