Time to ditch 50-50 split?

New Zealand's relationship property laws are out of touch with people's notions of fairness, and should be changed, University of Otago researchers say.

The Law Commission is currently reviewing the Property (Relationships) Act 1976 (PRA).

To assist, a research team led by University of Otago Associate Prof Nicola Taylor, Prof Mark Henaghan and Dr Megan Gollop, funded by the Michael and Suzanne Borrin Foundation, was set up to find what views New Zealanders had on the division of relationship property.

Prof Taylor said the results of the research showed some areas of current law "do not align with people's expectations of fairness in contemporary New Zealand".

Most people knew about the equal sharing provisions, but they might not know when they began to apply to them personally.

Fewer than half of the 1361 people surveyed knew equal sharing applied to all couples who broke up after living together for three years or longer.

There was a high level of public awareness and general support for equal sharing of relationship property - but 88% of respondents who supported it also believed a departure from it would allow for a fairer result in some circumstances.

"This suggests some aspects of the PRA's `one size fits all' model may no longer be appropriate," Prof Taylor said.

There was also a diversity of views as to when the equal sharing provisions should apply.

Most respondents thought property brought into a relationship - for instance a family home or money used as a deposit on a family home - should not be shared in the same way as property acquired during the relationship. A worrying facet of the research was the number of people who tried to opt-out of the PRA via a makeshift pre-nuptial agreement.

Of the people who did decide to discuss having a pre-nuptial agreement with their partner, about 38% made non-binding verbal or written agreements that did not have any weight in law.

The "million-dollar question" was whether people knew the legal status of those agreements, Prof Taylor said.

The research will be presented at a two-hour seminar in Wellington on October 30.

The team was not making recommendations, but the Law Commission, which had been working on the issue since 2016, was considering the research and would be releasing a preferred approach paper next week.