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Look at the original plans. Thick black lines define the boundaries of common property.
Otherwise, take a decision at EC level not to repair the deck and let the owner prove that its common property rather than you having to do anything.
I recall a case where a unit owner took the Owners Corp to court to prove that an added glass enclosure on their balcony, which had become dangerous, was common property and had to be maintained by the strata scheme.
Once the decision was made in the owners favour, the Owners Corp asked the judge to confirm that the glass enclosure was theirs and they could deal with its problems as they saw best. The judge confirmed this so they simply had it removed.
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@Queenslander said:
https://www.justice.qld.gov.au/corporate/community-consultation/community-consultation-activities/current-activities/review-of-property-law-in-queenslandQueensland is taking on this issue. Oh and parking, pets, overcrowding, recovery of unpaid levies and scheme termination. You know, just the easy topics.
Interesting reading and has many similarities with NSW much-delayed efforts to do the same. Interesting though that the report cites the inability to create by-laws restricting pets. Owners in Queensland are starting from along way behind the eight-ball if they can’t even create a workable pets by-law.
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@Derek said:
I suffered ceiling damage due to a leaking roof in my strata townhouse … is the OC responsible to recompense me for painting and wardrobe repairs when the damage to the paintwork is directly due to the leak?In a word yes. You should put in a claim, with quotes for painting and repairs, immediately and tell the Executive Committee or strata manager that if it isn’t fixed within seven days you will take them to Fair Trading and NCAT (the Tribunal) to have orders imposed. The easiest and cheapest way for the OC to remedy this is to get the work done – that’s what will happen in the end anyway so they may as well get on with it.
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@Dragandeewhy said:
We obviously do not understand each other. You come from one side of ideological thinking I come from the side of “live and let live”.I think I understand you perfectly – your attitude isn’t live and let live, though, it’s let me live the way I want and let others die if that happens to be their luck.
To get back to how this affects apartment living, if people aren’t prepared to tolerate the presence of other people in close proximity, and put up with some of their idiosyncracies, then they shouldn’t be living in apartments.
But there have to be limits and they include respecting other people’s property, their privacy and not causing a nuisance. If your libertarian sense of freedom is offended by the minor and perfectly reasonable restrictions that inevitably places on your behaviour, go and live in a house where you won’t bother anyone and they won’t bother you.
To paraphrase the judge who banned a couple from smoking INSIDE their unit in Sydney, because the smoke was affecting neighbouring apartments, the issue only arose because the couple smoked; in other words, “no smoke, no problem”.
Smoking is a foul and filthy habit and passive smoking kills. Trying to justify inflicting one person’s smoke on another with fatuous arguments about the level of pollution already in our lives is missing the point, I suspect deliberately.
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@Dragandeewhy said:
Have they chosen or are they forced to live? . Is it reasonable to expect children to play in front of the apartment building and make noise that playing children do?Plenty of strata schemes have by-laws that prevent children (or anyone else) from playing on common property.
The problem here is kids playing in their own homes and disturbing the “peaceful enjoyment” of other residents.
Just as well they don’t smoke too, eh?
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Dragandeewhy said
Are you saying that every “stink” or smell is harmful for you?As you will see, I am not saying anything of the kind. Cigarette smoke is known to cause cancer and other diseases, even among passive smokers. The USA’s Surgeon General says that living with a smoker increases your chances of contracting lung cancer by 30 percent.
Harm minimisation or positive discrimination how ever you call it still gives the right to the morally superior once to openly hate the addicts.
“Positive discrimination” has nothing to do with it. I don’t hate the addicts – I just hate the attitude that I have to risk my health and my peaceful enjoyment of my home so they can kill themselves in theirs.
In the north of Sydney they are openly hated while going more to the west or south the tolerance towards smokers increases.
And look at the cancer and heart disease rates there. Only six percent of people in Northern Sydney smoke compared to 14 to 16 percent in Western and South-Western Sydney. That’s peer group pressure for you but even out west it’s still a tiny minority inflicting their filthy habits on others.
