Digitisation of land titles won’t alter property rights

AAP FACTCHECK – Australia’s digitisation of land titles means homeowners will no longer own their properties, a social media user is claiming.

This is false. The move to digital does not alter the ownership rights of property owners.

The claim is in a Facebook video featuring a woman saying the process of digitising land titles means property owners are “tenants” in their own homes.

“A title deed is your contract with the Crown, so that you get the same rights and privileges owning your land that the Crown has with Crown land,” she said (one minute 51 seconds).

“When they give you a digital title, you don’t have that at all. You effectively become a tenant … You can’t leave it to your children, so you can’t build on it, you can’t do anything.”

She claimed that paper title deeds have been “destroyed”, making it impossible for landowners to prove their ownership.

Freehold property in Australia is created and transferred under what is called the Torrens title system, the existence of which means land ownership doesn’t have to be proved by physical title deeds.

A land title is obtained through registration with the relevant state or territory.

Kate Galloway, a property lawyer and law professor at Australian Catholic University, said hard copies of title deeds have become obsolete after states began adopting digital registers in the mid-1990s.

She said prior to digitisation, property registries held original paper deeds and the title holders held duplicates.

The title holder needed to produce the duplicate deed in the registry to prove ownership, Prof Galloway said.

She added that title deeds were never “contracts with the Crown,” and the shift to digital records had not interfered with freehold title ownership.

“This [digital] system did away with the need for the paper duplicate title deed. It was no longer needed because there was no original title deed any more,” Prof Galloway told AAP FactCheck

“Land registration has always been about recording data – there is no difference between whether that is binary [digital] or analogue [in writing]”.

John Page, a University of NSW professor specialising in property law, said the switch to electronic titles was about enhancing and harmonising e-conveyancing practices.

“These are only procedural changes to reflect that titles are no longer paper documents, which sometimes leads to changes in practice, but not legal substance,” he told AAP FactCheck.

Paul Babie, a University of Adelaide property law expert, said there is “absolutely no truth whatsoever to these claims”.

He said ownership of a title was “a concept, not a piece of paper”.

“That concept is ownership, and that allows an owner to do things with what is owned, including, in the case of land, building on it, leaving it to one’s children,” Prof Babie told AAP FactCheck.

“Over the course of the history of the Anglo-Australian land law, [title has] been represented by dirt, then ​deed, then certificate of title, and now in digital form.

“There was controversy at each of those moments when a change occurred, but those changes changed nothing of the reality of ownership.”

AAP FactCheck has previously debunked false claims about the Constitution and property titles.

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