Although about a fifth of the South Island high country is owned by Government and leased out to runholders, this is changing. Since 1992 the Government has allowed the privatisation of leasehold land. Called “tenure review” it involves an unusual deal and the government loses. The runholders because of their input into the farm claim the improvements belong to them. They end up getting part of the farm for a song. No I am wrong – they sometimes make money on the deal by a strange mechanism. And then they flip it on, making millions in the process. The less valuable land is kept for conservation. There is something strange about the land valuation process.
So why on earth does the public purse lose? To retire the pastoral rights, the Crown paid runholders $36 million (or $656/hectare). That is ridiculous. It is all explained by Dr Brower in April 2107 here and the Environment Court at that stage made a case for stopping freeholding of land in the McKenzie Basin.
The picture above from Stuff shows this week’s protest by Greenpeace about a farm near Twizel where the farmer wants to run 15,000 cows. Many local farmers and even Fonterra joined Greenpeace in opposing this dairy conversion.
All the figures and stories are given in her post and she ends by saying “The best, easiest, and cheapest thing New Zealand could do for the land and water of the South Island is to stop high country tenure review. Better late than never.”
As Charlie Mitchell from Stuff points out, the best land stays in pastoral use and the deal is skewed towards the wrong side. “You might assume that ownership rights to valuable land would be worth more than occupation rights to less valuable land. But the Crown believes the opposite, so it has purposely lost money through these deals.”
More recently we saw the headline “Flipped. From zero to $17.5 million.” This involved a lakeside property on Lake Hawea. Previously under tenure review the farmer had been paid $2.2 million by the crown and had paid nothing in return. Then he onsold it for $17.5million. Flipped from zero to $17.5 million by Charlie Mitchell. An earlier article is one on McKenzie country
Of course after privatisation the owner can subdivide so by April 2017 what used to be about 120 leaseholds is nearly 4000 parcels of freehold land.
The Minister of Lands Hon Eugenie Sage has her work cut out to change this situation.