Crown 'loses out' in money, value

The Crown is losing out as a property holder in the review of tenure in the South Island high country, an academic says.

Ann Brower, a lecturer in public policy at Lincoln University, says: "The Crown's position of neutrality leads it to give away valuable property rights and pay constituents to take it."

She said a year's study of the land-tenure review showed the myth of apolitical administration left the Crown effectively giving away freehold title to the high country.

"The Crown is disposing of valuable assets but failing to capture their value," Brower said. "Further, the Crown is actually losing money on the deal."

The Crown was taking a neutral stance in the face of powerful special interests motivated to diversify land use to purposes such as venison farming, viticulture and lifestyle blocks.

Land Information New Zealand, which is administering the tenure review, could not be neutral and represent the state's vested interest, and the Crown "and ultimately the New Zealand people" were losing out.

At June 2005, 30 pastoral leases had been reviewed under the Crown Pastoral Land Act 1998 (CPLA) and another 34 had been through an administrative process before 1998.

Brower said the numbers of tenure review were strongly biased in favour of farmers, with them receiving more than half of the land as freehold, "fee simple" private property and receiving millions of dollars in "equalisation payments".

Of the 64 properties reviewed since 1992 and completed, 229,652ha had been converted to freehold and 165,446ha had been restored to full Crown ownership.

The high-country runholders had also received a net $15.5 million: lease holders had paid $10.8 million to the Crown, but had been paid $26.28 million by the Crown.

Brower said this was surprising because the leaseholders were gaining a lot of property rights with their freehold titles. She noted that 62 per cent of the former leasehold land had gone to freehold and 38 per cent had been shifted to Department of Conservation management.

For more than 100 years, farmers have been able to pay low rentals to use Crown land in the South Island high country for grazing, with restrictions against use of the land for other purposes such as tourist resorts, subdivision or forestry.

The act - the result of six years of negotiation with farmers - allowed high-country pastoral leaseholders to freehold their commercial land by transferring areas with high conservation, or Maori or historic values to the Crown.

Lessees negotiate with the Government the right to freehold part of their pastoral lease in return for surrendering land of conservation value.

DoC has always said its plan is to retain up to one million hectares of the 2.4 million ha of the Crown pastoral estate and, in recent years, has promoted an overall plan for a network of 22 alpine parks.

The voluntary reviews began in 1999 under the Shipley Administration, when runholders were given the opportunity to freehold their pastoral leases under the CPLA.

Some scientists - such as biologist David Norton, of Canterbury University's forestry school - have described the process as "too narrow" to produce a durable solution.

And Kevin O'Connor - the former professor of range management at Lincoln University - has previously advised that the parties involved in the tenure review process would be better to declare it a stalemate and start a different game, engaging district councils in planning of land use.

Environmental lobbyist Forest and Bird has said some high country farmers have made windfall gains at the public's expense by freeholding leases valued as grazing land, and then selling it as lifestyle blocks near Lake Wanaka and around Queenstown and Twizel.

The Government is looking at changing the terms of high-country leases for land which has not gone through tenure review to lift rents to market levels.

Brower said uncertainty over the relationship between exclusive occupation rights held by lessees and the non-pastoral use rights held by the Crown should be addressed by the courts, not by Government contractors or officials.

- NZPA