7. Shut the gate:

rate of $541 per hectare while the Crown paid $81.

What is clear is there is no consistency in how payments are calculated, other than in one key way; farmers get a discount, while the taxpayer pays a premium.

With money and land lost, is New Zealand giving up something greater?

There have been many ripples caused by tenure review, which threatens profound change for the high country.

Earlier this year, an Environment Court judge made an unusually frank assessment in a judgment about a council rule change in the Mackenzie district – he said there should be a moratorium on the area’s tenure reviews, due to the continuing loss of rare ecosystems to development enabled by privatisation.

Partly in response to that, LINZ is reviewing its processes in the Mackenzie Basin, Sheppard says.

While tenure review has seen an unprecedented expansion of the conservation estate, opening up large areas for public access, it is not a process that gets enthusiastic support from recreation groups, which struggle with the implications of the wave of privatisation.

‘‘Tenure review needs to be fixed,’’ says Jan Finlayson, vicepresident of the Federated Mountain Clubs.

‘‘We have these backcountry places whose administration is so vital to everything downstream. It’s highly unusual that this land is administered by the Ministry of Land, with productivity in mind.’’

Newly privatised land will often have easements in place, but they can be unpleasant and variable.

When Stuff visited a station near Cromwell, a farmer blocked access to the large conservation area behind the farm. Many easements are closed during lambing season, or can be shut off at the farmer’s behest, effectively shutting out the public’s only access to public land.

Others are simply impractical – steep, long, or unformed, sometimes through dense bush or over rivers.

The problems with tenure review are deeper than access and the money being lost, Finlayson says – it’s about what, and whom, New Zealand’s wild and rugged places are for.

‘‘We need good, hard, deep consideration of how we’re going to manage these lands in the future,’’ she says.

‘‘We’ve tended to look for solutions very superficially – I think we need to go far deeper and accept that Government has a role in helping to determine what takes place on the land, so that people can farm according to their environmental profile and still make a living. It seems to me that is entirely possible.’’

With new restrictions on overseas buyers purchasing farmland, the cumulative impact of tenure review may start to soften.

Right now, large farms such as Lake McKay Station near Wanaka – one of the first properties to go through tenure review, and now worth upwards of $20m with the option to subdivide – are on the market, but may struggle to sell.

Whatever the case, capital gains will continue to accrue on the land that has already been privatised. Many of the increasingly popular vineyards in the Kawarau Gorge, for example, owe their existence to tenure review, as does the booming viticulture industry in Cromwell, which largely exists on what used to be Bendigo Station, known primarily as the home of Shrek the sheep.

The subdivisions appearing on luxury real estate websites – Queensberry Hills, Hillend Estates, Bendigo Hills or Wentworth Estates, to name a few – began as Crown land, sold off cheaply and developed for large capital gain, which in cumulation has cost the country both money and land.

Then there are the deals that are seemingly inexplicable. Mataura Valley Station, which the taxpayer paid $710,000 to privatise, was sold a year later for $9 million; similarly, the taxpayer paid $1.3 million to privatise Bendrose Station, also sold soon afterwards for $9 million. In both cases, the farmer made astronomical, untaxed profit at the expense of the taxpayer.

With nearly half a million hectares of once-Crown land now in private ownership, it may be more than money that has been lost.

‘‘Nobody’s going to care what money changed hands in 100 years time,’’ says Jan Finlayson.

‘‘We will care about the outcome of the land, though – what condition it’s in, does the public have ownership, does it have sovereignty there. That’s what we’ll care about, not the amount of money that changes hands.’’