Podcast: BBQs and secret committee meetings

A couple of issues popped on to the Flat Chat radar while we were off being festive.

One was all about smoking on balconies which, if that wasn’t serious enough, raised the spectre of barbecues being banned from apartment blocks.

Is the threat real and would anyone care? Or could we expect to see Sam Kekovich leading a protest march on state parliaments to deter our politicians from making any such unAustralian decisions.

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LISTEN HERE

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While we’re on the subject of threats to democracy (he says, drawing an extremely long bow) why are owners welcome to attend strata committee meetings in some states but not in others?

When we say “welcome”, of course we mean tolerated.  But at least that’s better than the situation in Victoria where you have to be invited to see what your elected reps are saying and why they make the decisions they do.

If they don’t want you to observe their deliberations, you are stuffed if their agendas and minutes are less than painstakingly accurate.

But then what do you do about the angry owner who takes the rule that they can’t speak without permission as a provocation rather than a protocol?

And finally, did you know that while we are celebrating Australia Day morning (or not, depending on your political inclinations) the Scots will still be celebrating Burns night with their traditional haggis-laden feast, complete with a recitation of the Bard’s ode to Scotland’s national dish (if you don’t count curry and chips).

In recognition, with half an eye of an alternative to the BBQ burger burners, we offer you a healthy but tasty option: vegetarian haggis. Not sure if that’s unAustralian – maybe you’ll need to check out the video below.

But, as we say on the podcast, it’s delicious and won’t stink out your or your neighbours’ flats. Enjoy.

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast (or reading the transcript), please share it with your friends using the social media buttons on this page.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq3UpFAwPbA

TRANSCRIPT IN FULL

Jimmy  00:00

Another Christmas and New Year behind us!

Sue  00:02

Yes, and a whole new year ahead!

Jimmy  00:05

 Right.

Sue  00:07

That’s the difference between us, Jimmy. You’re kind of like “oh, the year’s gone, Christmas is gone… Oh, woe is me.” Whereas, I’m thinking “wow, 2023! A whole new year, of new possibilities!”

Jimmy  00:18

Well, yeah, I wasn’t thinking “woe is me;” I’m happy that Christmas has gone.

Sue  00:24

So the Grinch who tried to ruin Christmas?

Jimmy  00:26

Right. I think it was ‘stole Christmas.’ We have a couple of things to catch up on, since we’ve been silent over the holiday period. There was the couple who managed to (finally) get a ban on their neighbor’s smoking on their balcony, because the smoke was coming into their house.

Sue  00:48

Took them a long time, didn’t it?

Jimmy  00:50

Yes, and then that prompted a comment by the President of the Strata Community Association, that a blanket ban on smoking could lead to a ban on barbecues.

Sue  01:02

You’d be happy to see that!

Jimmy  01:05

Well, we’ll have a chat about that. I’m Jimmy Thomson, I write the Flat Chat column for the Australian Financial Review.

Sue  01:12

And I’m Sue Williams and I write about property for Domain.

Jimmy  01:14

 And this is the Flat Chat Wrap.

[MUSIC]

Jimmy

Barbecues on balconies… Yes, I know I’ve got history in this. What do you reckon, Sue?

Sue  01:37

Well, I know it’s your bete noire, isn’t it, really? You feel that barbecues have no place on apartment balconies, because the smoke goes into other people’s apartments, and so many people just burn off the residue of their last barbecue; that’s how they clean it, which can really stink. Look, I have a lot of sympathy with that. But at the same time, a barbecue is part of the Australian way of life. If people look after their barbecues correctly, and they make sure lots of smoke doesn’t drift into their neighbours’…

Jimmy  02:10

But they don’t…

Sue  02:12

Well, yes. But if they looked after them properly, then there wouldn’t be a problem. So really, the idea is to stamp out bad barbecue-users, rather than get rid of barbecues completely from apartment balconies. I mean, I guess you also have an idea that it can be quite dangerous sometimes, as well.

