Since it’s Queen’s Birthday this weekend (not her official birthday which is 21^st April) here are a few pertinent facts you may like to ponder:

1. Queen Elizabeth is the largest landowner on earth; she has legal ownership of over one sixth of the planet’s surface. The Commonwealth, including Britain, occupies 9,900 mill acres of the earth’s 36,000 mill acres.
2. in the UK the Queen is the sole legal owner of all land. Everyone else has either of the following forms of tenure:  (a) freehold defined as ‘an interest in an estate in land, in fee simple.’ (a medieval term for the sum paid to represent the fact that freehold was actually a tenancy and that the monarch was the ultimate landowner). (b) Leasehold, an interest in an estate in land, in fee simple, for a term of years’.
3. The corporation called ‘NZ’ (your country Kiwis) is registered as owned by the Queen, on the Securities & Exchange Commission’s (SEC) website, Washington DC.
4. During WW2 11 million acres of land was seized by the British Govt., with minimal and in some cases no compensation paid.
5. In the UK, Australia, Canada, NZ and anywhere else there are Crown lands, the relevant Govts can seize land without compensation, acting in the Queen’s name … they can also use the Royal Prerogative (feudal powers) to do the same, beyond the reach of parliaments.
6. The Queen owns as a private person, about 637,000 acres with a value of over $9,200 million.
7. For nearly 10,000 years of known history, those claiming ownership of land on the planet has been between 0.2% and 3% of the population, whilst the remaining 97-99% owned nothing. The land owners exclude the majority from owning any by crafting their own land laws and perpetuating the fallacy that land is scarce because there are too many people on the planet.
8. If all the land on the planet was divvied up equally to all (this calculates roughly to one tenth of an urban acre or two of rural) poverty could be eliminated.

From ‘Who Owns the World’ by Kevin Cahill and Rob McMahon