Property rights

• 'The Challenge of Native Title' This paper was given to the Australian Agricultural Economics Society meeting in February 2005. It continues the theme of the Torrens paper (below). The paper compares aboriginal title in the Australian, Canadian and New Zealand jurisdictions. The challenge lies in legal systems for property ownership being brought up to date so as to recognise indigenous customary title.

• 'Institutional Aspects of Customary Land Rights'. This paper, delivered to the NZ Association of Economists meeting on July 1, 2005, more closely targets the aboriginal law arguments of earlier papers on this topic. This doctrine, common to the High Courts of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, has developed mechanisms and safeguards for incorporating pre-colonial customary law in to the common law. The original inhabitants of all three countries have been beneficiaries of the doctrine in modern times.

• 'Fisheries: Managing Property Rights'. This paper was presented to the winter meeting of the NZ Agricultural and Resource Economics Society in Blenheim, July 2003. NZ has an international reputation for its transferable quota system for sea fisheries introduced in 1985. This paper examines the administration of the quota system from the point of view of transaction costs within the management process. The goals of fish conservation and sustainability have been obtained by the scheme but at a high level of transaction costs particularly with regard to litigation over quota allocations. With the passage of time, these setting-up costs are gradually left behind as the fishers accommodate to mutual exchange of quota.

• 'The Torrens Land Registration System and Customary Rights' This paper, delivered to the NZ Association of Economists in June 2004, is concerned with recent debate in NZ about the ownership of the foreshore and adjacent seabed in the colonial settlement process. It appears that colonial legislation did not provide adequately for Maori customary rights to some coastal land and nearby seabed. Such rights were entrenched in and protected by the Treaty of Waitangi 1840. The Torrens system of land registration covers most land in NZ and may protect both European and Maori land interests. The debate was initiated by a Court of Appeal decision in 2003 indicating that customary rights may be reviewed by the Maori Land Court on a case by case basis, i.e. that such rights had never been extinguished. The paper shows that these customary rights lie outside the Torrens system and will have to be assessed in the light of modern aboriginal law as developed in Australia and Canada.