Parker David: Land Transfer Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeParker David: Land Transfer Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 15 March 2016. Volume:712;Page:9695. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I rise with some pleasure to support this bill. I think our Land Transfer Act is one of the most important pieces of legislation on our books. It ensures that people who buy a bit of land or take a mortgage over it can effectively get an indefeasible title without going back and looking at transactions that may go back over the prior hundred years. And if once they get a transfer in their name they have done what is called a guaranteed search prior to the date of their purchase even if the person they have purchased from had obtained their interest by fraud so long as the purchaser had no knowledge of that earlier fraud the purchaser gets clean title and the person who may have been defrauded out of their earlier interest in land actually has only a right of compensation rather than being able to knock over the title of the person who purchased it—that is assuming that the purchaser was without knowledge of that fraud. I mean that is long established. I think the leading case is Frazer v Walker which goes back to the 1960s Privy Council case that involved the venerable Justice Denning.In any event this is really housekeeping legislation. It should not be changing the law in any fundamental way. It may I understand from the description of the bill be changing some of the compensation provisions where the person who is seeking compensation may have an unmeritorious claim because they had some part in wrongdoing but other than that my understanding is that it just carries forward the existing law. It does not introduce electronic transactions—that has already been done—it just incorporates the amendment Act that currently allows computer registration and electronic lodgment into the body of this rewritten Act.I want to deal with a couple of issues that were raised by others in terms of the impending sort of calamity that we have in the dairy sector. Some of those people sadly are going to eventually be selling up at a mortgagee sale.Those rights are exercised under mortgages under the Property Law Act but the registration of those instruments is under the Land Transfer Act and I think it is proper to record two things. Firstly there is the current Government’s misallocation of capital which is protecting the dairy sector from the true cost of what it does including the cost of increasing emissions—not baseline emissions but increasing emissions—and preventing dairy farmers from facing a cost for their water and it is also giving them a tax advantage for certain asset classes where they can make speculative gains with no tax consequences. Those things together with the Government talking up the prospects of dairy and subsidising irrigation schemes all increased the price of property and encouraged the boom which has now turned into a bust. This Government just like Muldoon in prior years has caused massive misallocation of capital with billions of dollars of additional debt in this sector and the Government is partly responsible for that outcome.What will the response be now? Well the response will be to try to keep up land prices by enabling some of the sales by those farmers in distress to be made to overseas buyers. The Government says: “Oh well when Labour was in Government it sold vast tracts of land.” Actually the major transaction that those members referred to was the purchase by Graeme Hart of the Carter Holt Harvey farms and the onsale on that day to another overseas shareholder—so it went from a United States shareholder to Graeme Hart and then to a United States shareholder on the same day.In any event Labour changed its position. I was the Minister for Land Information in respect of that transaction but I was also one of those who was supportive of us changing our position because I became concerned that in this globalised world there are some assets that ought not be traded at an international market price; they ought to be traded at a New Zealand market price. There is something special about land. Land should be priced according to the ability of New Zealanders to buy land not some rich “1 percenter” from overseas who can pay more for either a house or a farm in New Zealand than a New Zealand purchaser can afford to pay.That is essentially the underlying reason why Labour has changed its position and said we should ban the sale of farms to overseas buyers. Buying our land is a privilege that should be reserved for New Zealanders not offered to overseas people.This is a good piece of legislation. There are some really important details to check through. I think the select committee should take as much time as it needs to deal with any controversies that come up through the submission process and I look forward to its report back to the House.