Forum Replies Created
-
Replies
-
Painting a picture of entire jurisdictions based on anecdotes about individual buildings isn’t particularly useful. They can be useful if the context and framework that led to the failure is known, and highlighted.
This is a hugely relevant point. Years ago I did a story about one major and highly regarded developer who was demanding proxy votes from owners as a condition of purchase of their units.
[…]
In both cases, the stories were about single instances but they illustrated a larger or wider problem. Random anecdotes are often just little local difficulties, but when a number of them expose the same flaws in the system, they are worth telling and re-telling until someone pays attention.
I haven’t had to directly deal with much internal strata nonsense (Furiously touching wood). But, it sounds like we’re probably on the same page.
So much of the bandwidth of strata difficulties is taken up by people complaining about situations where they’re either in the wrong, or were unaware of how things worked, and led themselves down the garden path… then don’t have the humility to step back or to the side. I can’t imagine how much nonsense NCAT/VCAT has to deal with based on the stories I’ve come across over the years.
Otherwise, the solid anecdotes where individuals or small groups are largely playing by the rules but still getting grafted by the system are, as you say, worth telling and re-telling until someone listens.
That’s why I like highlighting the disparities between different jurisdictions, for any type of issue. Technical standards, laws, bureaucratic frameworks, etc. It gets people thinking about the frameworks, the predominant cultural values, and perhaps wondering – “Maybe there’s a better way to do this”.
They may not be fair comparisons to determine who is better, but there’s nothing like a bit of inter-jurisdiction political rivalry to get some conversations started. The advocates driving those conversations just need to remember it isn’t actually about who is better.
The Victoria-NSW contest is great to do this with for NSW issues, especially with their respective Labor and Liberal state governments and a pending NSW state election.
But as for which one is better than the other – I don’t think that’s relevant. Each state has its own problems and as long as base our thinking on false equivalences – something of which I have probably been guilty, too – progress will be hard. Each also has its own solutions and that’s what we should be looking at.
Largely agree that a lot of that dialogue can be irrelevant or pointless. Painting a picture of entire jurisdictions based on anecdotes about individual buildings isn’t particularly useful. They can be useful if the context and framework that led to the failure is known, and highlighted. Though for any owner advocacy groups it could be very relevant. Australia does not have strong owner (and resident) representation.
There probably isn’t any advocacy group in Australia that has a membership in the tens of thousands otherwise this would be well known or stated somewhere. This is a problem as there are >3million strata/community titled properties and >300 thousand strata schemes across the country.
Industry lobby groups and carefully selected government executives have the tables tilted against owners (and residents) all across Australia, as well as other parts of the world. Advocacy groups should cherry-pick the best initiatives from different jurisdictions and focus on highlighting the disparities rather than shying away from them.
From working on Victorian and NSW combustible cladding building projects I can safely say that Victoria has adopted a more proactive approach than NSW. There are bold claims made by the NSW Building Commissioner in reference to Project Remediate when it could really be renamed Project Reclad based on what I’ve seen coming out of the investigation reporting phase and what is being done at the design stage. Fire experts aren’t even a significant part of the design process, or really at all in some cases, and facade engineers are being asked to sign-off on suspect and questionable existing construction details that don’t meet compliance. Very odd for a project that is all about fire safety compliance. But, to be fair, we had fires in Victoria that may have spurred things on for the State Government to react more decisively.
In terms of buying an apartment building as an investment I would lean towards Victoria over NSW as it seems to have faired better with the defects coming out of the latest construction boom. Again, to be fair, NSW probably felt the construction boom the hardest. So, the comparisons are probably not that straightforward to make unless you have access to reliable data held by the respective regulatory authorities of the relevant states.
Though some of NSW’s bigger structural failures in recent years are less likely to occur in Victoria due to tighter peer review processes. NSW seems to be very late to fixing their game, and it may even be too late for a lot of owners. It does not seem likely that the fallout from the construction boom has been realised yet.