Curb your balcony barbies before they are banned

OPINION: The recent about a successful case brought by a NSW couple to prevent their neighbours from smoking on their balcony, and their call for a state-wide ban, raised the issue of balcony barbecues.

In the Sydney Morning Herald story Stephen Brell, president of the NSW Strata Community Association (SCA-NSW), wondered if a blanket ban on all balcony smoking might lead to restrictions on barbecues and exotic cooking smells.

SCA-NSW is the strata managers’ professional body, so its members would have to deal with turmoil from any such ban in the unlikely event that it was ever imposed.

Why unlikely? Because barbecuing is a great Australian pastime and even suggesting that it’s not a crash-hot idea for apartment blocks is seen as a combination of sacrilege and treason, spiced with nimbyism.

I am probably over-sensitive to this because I live in a building where air-con is limited and the majority of residents are expected to cool their flats by opening balcony doors to let the breeze in.

Guess what! We need to open our doors to cool our homes on the same occasions when neighbours want to do a little al fresco beef burning. 

So we have often a choice between closing the doors and sweltering in the summer heat or being smoked out by the sausage sizzlers.

Some are worse than others. At one point we had a trio of young men living below us, none of whom had apparently mastered the use of a stove, so most nights were barbie night.

And it wasn’t just meat; fish and seafood would occasionally be on the menu too, preceded by the ritual “burning off” of the previous meal’s residue. 

Mmmm.  Nothing says “summer in Australia” quite like the smoke and stink from rancid fat and rotten meat. In apartment blocks, it also says or “selfish, inconsiderate neighbours”.

We have a barbecue code of conduct in our block, but it’s voluntary.  It works, to a point but, to the more inconsiderate residents, “voluntary” means “unenforceable”.

Could strata schemes easily limit the use of barbecues? Absolutely! In most strata schemes in NSW, the balcony is common property and the owners corp can pass by-laws limiting what you, the owner or your tenants puts on it. Washing lines are commonly banned, for instance.

So you could pass a by-law that makes permission to keep a barbecue on the balcony subject to certain conditions. For example, you could limit their use to weekends or no more than three nights a week.  That would still allow people to have barbies while giving the rest of us a break.

From a rough check of the blocks near where I live, only about 20 per cent of balconies have barbecues on them.  But that minority can be motivated enough to block any imposts on their freedom to fry.

Investors might well be worried about restrictions on barbecues.  Anything that cuts down the number of potential tenants is a concern for landlords.

However, if your block doesn’t have a sensible set of by-laws that curb the worst excesses of selfish residents, you could find the balance tips the other way when owners who are sick of being smoked out of their homes band together to ban barbies completely.

Make no mistake, that can happen; there are already many apartment blocks where barbecues are not allowed on balconies.

So the next time you’re chatting to your strata secretary or manager, ask them if there have been complaints about barbies.

If there have, and objections are increasing, think about proposing reasonable limits on barbecues in your block before they are extinguished permanently.

And if you think that’s an unlikely outcome, consider how for years strata balcony smokers have avoided any restrictions on stinking out their neighbours’ homes.

But now, suddenly, the scales have tilted the other way and some can’t even smoke in their own apartments. You have been warned.

A version of this column first appeared in the Australian Financial Review