The Personal Property Securities Register (PPSR) is to take over the role of registering and maintaining records of security interests in relation to a broad range of personal property, such as motor vehicles, boats, aircraft, machinery, artworks, crops, intellectual property and contract rights.
Currently States, Territories and the Commonwealth Government have registers for some personal property securities (PPS). Introducing a national Personal Property Securities Register will bring all of this information together into one national system. The aim of the PPS reform is to improve the ability of individuals and businesses, particularly small-to-medium size businesses, to use all their property in raising capital, and to provide Australia with a world class, convenient, efficient and cost effective personal property security registration system. Personal property securities reform has been successful in the United States, Canada and New Zealand.
The PPSR will be entirely electronic, and accessible via the internet. This represents a significant step forward as many of the specialist registers have been paper-based.
Planning and development of the PPSR has been carried out by AGD. Its ongoing management will be undertaken by the Insolvency and Trustee Service Australia.
AGS has provided legal services to support the introduction of the PPSR during the past 5 years.
Our contributions have included:
- advising on a range of issues relating to key legislation including the Personal Property Securities Act 2009 (Cth)
- advising on procurement of services to design and build the significant IT systems and facilities that will be used to operate the register
- developing the contracts for those IT systems – a particular feature of this type of contract is the need for the contract and system requirements to reflect the legislative requirements
- developing the PPSR conditions of use
- contractual arrangements under which useful non-register information (for example information relating to whether vehicles may be lost, stolen or written off) can be made available to PPSR users
- intellectual property issues concerning the branding of the PPSR and associated material.
The project has drawn on the skills of members of AGS's Commercial Group with dual proficiency in technology and law, and the expertise of our Office of General Counsel. A number of AGS people were involved in supporting this project including Tony Beal, Joanna Piva, Mark Molloy, Sacha Moran, George Witynski SC, Peter Kidd, Stuart Hilton, Rachel Chua and Garth Cooke.
This is an extract from the 2010–11 AGS annual report