Recorder of Titles (Tas)
A short factsheet on Tasmania's Recorder of Titles: its establishing Act and its role administering the Torrens land title register, closing this corpus's own previously-flagged land-title gap.
Learning outcomes
- State the Recorder of Titles' establishing Act and its role administering Tasmania's Torrens land title register.
- Locate the Recorder of Titles as Tasmania's equivalent to the land title authorities already covered for every other state and territory.
Act: Land Titles Act 1980 (Tas).1
Established: Neither a body nor a standalone office: a public servant wearing a second hat. Section 4(1) provides that the Governor may appoint a State Service officer or State Service employee to be Recorder of Titles, and that the officer or employee holds that office in conjunction with State Service employment. This is the third pattern the factsheet family exists to distinguish — the Act creates no agency and no separate position, it confers a statutory office on someone who already has a public-service job. Deputy and Assistant Recorders are appointed the same way (ss 4(3), 4(3A)). Eligibility is real, though: only a legal practitioner of at least five years' standing may be appointed (s 4(2)).
Purpose: The Recorder of Titles administers Tasmania's Torrens land title register — recording ownership, mortgages, easements and other registered interests in land, and issuing title information relied on for conveyancing. Every state and territory has an equivalent office — Landgate in Western Australia, and Registrars-General or Registrars of Titles elsewhere — and each is created by its own jurisdiction's legislation. There is no national land titles Act. Do not assume the establishing Act is always the Torrens statute: Tasmania's Recorder is created by the Land Titles Act 1980 (Tas), but Landgate is the Western Australian Land Information Authority, established by s 5 of the Land Information Authority Act 2006 (WA) rather than by the Transfer of Land Act 1893 (WA) it administers. The office and the register it keeps can sit in different statutes.
Where the authority sits
The Recorder administers the Torrens register under the Act. Because the office is held alongside State Service employment, the Recorder's independence is not structural in the way an Auditor-General's or an Inspector's is — it rests on the statutory functions and the eligibility requirement, not on the office sitting outside the public service.
Powers conferred under the Act
The Recorder of Titles registers dealings in land, maintains the folio-based register underpinning Torrens title's guarantee of indefeasibility, and can make corrections to the register in defined circumstances. Like every other Australian land title authority, the office is an administrative registration body, not a court — a dispute about the underlying entitlement to land is a matter for the courts, not the Recorder.
Is it a prosecuting authority?
No. The Recorder's functions are registration and administration of title, not enforcement. Offences under the Act are prosecuted by the ordinary Tasmanian prosecuting authority.
How it relates to the other Tasmanian bodies
The Recorder of Titles' registration function is distinct from Tasmania's Ombudsman, Integrity Commission and other complaints-and-integrity bodies already covered in the Tasmanian hub article — a registration dispute or a request to correct the register is the Recorder's business; a complaint about how a government department handled a matter is not.
Self-check
- Have I identified the Recorder of Titles' establishing Act and its Torrens-registration function?
- Have I treated the Recorder as an administrative registration body, not a court deciding disputed entitlement to land?