While visiting Europe or other continents the whole discomfort around smoking miraculously disappears.
According to you … it used to be the same in New York and L.A. – try lighting up in a restaurant or bar there now, or in Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries. According to this website “currently, 17 EU countries have comprehensive smoke-free laws in place. Among these, Ireland, the UK, Greece, Bulgaria, Malta, Spain and Hungary have the strictest smoke-free provisions with a complete ban on smoking in enclosed public places, on public transport and in workplaces, with only limited exceptions allowed.”
And if you look at this report you will see that the areas of the world that were late to take up the non-smoking banner (Europe and North America) had the highest cancer rates.
This is what I was talking about with “mass physiology”.
So it’s “mass physiology” now is it? Isn’t than a fun run or a pump class at the gym?
A push biker will openly show discomfort in the presence of a person who smokes while he or she inhales with the full capacity of his her lungs the fumes of peak hour traffic, thinking that he is living a healthy life style. Etc etc etc.
That is a pathetic argument. Flip it and you have the cyclist deciding not to ride in traffic because the idiot downstairs from them is filling his flat with cigarette smoke, so what’s the point in trying to be healthy? FYI, governments all around the world have made huge inroads into the level of pollutants from cars and other vehicle. Tried to buy petrol that isn’t lead-free recently?
This is an all-too-common bleat against a healthy lifestyle because it might affect others’ “rights” to pollute the air breathed by the people around them. Two of the five recommended ways to lower your risk of cancer, according to this easy to follow document are to avoid smoking and to exercise regularly. Where does that leave your passive smoking cyclist?
How do you feel about the “right” to go out at night, get paralytic drunk then punch the crap out of some unsuspecting innocent stranger. “Ooooh … but it’s my addiction … I’m the victim here … what about my civil rights?”
If the “Nanny State” exists – and I’m not sure it does – it’s not because some people can’t be trusted to look after themselves, it’s because they are happy to take other people to Hell with them in the same handcart.
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Firstly, this sounds like an ongoing dispute – we need more detail.
Secondly, you used your strata scheme number as your screen name. That not only identifies you, but your neighbours too. I have changed it.
Finally, when referencing David & Goliath, remember who won.
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Your relative needs to get a grip of their Owners Corp pronto.
Firstly, – and more importantly – the owners corp is breaking the law by not having insurance.
Secondly, damage cause by a failure of common property can be charged back to the Owners Corp. Your friend should threaten to take them to Fair Trading and NCAT if they don’t get insurance coverage and pay for the damaged floorboards.
What will NCAT do? I would think the statutory appointment of a strata manager will be a no-brainer … and then they’ll find out how bad things really are.
Oh, and anyone who doesn’t have home contents insurance is tempting fate just a little too much.
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If the owenr on the other side insists on you keeping your cupboards on your property then you can insist on them taking their bikes down. It’s common law, not strata law – your property, your rules.
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@Dragandeewhy said:
If the kids are small up to 12-13 years old of course there is going to be shouting and yelling. What would you expect? What for you is loud daily noise for somebody else is just daily activity.
So, does this mean we have to put up with any level of noise created by children? If not, where do we draw the line?
Is it unreasonable to expect parents who have chosen to enjoy the benefits of strata living to consider their neighbours and moderate the behaviour of their children?
Or don’t normal standards apply to kids and their parents?
I’m not taking sides on this – I’m just curious to know what others think.
Jimmy
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@PeterC said:
It all works fine until that person eventually gets worn out/fed up/ousted in a coup/gets sick/moves elsewhere, and there is nobody who knows how anything works to continue.I have a theory that there is a cycle of three phases that most strata schemes move through over a number of years. They are: chaotic … democratic … autocratic … then back to chaotic and so on.
