› Forums › From the Front Page › Fatal inaction – call for e-bike strata regulations › Current Page
We completely disagree with the SCA and any organisation supporting effectively banning an appliance. An ebike.is a plugin appliance like any other household appliance and they are critical to sustainability.
The SCA and other strata organisations are in a tricky position regarding e-vehicle. We know that there are dangers from the misuse of batteries and we know that the owners corporations and bodies corporate have almost no power to regulate how you use the appliances in your home until they cause a problem outside your home (loud music and smoke drift being common examples).
However, the owners as a group have the right to create by-laws that govern the use of common property. And by the way, this is your neighbours and other owners, not some remote body of faceless men and women.
So what, for instance, would prevent a super-majority of owners from passing a by-law that forbade residents from charging their e-vehicles from common power sources, parking them on common property or even moving them across common property?
Apart from the general principal that a by-law can’t supersede superior laws (FYI, most laws are superior to strata law) Section 139 of the NSW Act says by-laws can’t be create or stand if they are “harsh, unconscionable or oppressive”.
Now, the biggest by-law flip in recent years was when the Appeals Court of NSW decided that blanket bans on all pets went too far because they didn’t allow for exceptions. When the fur started to fly over all that, what was overlooked was that reasonable restrictions on pets were still allowed – e.g. if there was a valid reason for them. The chair of the committee having concerns about barking dogs was not a valid reason, for instance, because there were already ways of dealing with nuisance animals that didn’t require the banning of all animals.
So would a ban on moving your e-scooter through or storing or charging it on common property be considered “harsh, unconscionable or oppressive” by anyone other than the scooter owner? Critically, would that be the view of a Tribunal.
The building in which I live has a ban on anything other than a registered motor vehicle being parked in our parking spaces. That rule, intended to discourage people from leaving junk in their parking spaces, has meant I have been told not to park my road bike in the space under my storage box. It certainly felt harsh to me but it wasn’t something over which I would go to the barricades.
What would happen if an Owners Corp banned e-vehicles from being moved through common property, including passageways, lifts and lift lobbies? In the essentially adversarial system set up for strata, e-vehicle owners could wait until they received a notice to comply then challenge it at a tribunal.
No doubt the OC would hire lawyers to fight the case, as might the scooter owners and you never know, it could go all the way to the Appeals Court, as the pet issue did. You are looking at several hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by the time a resolution is reached.
The only alternative is for one side or the other to give way – not because they think they are wrong, but because they can’t afford to prove they are right.
And that’s what I think is motivating the SCA-QLD position. They are saying to politicians, give us something that will protect communities and stand up in a tribunal. They are not telling their members and their members’ clients to pass by-laws that might fail the three-pronged litmus test anyway and in fact seem to be trying to avoid that.
The transport, storage and charging of e-vehicles is going to be the big battle in strata this year and the bad news for their owners is that there are considerably fewer e-bikes and e-scooters than there are dogs and cats in strata.
But there is one spark of hope – thus far no insurer that we have heard of has told a strata scheme that it’s going to increase premiums if there are e-bikes and scooters in the building. Insurers have highly paid staff who assess the real risks to buildings in financial terms and if they don’t see a quantifiable risk, then anti-e-vehicle by-laws could be seen as harsh and oppressive.