Finally, time called on ‘tragedy’
People have found it hard to understand exactly what tenure review is and why it has gone on so long. The simplest explanation for this confusion is that the intentions of the policy and the reality seemed so different.
On paper, it looked to be a neat and tidy solution to management of the South Island’s high country. But the same policy delivered what one academic critic described as a national tragedy.
Another way to describe tenure review is to call it mass privatisation in which Crown land went to private operators and foreign buyers, and the country ripped itself off.
The process started in the early 1990s, the heyday of privatisation, and came to affect 10 per cent of New Zealand land. The tenure review system broke up hundreds of Crownowned farms that had been leased to pastoral farmers for more than a century. Part of the land was sold to private owners and the rest went into the conservation estate.
The thinking was that farmers were the best stewards of the land, while the nation benefited from the expansion of the conservation estate. In fairness, tenure review added about 350,000ha to the conservation estate and improved access to the high country.
But the negative side-effects outweigh benefits. In 2017 academic Ann Brower, a long-time critic of tenure review, showed how it played out in the Mackenzie Basin. Brower explained that the Crown freeholded 65,000ha, for which run holders paid about $28 million, or $423 per hectare. This was the most productive land. Meanwhile, the Crown put 54,000ha into the conservation estate, for which run holders were paid $36m, or $656 per hectare.
It is plain from those sums that a few did incredibly well out of these deals and that was before the land was on-sold. Again, Brower showed that in the Mackenzie Basin six owners who paid the Crown $700,000 later realised $26m by on-selling the land.
No-one can blame them for taking advantage of such a system, even if the wider New Zealand public would be appalled that Crown land had been sold and then resold like this.
Brower reported that about 20 per cent of freehold land was resold. Land sold by the Crown for $62m was resold for more than $300m.
The deals regularly led to intensive farming and development in vulnerable areas, with impacts on the wider environment and water quality. Again, this was probably not intended when the scheme was devised.
The coalition Government has finally called time on this unpopular system and promises a plan that will focus on sustainable farming and the protection of those landscape values that remain in the high country.
While the axing of tenure review is a good move, it is legitimate to ask what took so long. Brower has been a critic of tenure review for about half of the 27 years it has been running, and media organisations, including Stuff, have regularly exposed its shortcomings. There has also been significant attention paid to exorbitant and controversial land sales in the South Island, often of properties that began as Crownowned pastoral leases.
As for the 30 leases in progress, the Government should look very seriously at whether these proceed.