One of the frustrations in dealing with badly behaved neighbours is that after all hassles of pursuing them through Fair Trading and the Consumer, Trader and Tenancy Tribunal, any fines are paid to the government, not to the culprits’ suffering neighbours. But a cunning plan is being hatched south of the border.
QUESTION: I’m a Victorian fan of your column and heard you mention briefly on the radio about issuing fines to residents. My Owners Corporation is thinking about introducing a bylaw that allows us to fine owners or tenants who break our building’s bylaws. Is this possible without being inconsistent with other Acts? And if so how would we enforce these fines especially to tenants? – Mark, Melbourne.
ANSWER: Victorian and NSW strata law differ greatly but I’m pretty sure neither of them allow Owners Corporations to directly fine owners or tenants. They have different approaches to dispute resolution but both ultimately end with fines, or the threat of them, at the Consumer, Trader and Tenancy Tribunal (in NSW) or Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
This costs money. If you issue a “Notice To Comply” in NSW and then pursue it through to the CTTT, your strata manager will charge extra for all the extra work in preparing and prosecuting the case. But costs are not awarded to either party and fines are paid to the CTTT.
However, there is a theory that you can impose a reasonable “service charge” to cover the cost of following the dispute procedure. So you may get a by-law through that says owners agree that they and/or their tenants will be liable for the reasonable costs of any cases pursued against them that prove to be successful.
That way you can warn people who are breaching by-laws that they face a definite and hefty charge for processing the case plus a possible fine of up to $500 from the CTTT (or in this case VCAT) if they lose. The “service charge” would, of course be paid to owners corporation.
This wouldn’t affect tenants directly but their landlords would soon get sick of being slugged for their bad behaviour and do something about them. Sadly, hip pocket therapy often works where logic, reason and common decency fail.
UPDATE: Since sending Mark this advice, he has written to say that VCAT have no problem with this approach.