Petrol heads, climate denialists and other Trumpier elements in your strata block will soon no longer be able to refuse to allow you to install EV charging in your parking space … if it’s part of your lot.

New strata laws that will speed up approvals for EV charging have already passed the NSW Legislative Assembly and are now before the Upper House – and there’s no serious suggestion they won’t get through.

According to our sponsors Bannerman Lawyers, when the Strata Schemes Legislation Amendment (Miscellaneous) Bill 2026 becomes law, probably later this year, apartment owners will have a straightforward right to install an EV charging station in their own lot.

All you have to do is send a written notice to your strata committee saying you want to install a charger. The committee then has three months to respond. If they don’t reply in time, they’re deemed to have approved it.

And before your committee members start inventing bogus reasons for saying no, the bill says the committee can only object on reasonable grounds, and those objections must be put in writing. The regulations will spell out exactly what counts as reasonable – and what doesn’t.

The bill also does away with the need to jump through the usual renovation hoops under sections 108 to 110 of the Strata Schemes Management Act. If your parking space is part of your lot, and there’s already a poewer suply there, you won’t need a general meeting vote for a by-law amendment. You notify, you wait, you install. It’s that simple.

But – and there’s always a but – this only applies to installations on your own lot. Where the charger requires work on common property, such as running cabling from the switchboard to your car space, that’s still allowed, but only once the committee has issued a no-objection notice.

There are also sensible safety checks built in. Owners will need to provide supporting documentation – likely including proof that the work will be done by an appropriately licensed electrician. EV owners have to pay for all aspects of the installation, including appropriate by-laws.

This isn’t just about letting a few privileged Tesla owners plug in for a 20-minute charge; invidual owners who just want a metered trickle charge unit in the lot property parking space will be able to get one without too much hassle.

The ultra-convenience of plug-in rapid chargers doesn’t make a lot of sense when most cars sit in their parking spaces all night, when demand is low and electricity is at its cheapest.

And this isn’t just a passing fad. There are now more than 117,000 EVs registered in NSW, and they make up nearly 16 per cent of new car sales in the state. Those numbers are only going one way, and buildings that don’t start planning for charging infrastructure are going to find themselves losing value to those that do.

Meanwhile, the changes that came into effect on 1 July 2025 already prevent owners corporations from blocking charger installations purely on aesthetic grounds – unless you’re in a heritage building. So if your committee’s main objection is that a charger would look unsightly next to the garbage bins, that ship has sailed.

A number of installers are already geared up to provide trickle charge systems that allow owners a low-cost, low-impact installation through which they can pay their owners corp for electricity they use from the building’s supply during off-peak periods. They include Nox Energy, Alchemy Charge, Ready Steady Plug, Combined Energy inCharge, Ohmie Go and Powerlogger.

It’s clear that Ev-resistant strata committees and EV owners are on a collision course that can only go one way. EVs are an irresistible force; stuck-in-the-mud committees are no longer an immovable object and the law is not on their side.