Look on page 7; there is an article on the demise of the high country tenure review system

Back in the day, the idea of tenure review seemed a good one.

The Crown would pay out its high country pastoral lease owners for some land, which would be retired and incorporated into conservation parks and reserves.

At the same time, public access could be improved, and the leaseholders would pay to freehold parts of their runs. Everybody would gain.

Tenure review would be voluntary and negotiated between the leaseholders and the Crown.

What happened, however, in the words of researcher Ann Brower, a senior lecturer at the University of Canterbury, and author of Who Owns the High Country? was a rort.

Who Owns the High Country? was a startling exposé of bureaucracy gone wrong. This controversial story tells how large areas of the high country in the South Island were sold off to run holders for knock-down prices, in a process that was hidden from public view.

Brower exposed this quiet scandal. She discovered that the Crown had been paying the runholders of South Island high-country stations to freehold parts of their pastoral lease farms, subsequently leaving them to subdivide their newly-owned land for massive profits.

Land that has gone into private ownership in these deals has included significant parts of the shorelines of Lakes Tekapo, Wānaka, Hāwea and Wakatipu, as well as some of the finest vineyard country in Central Otago.

The book explains how and why this process was allowed to go unchecked and documents the rise and fall of farmer domination of high-country land reform. It is an important book and a must-read for anyone who cares about the high country of the South Island. Unfortunately, after checking, I see it is out of print.

I did some Googling and came up with these statistics. Between 1991 and 2018, the Crown freeholded about 440,000 hectares from more than 100 stations.

The leaseholders paid $65.2 million. About 20 per cent has been on-sold for $275 million.

The median sale price was more than 500 times the Crown's selling price, according to Brower's figures. I can't find the figures for the past two years, sorry.

What was Crown-owned land leased for ''pastoral'' purposes has in some cases become high-end lakeside subdivisions. The sales have been a bonanza for some Crown pastoral leaseholders.

While the leaseholders cannot be blamed for taking advantage, taxpayers have every right to feel disappointed at both the unjustified transfer of their wealth and the loss of Crown land.

At the same time, high country conservation land has been expanded. So a good thing.

However, according to the views of some, these gains have been outweighed by land-use changes on freehold land, There are also questions about intensification and land-use changes allowed on leasehold properties themselves.

No wonder the Government has decided to scrap tenure review. Some leaseholders might look askance at missing out on windfalls their fellows received. But the transfer of land and money to small numbers of runholders needed to stop. The system was not working.

Read edition 1003 of the Wānaka Sun here.

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