Outsourcing of jobs and the movement of oversight from public to private hands shows that the Baird government is more interested in putting profits before people.
The F6 bungle, the loss of hundreds of skilled and dedicated staff, the risk of title fraud and the prospect of price increases make the case for privatisation impossible to defend.
What the government is doing is ignoring all of this in their pursuit of short term financial gain.
The NSW Land Title Registry is a world class service and must remain a public body.
The process of privatisation needs to be halted immediately.
Tony Proust, President, The Institution of Surveyors NSW
In response to Neil McCormack’s letter to the editor (“Land Registry sale fraught with problems”, Your View, November 9).
I support the message in Neil’s letter about the perils of the sale of the Land Registry.
As a land surveyor I am a frequent “client” of the land titling unit of Land and Property Information (LPI) office.
We interact with their officers almost daily. This sale has been planned since about 2014 but the decline in services goes back earlier than that.
I believe the big problem initially was the lack of succession planning to replace the knowledgeable “baby boomer” officers who could handle every enquiry competently and expeditiously due to their experience and training.
The replacements were low in number, lacking experience and training due to insufficient mentors.
Couple this with a political interference which imposed cost-cutting/bean-counting measures, and we start to feel the pincers closing.
Within the last two years we have had to deal with a call centre form of contact to resolve questions.
They are call centre people who cannot answer enquiries directly but promise to get an officer to respond within 24 or 48 hours.
For a simple enquiry, where a lot of money/settlement may be pending, this is costing my clients and the consumers a lot of delay and hence expense.
This cost is ultimately carried by the purchasers of the real estate.
We have enormous difficulty contacting knowledgeable people directly and when we do, we often find the lack of experience and training noticeable.
The other problem starts when the Sale Plan began.
Many of the older officers were made redundant. Two of the services that have now gone by the wayside are (1) conversion of Old System Title to Torrens Title AND (2) identification of government owned land, leases and interests for title conversion purposes.
These two processes found many thousands of parcels of land which were not attracting rates for Local Government or returning a true revenue income for the State. There are many thousands still to be identified for conversion and these are mostly the difficult ones.
When we, in a meeting between the Institution of Surveyors and the Ministers offices, ask our political masters what they know about these issues, no-one on the government side has a clue what we were talking about.
Privatisation will not resolve these issues, it will only lose this State a world-class system, and security of Title which gave us an A1 S&P rating. And the State will also lose billions of dollars in revenue over the 35 year concession.
Robert Harrison, Como West
