For those of you who enjoy reading our Forum for the schadenfreude of “at least that’s not happening to me,” we catch up with a bunch of questions left over from our recent Lawyer in the Hot Seat session HERE.
For more immediate issues, it’s been a quiet week thanks to school holidays and the long weekend but there’s one Forum issue lingering from last week, and that’s the new compulsory training for strata committees that came in on October 1st.
Now, there’s no need for anyone to panic. If you’re in NSW and on a committee, you have until your next AGM election and then three months to sign up, log in and get your certificate of completion.
And even then your secretary or strata manager has to ask to see it and tell you you’re no longer on the committee if you don’t – and I’m not even sure that’s the strata manager’s job.
What happens if you miss the deadline, get told you aren’t on the committee but then do the training? Do you automatically get back on? Does the committee have to co-opt you back on to the committee (as they can)? Do you just keep turning up and hope no one noticed?
The rules as they stand are pretty toothless and no one is going to go to jail for breaking them. In fact, even if you provide the casting vote in a disputed motion when you shouldn’t even have been on the committee, the decision will still stand.
So it’s alarming to read a couple of posts to the forum where even the (by definition) super-intelligent beings who read Flat Chat have been befuddled and frustrated by the training module.
“The ridiculous requirement that I create a 10-digit password was it for me,” writes Peter. “I don’t know why such a Mossad level of security is required for a simple compliance measure, but I simply refuse to comply with such nonsense.”
Peter called Fair Trading and pointed out that many people on Strata Committees are of the older demographic, and some with fewer computer skills than others.
“As it is, we’ve already had one 74yo lady resign from the Committee over this, and I won’t be re-nominating at the upcoming AGM.”
Peter is not alone in feeling frustrated. “This website …is a design nightmare,” writes Johnston, who couldn’t even get basic “next” buttons to work. He uses Mozilla Firefox rather than Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge but points out that while the latter two are preferred, the course FAQ says Firefox is okay. You can read his extended rant in the Forum.
Now, as someone who spends half their waking hours wrangling websites and apps, I sympathise with anyone who finds themselves bashing their heads against a digital brick wall.
And, thinking of the 74-year-old woman who has quit her committee over this, I’m reminded of a response to a strata management executive at a meeting who referred sympathetically to “little old ladies” only to have a mature woman in the audience respond that the issue had “nothing to do with gender, age or, indeed, size.” Burn!
Setting aside the inevitable flaws on the FT website, wouldn’t this be an opportunity for someone on a committee who is computer-savvy to sit with members who are deterred by this and walk them through the process?
And am I being harsh in thinking that anyone these days who doesn’t have basic computer skills and refuses to acquire them probably shouldn’t be on a strata committee anyway. Ouch! Mr Cat, meet the pigeons.
You can read the other posts and respond to my last two outrageous comments HERE.
And while you’re there, you can offer some advice to a Victorian reader whose building hasn’t had an AGM for 18 months (the limit between AGMs is 15 months in that state) and whose online records portal has been switched off, apparently by their non-communicative strata manager. That’s HERE.
And if you have the time, post your questions or respond to others’ queries on the Forum. Thanks.
So easy to ask and answer questions
Anyone can read our posts at any time, and now you can also ask and answer questions anonymously too.
As part of our continuing efforts to make the Forum more accessible, we are also now making it possible for anyone to click on “reply” and respond to published posts.
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Forum: The question of the week is, how computer-savvy do you have to be to serve on your committee – and how dumb is the compulsory training?
[See the full original blog post at: Forum: Does strata smart mean computer savvy? To comment on the post, click on reply here.]
If you want to be alerted when anyone replies to your posts or responds to this topic, please register and login, then you will be able to subscribe to the topic. The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers. NB: Longer threads may spill over to additional pages - look for the numbers on the bottom right, under the last post.
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› Forums › Current Page