On Malta, years ago, we stayed with my friend's Uncle Joe. A lardy, low-rise, mustachioed type, Uncle Joe greeted us at his castle door dressed in shorts and a grubby singlet. Sitting us on low kitchen stools he played ukulele to the chooks that ran about under our legs, interspersing his serenade with complaints about how "they nationalised my banks". Poor Uncle Joe. All he had left was the castle, with its cool stone corridors, ballrooms, orchards, suits of armour – and chickens.
Lately Uncle Joe, a devoted Thatcherite, keeps popping into my mind. I've never been a socialist, not even back in the day. But if by socialism you mean the steadfast belief that some things must and can only be done by government, I guess I'm a little bit on the spectrum.
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Why the Land Titles Registry matters
In September 2016, the NSW government passed legislation enabling the lease of NSW's "world-class" land titles registry. Here's why that's a big deal.
As neo-liberal attacks on civilisation get crazier, as we scrape ever lower in the barrel of saleable public assets, it becomes clear that Bernie Sanders had a point. Socialism, in some form or other, must return. Future generations will be forced to re-nationalise.
And the first thing they'll want back, in NSW, is the Land and Property Information service, aka the Land Titles Registry – backbone of the entire NSW economy – which Premier Berejiklian proposes to sell for less than half its value to some conscienceless offshore consortium.
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The list of neo-liberal depredations on our lives and cities is long: bringing, inter alia, the relentless diminution of university teaching, climate science, TAFE, prison education, cycleways, building certification, political probity, strategic planning, environmental protection, local democracy, agricultural land, heritage protection and public parks.
But the mother of all depredations, the final nail – one can only hope – in the grim monetarist coffin, is the Land Titles Registry sell-off.
Selling treasured buildings is bad enough. Turning services like prisons or education into "profit-centres" is worse. But flogging off a critical knowledge-base and regulatory function that, refined over centuries, is critical to our economy and ecology is a deep and dangerous incompetence. It is ideology run rampant. Cowboy territory.
As this nutty ideology gnaws away at our slow-evolved traditions and institutions, it becomes increasingly evident that neo-liberalism is the direct opposite of true conservatism. Thatcher was wrong. There is such a thing as society and we have a duty to nurture it.
The government's rationale is the usual: competition, efficiency, innovation, cash. But all are spurious. Selling land titles cannot increase competition, since there is none. It's a monopoly. It won't drop prices, which are already low and in, for example, Canada, have quadrupled with privatisation. It won't increase efficiency, already so high our system is envied and copied across the world. It will provide cash, but (at the expected $2 billion instead of the $4.5 billion minimum experts say it is worth) not as much as it should, and not for long.
What the sell-off will do is open us to corruption and fraud on a scale we never thought to see, even on the coat-tails of the Rum Corps.
A closely-argued paper by Liberal councillor and lawyer Margaret O'Connor with surveyor and Tamworth Liberal Party president and surveyor Mitchell Hanlon summarises the case against. "The integrity and quality of the cadastre is the measure of stability of the state … the foundation of all commerce and security … the people's protection against fraud, corruption and tyranny."
It's this that has brought our august bodies out in force. Opponents to the privatisation include: the Law Society of NSW, the Law Council of Australia (representing 65,000 lawyers), the Property Owners Association (NSW), the Property Owners Association Australia, the Institution of Surveyors (NSW), the Real Estate Institute of NSW, the Real Estate Association of NSW, the Australian Institute of Quantity Surveyors, the Australian Valuers' Institute, the Australian Institute of Conveyancers, the History Council of NSW, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the Professional Historians Association NSW and the Public Service Association.
Supporting? Almost no one.
Public servants are not activists. Almost by definition, they're measured and circumspect, guardians of the status quo, protectors of order. So it takes a serious, pulse-quickening threat to get them marching in the street. Yet march they did, in Martin Place 10 days ago, in a desperate bid to save the cadastre. Why?
Let's start with the physical. Walter Liberty Vernon's Land Titles building is one of the prettiest in the country. How fastidiously this lacy late-neo-gothic sandstone manifests its function – the window filigree as elegant and fragile as the cadastral net it houses yet the whole holding that fluid street-corner as staunchly as the land-titles system embraces every house, business, forest, swamp and farm in NSW.
That we take them for granted, making both building and system largely invisible to us, only proves how peerlessly they perform.
Our Torrens system has 400 highly trained staff – keepers of the knowledge – who tirelessly scrutinise every survey, mortgage and transaction on NSW's four million-odd properties, fitting it into the cadastre's gossamer net, honing and perfecting this priceless public asset. So doing, they cross-subsidise less profitable parts of the service, provide a free guarantee against fraud or error to every title-holder, complete most transactions within 48 hours and still generate $130 million a year clear profit.
Yet when the system is sold and sent to some server possibly outside of NSW, the building too will be up for conversion to some casino, gaming parlour or boutique fashion hub. Then what?
Imagine a world where your house could be sold without your knowledge. Where your newly purchased waterfront flat turns out to have an office block in front, or a freeway starting construction next week. Where title insurance costs you at least $1000, confronting the system involves tangling with some offshore call-centre and all information, including about your divorce, bankruptcy or inheritance, is owned outright by a two-dollar shell company registered in the Caymans.
Sound scary? It should. Because – unless we immediately ditch Uncle Joe's mad Thatcherite belief that private ownership is the only legitimate kind – it's our future, starting now.
Twitter: @emfarrelly
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