Billen Ben said:
Jimmy loves to talk about the owners empowering things by special resolution but i have some concerns over this type of democracy, it can disadvantage people because they do not have the numbers.
If fees were by unanimous resolution then perhaps that would be OK but action by special resolution had led to cases where CTTT has acknowledged that this type of democracy can disproportionately disadvantage some people. Generally it works but it has the potential to be misused and that potential has been realised in several CTTT matters.
The usual reason people don't have the numbers is because the majority of people don't agree with them. Requiring a unanimous vote on financial decision is a frankly ridiculous idea. And of course some people are “disadvantaged” by a majority vote – even one that requires 75 percent of support. That's life. What about the 90+ percent of people who would be disadvantaged because one antisocial curmugeon refused to go along with a proposal that made sense to everyone else in their building?
As Winston Churchill once observed: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government … except all the others that have been tried.”
As for strata being the fourth level of government … of course it is. But this is nothing new … village councils and street committees have been around for hundreds of years. The truly retrograde aspect of strata democracy is that it is based on ownership rather than residency and right there is the root of most of its problems.