How ridiculous – what kind of crappy insurance does your building have that it doesn’t cover the old “shutter landing on car load of American lawyers” clause?
Regarding their referral to a DA, your shutters would almost certainly come under a “compliant development” and therefore would require no D.A. I would get your shutter installer to investigate this immediately.
Your EC and Community Association are being ridiculous and I think it’s time to rattle their cage and give this new NCAT bunch a spin round the block.
You’ll need to go to Fair trading for mediation first but you can then pursue an order under section 158 which says:
158 Order with respect to by-laws conferring exclusive rights or privileges over common property
(1) An Adjudicator may make an order prescribing the making, amendment or repeal, in terms of the order, of a by-law if the Adjudicator finds:
(a) on application made by an owner, that the owners corporation has unreasonably refused to make a by-law of the kind referred to in section 51.
Sections 51-55 cover special resolution by-laws and how they operate. So put together a by-law saying that you are given permission to install shutters attached to common property (as per your attached designs) and that you take responsibility for their upkeep and maintenance and to the area of common property immediately affected by their installation.
At the same time, jump through whatever hoops are required to make this a complying development at council and you’re sorted.
OR, just install the things, make the EC do all the legal and NCAT work and hope that you get the same result.
I would never recommend that anyone takes the law into their own hands … but it’s probably what i would do.