Assuming it starts when a new strata scheme is born, nobody knows what to do, who to trust or what they want. Chaos reigns because no one else knows how.
Eventually someone comes along and calms everyone down and we move from the chaotic to the democratic.
Then the people who have done all the hard work start feeling threatened by newcomers who have no idea how much the incumbents have gone through to get to this state of relative calm. The newcomers try to shake things up and the old hands start to batten down the hatches. Thus we move from the democratic to the autocratic.
This change is gradual but after a few years, those who are excluded from the decision making get agitated and then some disaster happens or a mistake is made and it’s on for one an old. The old guard are driven out and the new guys take over.
However, having been denied access to the levers of power, the new people flounder and we are back to the chaotic, and so the cycle continues.
Of course, not all strata schemes are like this. Some never move from the phase they are in, be it chaotic, democratic or autocratic. Some get to democratic and stay there.
How do you sustain that? I believe a smart EC will encourage non-EC members to participate (rather than shutting them out) and will have an idea of who could take over if their beloved leader fell off the twig, lost interest or sold up and moved away.
Strata schemes are all about human nature and politics, petty or otherwise. As our chairman is fond of saying, you can have too much democracy.
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In one building that I know well, the chairman had more than 50 percent of the vote in proxies at the last two AGMs. Considering this is a large building with over 100 units in it, that’s a massive concentration of power.
A large percentage of the votes would have been offered to him by people who a) thought he was doing a good job and b) couldn’t be bothered to attend. He claims he canvasses his proxy providers on contentious issues so as to properly represent their views (and I have no reason to disbelieve him).
In return for passing on their votes, owners feel that the building is generally well managed and they are happy not to have anyone rock the boat. However, I have witnessed a gradual erosion of the democratic process, including:
- good ideas from other owners being over-ruled because the ruling minority didn’t like the idea or the person suggesting it,
- individuals being replaced on the EC because they consistently challenged the chair’s authority,
- attendances at the AGM steadily decline
- increasing secrecy over issues that owners were entitled to be fully informed
- use of the EC minutes to “spin” contentious issues, cover up serious mistakes and “name and shame” owners who have caused problems for them
- express lift keys being issued to EC members and their cronies so they don’t have to encounter other residents in the lifts
- secrecy over candidates to replace EC members who resign from the committee
- expensive and (as it turned out) unworkable obsessions being pursued to a ridiculous extent when everyone else could see they would never fly
It’s all small potatoes but you can see how an individual or a group can start with the best intentions, but if there is too much power in too few hands the situation can soon degenerate into owners drifting away from the process while the incumbents spend as much time working out how to hang on to power as they do in looking after the building.
In situations like yours, Peter, it would be a pain to not be allowed to take proxies from people who genuinely want to support you for the very best of reasons. I suppose one compromise might be to present a “panel” of candidates, rather than individuals, to whom owners could pass on their votes.
Share the love, in other words.
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@SMO said:
I know what you are saying; it was a complete reproduction of material “published” for public use. Copyright is a complex area and a lot of material on the net is not covered by copyright law. I’d be very surprised if the material i posted was covered by copyright. It was general information for public use as far as i could tell. Perhaps i was a little lazy in writing that it was on the net so it should be OK.
I am aware of Jimmy’s understanding of copyright due to some issues he has had from time to time with the other strata forum that he deems the competition, funny they do not see it like that.You are wrong (except for the point you made about this being a distraction). I base my views on having been a professional journalist for 35 years and on my recently acquired MA (Writing), a large component of which was a module on copyright.
More importantly, SMO, your snide comments have given you away. Under one of your other aliases (Billen Ben) , you were not only banned from this website but purloined material of mine which you posted in its entirety on the other forum that you frequent. Also, you have been using a series of proxy addresses to conceal your identity. Regardless of the value of your opinions, there’s a level of dishonesty and lack of respect for the other people on this forum that’s intolerable. Please go to the other forum and stay there. Bye-bye.
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