Mysteries of the NZ Gazette
The Gazette records all that is weird and wonderful about New Zealand central government. It also hides as much as it reveals. Will Harvie reports.
It’s about a page of formal legal prose and notably cryptic. A man named Rodney Nelson Jupp had applied for formal title to about 1.3 hectares of land in Taranaki.
He claimed 13 separate parcels of land, all of them identified by their legal description – ‘‘Lot 9 being Section 67 in the Township of Tikorangi’’, for example.
After that, the prose on Lot 9 veers off in an unexpected direction – ‘‘being all of the land granted to John Henry Armstrong . . . on 30 October 1868’’.
Really, 1868?
The other land titles claimed by Jupp were of similar vintage: 1871, 1899, 1903 and so forth.
Unless you are a land lawyer, the August 15, 2018 notice in The Gazette explains almost nothing.
It took some intensive internet searches and an interview with Jupp to sort out the Gazette notice.
He’s a long-time Tikorangi farmer. There was land beside his farm and he worked it.
He ‘‘always knew’’ it wasn’t his land but the last registered owners had probably been dead for more than 100 years.
He used section 19 of the Land Transfer Act to take ownership of the land, a legal concept known as ‘‘adverse possession’’.
In short, a person who can prove ‘‘a minimum of 12 years of uncontested continuous occupation’’ of land can take ownership at no cost, apart from substantial legal and admin fees, and a public notice in The Gazette.
Jupp said he might sell some of the land for lifestyle blocks.
This is perfectly legal and happens sporadically.
In July, Lindsay John Peters applied for adverse possession of 1.65 square metres of land in Kaipoi. Less than 2sqm.
But this isn’t a story about adverse possession.
It’s a story about The Gazette, the ‘‘longest-running publication in New Zealand’’, according to its website.
A first edition was published in 1841 in Auckland. It’s been published continually since. It used to come out on Thursdays but these days its website is updated pretty much daily.
It’s the document of record for central government. When legislation stipulates the public must be notified of some action by the Government – or citizens, or companies or credit unions – it gets published in The Gazette.
Sometimes these notices are also published in newspapers, typically on the classified advertising pages.
To read The Gazette is to wonder at the folly of man, the power of the state, the minutiae of legislation.
The Gazette is home to the weird and wonderful, wacky and woeful of New Zealand central Government.
Here is published the: Llamas and Alpacas Code of Welfare (‘‘applies to all persons responsible for South American camelids’’).
The annual levy paid by commercial blackcurrant growers (4 cents a kilo).
That the Registrar-General of Marriages approved the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster for the purpose of the Marriage Act 1955.
That the Governor-General had ‘‘dismissed’’ Meka Whaitiri as a minister and member of the executive council, but had ‘‘accepted the resignation’’ of Clare Curran and allowed her to use the title ‘‘The Honourable’’.
That the Crown held $10,117 of R B Bell’s money he apparently deposited with the FAI Metropolitan Life Assurance Company of NZ Ltd.
Actually, it’s worth plugging your name into the Gazette search function because the Crown is the final recipient of multimillions of dollars in cash, property, mortgages and so forth and efforts to find the owners are uneven at best.
Be advised that you may discover namesakes have been bankrupted, liquidated, removed from the register, prohibited from managing companies or otherwise fallen foul of New Zealand civil law.
Much of The Gazette is taken up with business and personal financial misfortune. Successful businesses happily making a bundle don’t appear here much.
That said, land makes up many chapters of The Gazette.
In January, for example, the Public Trust published a notice in The Gazette titled ‘‘Unclaimed Property’’.
The trust set out that a chap named John Duncan owned land in Bagdad Rd, Hamden, in North Otago, presumably meaning Baghdad Rd in Hampden.
In any event, the trust believed ‘‘after due enquiry that the owner is no longer resident in New Zealand and it is not known where the owner of the property is or whether or not the owner of the property is alive or dead’’.
The trust also judged that the land was worth less than $40,000 – a statutory level.
It also believed it was ‘‘in interests of another person’’ to effectively take control of the land for that other person – almost certainly family.
In the language of legislation, the Public Trust ‘‘elects to be manager of the property’’.
The Public Trust has been especially active in electing to manage land in Dunedin and Otago this year.
It elected to manage Lillie Mills’ land in Ardgowan Rd, North Otago, and Basil Walter Cotterill’s land in Blaikie Rd, Dunback, North Otago, both in February; John Logan’s land in Butts Rd, Dunedin, and Frederick Nimrod Wickens’ land in Fern Rd, Dunedin, both in March; and David Lees’ land in Enfield, North Otago, and Mary Jane Gray’s land at 290 Malvern St, Glenleith, Dunedin, both in August.
It’s notable that only one of these seven elections included a
street address. More often than not, land in The Gazette is described like this: ‘‘Lot 1 DP 52736 (Computer Freehold Register WN22C/585)’’.
As a method of informing the public about important decisions about land, it’s remarkably opaque.
There’s no free way to determine the address from the legal description.
In this case, it refers to 9462 square metres of land in Porirua.
It happens that the Department of Conservation had revoked the recreation reserve status of this land and specified that Porirua could sell it at current market value and spend the proceeds on other reserves.
Stuff asked Porirua City Council for the common street address of this land.
It declared the request was a matter for the Local Government Official Information Act and granted itself 20 business days to supply the address.
It seems reserve land is regularly reclassified for other purposes, including for sale to private buyers. An example comes from Pomare, Lower Hutt. A September notice in The
Gazette noted that 2691sqm of ‘‘local purpose community purposes reserve’’ land – ‘‘Lots 1 and 2 Deposited Plan P75169’’ – could be sold by Hutt City
Council without restriction.
This turns out to be 132A Molesworth St, a little-used reserve next to Pomare School.
A report found it had low significance as a reserve, poor visibility, drainage issues, little evidence of use and there were better reserves nearby. Flog it off then, possibly in favour of social or low-cost housing.
However The Gazette isn’t all bad news. In September a notice recorded that almost 600 hectares had been added to Fiordland National Park.