States no help on united FIRB land register, so federal government to go it alone

The federal government's desire for a national register of all property purchases by foreign investors, in co-ordination with the states, now appears temporarily out of reach.

"I've virtually given up on that ….now I am going to have to set up our own register," Treasurer Joe Hockey told 2GB breakfast broadcaster Alan Jones today (@ 8.30 mins).

Queensland is the only state that maintains a register of all foreign land owners, both urban and agriculture.

Meanwhile the federal government is set to tighten its scrutiny of foreign purchases of Australian agricultural land, according to a Daily Telegraph report by Scott Rochfort.

Federal Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce told The Daily Telegraph the new rules, which will lower the threshold of farm purchases examined by the Foreign ­Investment Review Board (FIRB) from $248 million to $15 million, were “imminent”.

“We are entitled to have a proper oversight and in some instances a concern if people believe things are becoming excessive,’’ Joyce said. Any entities owned by a foreign government will have a $1 FIRB threshold.

Since the 1970s, the Foreign Investment Review Board has been required to supervise the purchase of residential and agricultural real estate by foreign buyers, with notification to the FIRB mandatory.

Acquisitions by state owned enterprises or sovereign wealth funds must also be reported to the FIRB for review. 

However the then federal coalition said in opposition the lack of robust data and the absence of foreign land ownership registers had stirred concerns about the extent of foreign land ownership that may (or may not) be occurring throughout Australia.

In response to pressure over the lack of information, the Labor government in November 2010 directed the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to include questions concerning ownership of agricultural land in a farm survey.

However, the validity and usefulness of the official ABS data has been widely questioned.

The coalition had a policy implementing a database capable of tracking acquisitions of land across Australia to inform public debate or policy. 

In late 2012 the Labor government announced plans to introduce a foreign ownership register for agricultural land, with Prime Minister Julia Gillard saying she wanted to take the politics out of foreign ownership.

Gillard told the National Farmers Federation national congress that the register would provide a more comprehensive picture of the specific size and locations of foreign agricultural land holdings.

The debate has flared in the suburbs regarding urban land given the belief of high rates of Chinese property acquisitions over the past two years.

Kelly O'Dwyer, the Liberal member for Higgins and the Chair of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics, has been charged with finding the solution having said there are a number of buyers who are not going to the Foreign Investment Review Board for screening.

"We need to have better data, better information, which is another reason why one of the key recommendations that our committee will be making is to have a national register where, at the transfer of land, you actually understand who is purchasing that residential property and that that data can be matched against all sorts of other data, including data from the Immigration Department, where you have, for instance, temporary residents who might've left the country and who, under our current existing foreign investment framework, need to sell their property within three months of leaving - some of those people are not doing that and the data isn't being matched, which means those people, at the moment, are not being caught," she told the ABC Lateline program in late September.

It was expected the move to electronic conveyancing would expedite the process.