Adjoining land owners may enter into agreements with each other regarding the construction, maintenance and removal of line fences. If such an agreement is in writing in the "prescribed form" then it "may be registered and enforced as if it were an award of fence-viewers" [s.16] (See "Enforcement").
Where there is a written line fence agreement which addresses "sharing the costs of the construction, reconstruction or repair" of a line fence, the parties cannot use the fence-viewer process [s.4(1)], and one can hold the other to the terms of the line fence agreement as a matter of contract. This contract could be varied only under principles of contract law (rectification and rescission), or - more typically - by mutual agreement of the parties.
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