Jimmy  02:30

I mean, look, the only injury (when we had terrible horrendous winds)… I think it was this time last year, or the year before, with somebody being hit by a flying gas canister from a barbecue. It just got picked up by the wind. It must have been empty, I would think. It was picked up by the wind and thrown off and hit this poor bloke in the street, just walking along. But I don’t think you can blame all barbecues for that.

Sue  02:54

No, but I thought you were kind of thinking more of, if anything caught fire, or overheated, or sparked?

Jimmy  03:02

Well, you know, it just strikes me as ironic, that here we are getting ourselves in a tizz and spending millions of dollars, removing flammable cladding from buildings, without removing a source of naked flames from buildings.

Sue  03:17

Yes. But then, if there’s a building without flammable cladding, would it be okay for them to have a barbecue?

Jimmy  03:22

No.

Sue  03:23

Okay. Is that because of the smoke, or is it because of the inherent risk of danger?

Jimmy  03:29

 It’s a cultural thing. At the moment, we’ve got a campaign going on for Australia Day. Basically, it implies that you’re un-Australian if you don’t eat lamb. So imagine what those people would say about people who say that you can’t have barbecues? Now, we’re not saying you can’t have barbecues at all, because a lot of buildings have communal barbecue areas, which I think is fine. It’s actually a good thing, because then people would meet each other while they’re out there, burning their beef, or whatever it is they’ve got. I’m not against barbecues, per se. I’m not even against people cooking meat and sausages and bacon, if that’s what they want. It’s not my preference, but you know, that’s their choice. It’s just this complete lack of concern for everybody all around you. If you imagine an apartment in that kind of Brady Bunch grid, of three rows of three;  the people beside you and the people above you, are all going to (likely) be affected by the smell from your barbecue. Why are we not allowed to say, can you just cut this down a bit and can you be a bit more considerate?

Sue  04:41

So you’d say you can only use it once a week, or something like that?

Jimmy  04:46

We’ve had situations in the past, where the people who rented the flat below us (in the past, not the current ones)… It seemed to be three young guys who were sharing, none of whom had been taught to cook, apparently So it was a barbecue every night. Every night, they cooked on the barbecue. It was disgusting. It wasn’t just meat that they were cooking. They were obviously cooking prawns and fish and stuff like that. It was absolutely disgusting; it drove me mad. So you’ve got that situation, where people are using it as their main form of cooking. I don’t think that should be allowed. These apartments all have pretty high-tech stoves in them. Learn to cook!

Sue  05:28

Sure. I mean, I guess it’s okay in a house, if you’ve got a backyard and you use your barbecue to barbecue meat or fish, but I mean, that’s in the open air, really. But an apartment balcony is still a very enclosed space.

Jimmy  05:44

You’ve got a building like ours, which is (I think they call it ‘negatively pressured’)… So if you leave your windows open, it will draw air in. Our building in fact, is not allowed to have air conditioning. So if it’s a hot summer’s day (the kind of day that people want to use their barbecue), we’ve got to leave our windows open, to let the air blow through. If somebody’s cooking with a barbecue, that just blows smoke into our apartment, and we get about five seconds, where we’ve got to sprint and try and get the door shut, before the whole house is stunk out with somebody’s rotten meat. Rotten meat is probably overstating it, slightly.

Sue  06:24

I remember we were discussing it in an EC meeting once, that we had in somebody’s apartment. We’d just about got to the thing about barbecues; whether we should be allowing them, and suddenly, this huge cloud of acrid black smoke came into the apartment. It was so thick, we could hardly see each other and it was from the neighbor’s barbecue. It was kind of quite timely, really. It can be very, very annoying and particularly if you’ve got kids. You know, it’s not very nice for them to be breathing in that kind of secondhand barbecue smoke.

Jimmy  06:49

Everybody knows now (well, not everybody knows;  they will, when I tell them), that burnt meat is carcinogenic. There are elements in the surface of burnt meat that cause cancer. In fact, if you eat a lot of meat, you’re more likely to get stomach cancer. So it’s not healthy, for a start. Whether or not that can be transmitted through smoke is a whole other issue. The big problem for me is, it’s all or nothing. You cannot say to people “can we restrict the use of barbecues in apartment blocks?” They’ll go “no, no no! You’re not allowed to stop us. This is our freedom; this is our right, to do this.” So you can’t actually say “how about no more than three times a week?”

