Tag: Land Titles Office

21 October 2017

The privatisation of the Land Titles Office will allow developers to search systematically for any land that can be bought. With the total emasculation of the NSW planning process, and a tax system which rewards land development over all other forms of financial activity in this country, this will result in the largest systematic transfer of wealth from the public to rich individuals that has ever happened in this State.

Well done the Libs- you have rewarded your donors admirably!  Tough luck the commons.

But having got all this easily and probably cheaply, there will quite a lot of support for the renationalisation as suggested by Jeremy Corbyn in England.  We are perpetually lectured about the need to have huge rewards for risk-takers as they might lose things. ‘Easy come, easy go’ might be the slogan for a new age, replacing ‘Once grabbed, always mine’, the inherent assumption of the privatisers.

I had observed Sydney Water put all its water plans on a computerised system. This had an highly developed mapping system with all the pipers and boundaries. It was not clear whether they had intended to use this for revenue or merely to keep track of their own facilities and works, but the system, which had been developed by funding from Water rates was taken from them by the NSW government and given to the Land Titles office and combined with the Land Titles Register. This combination was then absolutely State of the Art. It was the ultimate private monopoly as I warned in this post on 21/10/17, though at that time Jeremy Corbyn in the UK may have let a push to reclaim some of the more outrageous privatisations. That was not to be and he lost the UK elections dramatically.

What happened in NSW was a huge abuse of the private monopoly with a 1900% price hike as described a year later on 4/10/18 in the SMH.

www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/unauthorised-privatised-nsw-land-titles-registry-hiked-fees-by-1900-per-cent-20181004-p507ri.html