No waiting: You can dump committee duds now

I have a few words of encouragement and comfort for anyone who thinks they are stuck with a dysfunctional committee, or is on a committee with a destructively disruptive member.

You don’t have to wait for your next AGM to fix things. 

Under NSW laws that came into effect earlier this year, if you have enough support, you can call an Extraordinary General Meeting and get rid of the nuisance members by a simple majority vote, and they can’t stand for election for another year.

Even if you aren’t the secretary – who can call a general meeting whenever they please – all you have to do is get 25 per cent of owners (by unit entitlement) to petition for a general meeting and you are halfway there.

And going by the apathy that’s endemic in most strata schemes, getting 25 per cent of owners to support you will translate into a huge majority at the meeting where the vote is counted from those who turn up, vote electronically or send proxies.

Conversely, if you can’t get that level of support then your case may not be as strong as you think.

How can you drum up interest?  Firstly, don’t be put off by fears that you can be sued for defamation just by criticising someone, especially if you restrict your complaints to actions that can be shown to have affected the smooth running of the scheme.

Back in 2019 the chair of a building in Manly sued a tenant who had described him in an email to other residents as, among other things,  a “small-minded busybody who wastes the time of fellow residents on petty items.”

The chair initially won $120,000 in damages at a District Court but this was overturned by the NSW Court of Appeal – the state’s highest court – which found a defence of “qualified privilege” was appropriate because the tenant was entitled to comment on the running of the building.  The court also awarded the legal costs for both cases against the plaintiff.

Budding Rumpoles can re-read the decision HERE but the key message is, if you restrict your criticisms to the running of the scheme and can avoid any sense that there is malice behind your comments, you are probably in the clear.

For instance, you might reasonably say that it’s time owners reviewed the election of a member who has consistently disrupted meetings where the majority opinion is against them (if, indeed, you have evidence to back that up).

What you probably can’t say is that they are a violent drunk whose presence is a blight on the whole scheme, let alone the committee, and even whose family members and dog hate them … even if that’s demonstrably true.

The point is that you don’t have to wait for your AGM before you make necessary changes in your committee. All of this came out of my discussions with David Bannerman in our Lawyer in the Hot Seat session this week which will be the basis for the Flat Chat podcast next week.

But you really should check with your own strata lawyer before you venture into any murky legal waters.