Sue  07:43

Really hard to police that though, isn’t it really? But it could be a guideline that people might adhere to.

Jimmy  07:51

Our building has a voluntary code of conduct and a lot of people look at the word ‘voluntary’ and they hear ‘unenforceable.’ You know, “I can do what I want. Nobody can stop me, because this is voluntary and I choose not to abide by these rules.” Again, it’s the all or nothing thing. You stand up at a meeting and you say “can we have some restrictions on barbecues?” and people go absolutely berserk. And then, you go outside on the street and look at the number of barbecues on the balcony… There’s only about (at most), 20 to 25% of the balconies with barbecues. So you’ve got this substantially small minority, deciding the quality of life for everybody else in the building, because they’re obsessed with wanting or needing to cook on an open grill, or a hot plate on a balcony, and create as much smoke and stink as they want, when they want and nobody’s allowed to challenge that.

Sue  08:49

So therefore, you kind of feel that barbecues should be banned on balconies then, do you?

Jimmy  08:53

I think in the same way that we have pet bylaws, I think every strata scheme in New South Wales should be legally obliged to have a bylaw about smoking and a bylaw about barbecues. I’m not saying what that bylaw should be, but it should be there, so that people have to think about what they’re doing.

Sue  09:15

So people can complain as well and say “look, you know, there’s been three barbecues this week, and the person isn’t cleaning their grill properly.”

Jimmy  09:24

Well the simplest way to do it (I mean, any building can do this), because the balconies in most apartment blocks are common property and the owners corporation can control what is and what isn’t on the balcony, even down to the colour of any tables and chairs on the balcony, because it’s common property… So you can say “yes, you can have a barbecue, but on condition that x, y, z. You don’t use it every night, or you clean it when you do use it,” and stuff like that. The default position is you have permission to use it, but there are conditions applied to that. And the problem is, you cannot raise this issue in a lot of strata schemes, without creating this hysteria about people’s rights to eat burnt animal flesh.

Sue  10:13

And being un-Australian.

Jimmy  10:15

And being un-Australian.

Sue  10:17

Yes, absolutely. We need a lot more reason and rationality.

Jimmy  10:23

But we need people to have to think about it. And the way you get people to have to think about it is you put up a standard bylaw about smoking and a standard bylaw about barbecues, and allow every scheme to change those bylaws, within the parameters. You know, it’s got to be reasonable, to suit the lifestyle of the people in the building.

Sue  10:45

And the type of building, as well. Fair enough. Well, happy summer days!

Jimmy  10:52

When we come back, we’re going to talk about whether you should be allowed to go to your strata committee meetings and how you should behave when you get there. That’s after this.

[MUSIC]

Jimmy

We are back, and there’s been a bit of discussion on the Flat Chat website and on LinkedIn in fact, about strata committees and whether owners should attend and whether they should be allowed to attend. Just to clarify the situation; in New South Wales, you have the right to attend your strata committee meeting, but you can only speak if you’re invited to do so; are allowed to do so, by the committee. In Queensland, the same applies, but you have to tell the chair or the secretary in writing, 24 -hours before the meeting that you’re planning to attend. But again, you can only speak if you’re invited, or allowed. In Victoria, you have no right to attend a strata committee meeting at all. You can attend if you’re invited to, but if you’re not invited to, you can’t attend. Now, to me, that is the very start of a lot of the problems that are starting to become apparent in Victoria, where people are finding out that things are going wrong in their buildings, long after it’s possible to fix these problems simply. The committees get very secretive. They’re supposed to issue minutes, but they don’t. I’m not saying this is all committees; in fact, it’s a minority of committees in Victoria. But there are some committees that are very secretive. They don’t allow anyone to attend. They only issue in the minutes what they want to issue to you. People say “well, you just elect another committee.” Well, the way the elections work in Victoria, is the committee stays in power, unless somebody else is voted on in the place of the people that are there, which is a kind of default continuation of the same people, rusted on the committee.

