Wood MichaelMICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): I am very pleased also to rise to speak in favour of this third reading of the Land Transfer Bill. It is a bill that modernises what is a very significant piece of legislation. Reading through the notes we know that the piece of legislation that is immediately being superseded is the Land Transfer Act 1952 but its predecessor legislation was set up in 1885. So we have considerable periods of time—about 60 or 70 years it would seem—between revisions of this piece of legislation.Brett Hudson: About when Winston entered Parliament.MICHAEL WOOD: I will not comment on whether certain members of this House may or may not have been present at the time of those various pieces of legislation. I do have to comment that I was somewhat amused when Mr Doocey reflected on the Government's relentless modernising drive in respect of this bill but of course the Hon Ruth Dyson did note in her previous comments that it has taken the Government 7 years from the beginning of this piece of legislation—from the initial report that we received from the Law Commission—to actually progress the legislation through the House. So if that is a relentless modernising drive I would hate to see what slow and steady progress is.It is a bill that the Labour Party supports and it is a bill that is important really to our whole economic system and to our whole society because it underpins the way in which—as the title rather suggests—we transfer land and understand the transfer of land to operate. There are a number of principles that underpin that which are modernised and updated within this bill. The fundamental principle which the bill affirms—and this is in the very purpose of the bill and is reflected particularly through the first two parts of the bill—is the Torrens system. The Torrens system—as we discussed at great length in the Committee stage actually in what was a very good interchange between members of the Committee and Mr Finlayson in the chair—is a system that evolved in South Australia in the 19th century and has spread around a number of Commonwealth jurisdictions in which we have absolute confidence in a public central register of landholdings. That is incredibly important because in our system you want to know that if you own a bit of land it is understood that you own it. You want to know that if you are buying or selling a piece of land you know whom you are buying it from or selling it to. Those things are utterly crucial to the operation of our economy and society. So we affirm that within this piece of legislation but we update important aspects of it.I was thinking in preparing for my comments tonight about the fact that only 10 or 15 years ago in a job I had that interacted significantly with the financial sector we still did a lot of our communication through faxes. We still faxed a lot of information. In fact in many respects it was the main way that we communicated across our organisation. But of course that has been largely outmoded now. It was still a paper-based system. That was not all that long ago and what we know is that across most of the areas of our economic life now what we actually rely upon is electronic communication. So one of the key things that the Land Transfer Bill does is just recognise that—recognise the reality of the way in which we conduct these kinds of transactions. One of the useful things that the Land Transfer Bill does in respect of this is it not just brings us up to date with where we are at now in 2017 but actually we build into this bill—in the latter part—some capacity through the use of regulation for the bill to be adapted to forms of communication that may evolve in the years to come.Quite appropriately what we have also done in the legislation—and I approve of this wearing my Regulations Review Committee hat. As I have said there is a 5-year check-in on that so in 5 years we come back and if via regulation we have determined that alternative methods of electronic communication are appropriate in respect of land transfer then let us actually either build that into the Act or have a fundamental look at it. Let us not just leave it hanging out there in regulation land. Let us actually make sure that the Act stays live and stays up to date as best we can.One of the really important areas that we cover in this piece of legislation is the area of indefeasibility. That of course is incredibly important. That underpins the Torrens system. It says that if something is here in our land transfer system that is it. You can take it to the bank; there is no backing down from that. One little area we have looked at in the Land Transfer Bill which was bit of a tricky area to work through at the Committee stage and also at the Government Administration Committee was the question of manifest injustice. What actually happens in situations where something arises and we can see that through possibly the pernicious actions of one party something has made its way into the land transfer system that might be manifestly unjust. Someone may have been dishonest or there may have been some kind of error in the system and so we have a record in the land transfer system where under the principles of the Torrens system and the indefeasibility we would otherwise say: Well we just accept that. That is the way it is. You cannot change it." What we have actually built into the Land Transfer Act is this concept of manifest injustice and it is about recognising that the courts have some capacity—through the High Court only—to recognise the manifest injustice where that might occur and to do something to put that to rights.Mr O'Rourke in his comments spoke about the debate that we had about this at both the second reading and the Committee stage. The Labour Party did support the Supplementary Order Paper Mr O'Rourke put forward in this area which did not make its way through into this bar 3 version of the bill. I do just want to comment on that briefly and affirm that the Labour Party did think that was a little bit unfortunate because in this area of manifest injustice we set a very very high threshold—an extremely high threshold—and the things that need to be met are listed in the Act and left to the discretion of the High Court. The point that Mr O'Rourke made which the Labour Party agrees with is that if you have met that threshold—if there is a manifest injustice and something is incorrectly entered into the land transfer system—then why would the remedy simply not be to put that right? Instead what we have built into this Act is a system whereby compensation is considered first. We in the Labour Party just did not think that was quite the right approach. We would have preferred the system put forward in Mr O'Rourke's Supplementary Order Paper where we say we would simply put it right. We remedy what went wrong—we remedy the original manifest injustice.What I would say around the question of manifest injustice also is that in the consideration of this bill there were submissions and there was discussion about whether a definition of that should be entered into the Act or whether we should leave that for the court to determine through its processes—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.MICHAEL WOOD: This is a bill that deserves the full attention and time of the House I feel. In coming back to the Land Transfer Bill I will just recap on a few of the key points I touched on prior to the break. These are really addressing the core principles of the bill which the Labour Party and I think the whole House supports. These are the things that underpin our incredibly important land transfer system: the Torrens title system which means that we have an indisputable way of recording landownership in our country and the principle of indefeasibility which means that when we say something is in the land transfer system we say something is transferred we jolly well know that it is. There is not any dispute about it. We do not have to argue over titles—if it is in the register then that is it. Also there is the new principle that has been introduced through this bill which is that of manifest injustice—the fact that if something really does go wrong in the process of land transfer there is a limited capacity through the High Court to address manifest injustice through a system of compensation or if necessary to make corrections in the register.I do just want to reflect briefly on one of the comments made by my colleague Hon Ruth Dyson who of course chairs the Government Administration Committee which oversaw this piece of legislation. It is around the area of mortgage fraud and the fact that through the submissions process there was a very considered and collegial process that looked at this area. It had originally been put up I think in the Law Commission report that we needed to look very carefully at this area but as a result of the weight of submissions particularly from the very good and public-spirited people at the Bankers' Association we were able to actually look at the regulatory balance that had been proposed in the first stage of the bill and actually say well what is the serious risk of mortgage fraud in our jurisdiction? What is the history of it? And what is the regulatory burden that would be placed on banks and potentially passed on to consumers if we did proceed with the original provisions of the bill?I think the select committee worked through that process really well and came to a sensible outcome. We are a party that does believe in public-good regulation. Not all regulations are bad. We have them there to protect people. But we carefully weigh up what is the benefit and what is the cost. In this case we largely agreed with the submissions which said that actually given the very small risk of mortgage fraud in this country which has been measured as being less than in other similar jurisdictions that was not a track we wanted to go down.In concluding this is a sound important background piece of legislation. It will not have people jumping on the sofas tonight but it is really integral to the way that our economy and our society operates and I have no hesitation in commending it to the House this evening."