Farmers deny rip off over land tenure review

High-country farmers are disputing claims they have made almost $150 million by selling land acquired cheaply through the tenure-review process reports Stuff. Sales figures from the past 15 years show farmers have made $146.6m from selling the land in freehold titles, says Lincoln University tenure-review specialist and public policy senior lecturer Ann Brower. They showed tenure review had been "a rip-off" for the public, with land sold to farmers on the cheap, allowing some to subdivide it and sell it to developers for millions of dollars, she said. "It has been a pretty good deal for the farmers." Under tenure review, farmers with pastoral leases allow unproductive farmland to become Department of Conservation (DOC) estate in exchange for freehold rights to higher-value farmland. Rampant subdivision of former pastoral leases had transformed 80 farms into 865 sections, the average size reduced from 5938 hectares to 334ha, she said. Most subdivision had occurred around Queenstown and Wanaka, and in the Gibbston Valley. In some instances, farmers had received up to $5.6m in exchange for DOC land through the tenure-review process. The Government has paid farmers $27.5m more for new DOC estate than it received for converting leases into freehold titles. Brower has been a repeated critic of tenure review but has also been criticised by high-country farmers, who call her research ill-informed. High Country Accord chairman Jonathan Wallis, of Wanaka, said Brower's latest figures were misleading, and did not compare apples with apples. Farmers had already effectively owned land under pastoral leases, which were valued only marginally below freehold titles. While acquiring a freehold title allowed farmers to apply for subdivision, regulatory approval was not a given and often costly and time-consuming, factors not accounted for in Brower's figures, he said. Brower's figures also ignored land-value rises since the tenure review began, Wallis said.