This paper is in the form of a 2002 departmental report Property: An Analysis of Rights and Obligations in Property, Focused on Fresh Waters but was not released to the public and has no official status. QSN has published it on the website for the benefit of scholars and practitioners who are wrestling with the concepts of property rights, stewardship, public interest and duty of care.

A shortened version was published in June 2003 in the form of a departmental guideline B7, Rights and Responsibilities in Property.

The paper was written at a time of intense debate within Queensland about compensation for rural landholders who were denied permission under new regulations to clear native vegetation on their properties; and also about reforms to the administration of water, aimed at introducing tradeable rights to take water for irrigation. As the paper was written in 2002, of course many of the references to legislation and policy are now dated. Do not rely on this paper for legal advice.

Much of the article is a fairly routine explanation of the origin of property in English common law systems and would be well known to lawyers and scholars of property; but the claim that property in Australia rests on four distinct foundations, and the definition of stewardship, are original.

The argument that stewardship obligations are inherent when a landholder accepts title to a parcel of land will be well understood in Indigenous circles. In Western land scholarship this argument is nicely articulated in the writings of Harvard scholar Joseph Singer.

See also the post on Land Tenure.

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