Sue  12:54

And you don’t really know how people are performing, unless you go along and have a look, or you read the minutes closely and the minutes are a true reflection of the meeting.

Jimmy  13:03

But the minutes, often they are; in some cases that we’ve had reported to us, they just don’t exist. And the VCAT (which is the Victorian Civil Administrative Tribunal), is very slack on enforcing these things. They don’t come along and say to committees “you must start issuing these minutes,” and stuff like that. In fact, what I’m hearing is, they’re so clogged up there with rental disputes at the moment, that VCAT isn’t listening to strata disputes at all.

Sue  13:34

That’s appalling!

Jimmy  13:36

Yes, I agree. The other thing about strata committees in Victoria, is the chair in Victoria has a casting vote. So you add up all these things; the lack of transparency, the lack of compulsion to do what the law tells them that they should be doing, in terms of issuing agendas and minutes. And the fact that one person in a committee can have a lot of power, it just opens the door for anybody who wants to act corruptly, to do so.

In one case that was reported to us, the committee chair and the building manager had colluded. They had an agreement to replace all the windows in the building, but they got a contractor to do it at something like eight times the cost that it would have been done by anybody else, and they did this in several buildings, where they were both chair and building manager. Did they have a relationship with the contractor then? You would think so. A very healthy kickback, coming into their pockets, but how do you prove that?

So I think it’s really important that owners… There’s a potential for owners to turn up at committee meetings and listen to what’s going on. Now, the other side of that coin, as has been pointed out to me, is the disruptive owner. Because it’s all very well to say “you’re not allowed to speak unless you’re given permission to speak…” What if somebody says “well, I don’t need your permission. I’m going to talk, anyway. I’m going to disrupt this meeting, because I don’t agree with the decisions you’re making, or because I’m…”

You know what it’s like. You’ve seen it at close hand; people come in and say “I’ve been hard done by;” usually because they don’t understand the law. “You won’t do this and you won’t do that.” And when people say “well, we’re not discussing that now,” and they just go on and on. I’ve heard of cases where the building security people have been called to the meeting, to remove the disruptive owner and they’ve basically said “well, we don’t do that. We can’t do that. We’re not insured for that. We’re not empowered to do that.” And so the meeting has to be cancelled.

Sue  15:50

Well, I’ve been at a meeting where that happened before and the chair (who was thinking on her feet), said “okay, I declare this meeting adjourned and then we’re going to reconvene it in another place.” She didn’t tell the members who weren’t members of the committee, which place it was going to be. So we all then decamped to another apartment, and continued the meeting there.

Jimmy  16:16

Right, which is not strictly legal.

Sue  16:18

No, because it doesn’t allow any other people to come along if they want to.

Jimmy  16:22

But, what you’ve done there is something that is very pragmatic.  Nobody’s going to go to NCAT or tribunal and say “I want this meeting declared null and void, because they didn’t follow proper procedure.” I mean, NCAT will say “yes, they didn’t follow proper procedure… Don’t do it again,” but they’re not going to declare all the decisions made. And this is one of the things we get hamstrung by; second-guessing all the time what might happen if somebody took us to tribunal. If you’re acting illegally or corruptly, then yes, you should get taken to the tribunal and that should be fixed. But in terms of just not following the letter of strata law, I think you’ve got to give yourself a bit of leeway.

If somebody as an owner comes in, and is deliberately disruptive, and basically sits there and says “I’m going to disrupt this meeting, because I can, and because you won’t do what I want,” then I think you’re entitled to bend the rules. But you know, you can’t legislate that. I mean, I keep saying to people on the website, get a code of conduct; a code of conduct, enshrined in a bylaw.

A code of conduct and standing orders. And standing orders will say things like, a person can’t speak for a second time, until everybody who wants to speak has had at least one turn. It sounds a bit kind of over-organised or pedestrian, but it means that people who want to speak aren’t constantly getting shouted down by the loudest voice in the room, who keeps butting in and butting in and butting in.

Sue  18:04

Well, you could hold meetings at 5am.

