WA considers Landgate sale
The WA Government could give private companies access to the state’s land sales data in an effort to repair the budget.
The state-owned Landgate service collects and provides data on land and property sales and transactions in WA, for a fee.
NSW recently privatised its land titles register, making $2.6 billion, while South Australia netted $1.6 billion after selling access to its data.
WA Premier Mark McGowan said privatising Government assets like Landgate is a necessary move to restore state coffers.
“I mean we can't work miracles, we can't magic money out of the air,” he said.
“Those sorts of things come on the table because of the attitude of the Liberal Party [opposition] to our reasonable budget measures and also because we've lost so much GST.”
Giving Landgate data to the private sector would allow it to be packaged with other data and sold at a premium.
The property industry is the main market for this information.
But there are significant privacy concerns over the security of personal information Landgate handles, including home addresses and financial details.
“I think privacy of data and people's information is paramount and that's something that we would need to address,” said Opposition Treasury spokesperson Dean Nalder.
“We understand that the Labor Party has won government and we need to respect that however we will scrutinise every policy they bring forward to ensure that it's in the best interest of Western Australia.”
The Property Council of Australia argues that privacy must be protected if Landgate is privatised.
“It operates now in a manner where privacy is protected and that has to be protected when its privatised,” said WA Executive Director Lino Iocomella.
“It's got to be affordable to the public because that's important to enable housing affordability to continue.
“Most importantly the public has to have easy access and transparency to the data that's going to be available,” he said.