Jimmy  18:07

People have done things like holding meetings in rooms at the top of staircases, because one of the people that they didn’t like was in a wheelchair.

Sue  18:16

Oh my god!

Jimmy  18:18

So they’re saying “well, we told them where the meeting was and it’s up to them to find their way there.” It’s holding a meeting at 5am. A lot of strata managers will hold meetings during their working hours, which also happens to be everybody else’s working hours. So people who have got jobs can’t attend the meetings. Now, there’s nothing in the law to stop them doing that, except that if you get control of the committee, you can get rid of the strata manager for not doing what the majority of owners want. But I think having standing orders backed up by a bylaw, so that you can say… For instance, if you’ve got a disruptive person at a meeting, you can say “okay, I propose that this person is named in the minutes as being disruptive.” And then the committee takes a vote. The committee is protected by privilege immunity against prosecution, or being sued, or whatever, for libel, because they’re doing this in the normal course of their business. And so the minutes go out, and it says ‘so and so Jimmy Thomson was named for being disruptive at this meeting, and was asked to leave the meeting and refused to leave.’

At least everybody else in the building knows that that person is being disruptive and being a pain. But you’ve got to put these structures in place. You’ve got to get the bylaws passed to do that. And again, Fair Trading in New South Wales and in Victoria is pretty much the same. They issue fact sheets that tell you that you can do this and you can’t do that… Nobody says ‘this is how to conduct a meeting,’ to tell you these are the things you must do in a meeting. T

here’s nothing that says ‘this is how to conduct a meeting; this is how to protect the members against disruptive owners,’ and things like that. That’s just such a basic thing. People go into strata committees; they’ve got no idea, unless they might be members of committees elsewhere, and they try and bring that structure in, which is usually fine. But if they’re not, they’re just stumbling around, with absolutely no assistance on how they should and could be doing things.

Sue  20:39

That would be really helpful.

Jimmy  20:40

It would.

Sue  20:41

I remember we had a chairperson once of an EC, who was high up in an IT company. They held their meetings and for every item on the agenda, they would only allow two and a half minutes. So he started to run our meetings in that same way and after two and a half minutes, he would say “that’s it, no more discussio. We’ll move to a vote.” It was just bizarre. I mean, the meetings were very, very quick. It did mean that everybody rebelled, obviously, after the first meeting, I think. We said we can’t carry on like this; it’s just crazy.

[MUSIC]

Jimmy  21:21

One final word on being un-Australian and not wanting barbecues and things; as well as Australia Day, we’re coming up to Burns Night, the Scottish poet’s celebration, and there’s the traditional haggis. Now, anybody who is out there who is a vegetarian, or health conscious and wants a recipe for vegetarian haggis which actually works… Because we’ve done it, haven’t we?

Sue  21:50

Yes, well, you’ve done it and I’ve eaten it. It was very good.

Jimmy  21:53

There will be a link on the website, for a website called ‘Scottishscran.’ I won’t even try and spell it; it’ll be on the website. There’ll be a link there. Find it and give it a try and I’ll tell you what; it won’t stink out your neighbor’s apartment, either.

Sue  22:10

It’ll be quite interesting and a conversation-starter for an Australia Day lunch.

Jimmy  22:15

People will say “where did you get this excellent-tasting thing?” They’ll say “a website about living in apartments.” You make the connection! All right, thanks, Sue.

Sue  22:26

Cheers, Jimmy.

Jimmy  22:27

We’re up and running again.

Sue  22:28

Great. And Happy New Year to everybody!

Jimmy  22:30

Yes, and we probably need that timing thing, to stop us going over time, as we always do, but it’s not too bad this week. Thanks very much for listening, and we will talk to you again soon.

Sue  22:40

Bye.

[MUSIC]

Jimmy  22:43

Thanks for listening to the Flat Chat Wrap podcast. You’ll find links to the stories and other references on our website, flatchat.com.au. And if you haven’t already done so, you can subscribe to this podcast completely free on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your favourite pod catcher. Just search for Flat Chat Wrap with a w, click on subscribe, and you’ll get this podcast every week, without even trying. Thanks again. Talk to you again next week.