#63456
Austman
Flatchatter

    The strata committee has obligations and they can be compelled to fulfil them.

    But how are they actually “compelled”?

    Has a Committee itself ever been individually fined or otherwise penalised by a Tribunal or a Court?

    If so, I think I’ll be resigning from all the Committees that I’m a member of and my Chair role too.  It’s all done voluntarily with my best intentions, due care and diligence.   And that seems to be the limit of what I am actually compelled to do.

    Having a statutory duty is all very well but failing to actually give an OC/BC or a Committee any authority to actually enforce that statutory duty makes it a moot point.   Issue a breach notice?  That’s just a warning.  Not much enforcement authority there.

    There is a recent QLD case where the Adjudicator made a comment on this:

    http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/qld/QBCCMCmr/2021/596.html

    In the last paragraph (47) the Adjudicator noted that: “The body corporate is not obliged to enforce section 167 of the Act, but it does have a statutory obligation to enforce the by-laws”.

    That’s because the QLD Body Corporate and Community Management Act 1997 at s.94 states that a Body Corporate must enforce its by-laws (or at least try to).   That’s what makes it a statutory obligation.   But there’s no such requirement in the same Act for Body Corporate to enforce actual laws.

    To me that makes some sense.  The BC didn’t make the actual laws – the government did. If the government wants the BC to enforce them, it should give the BC some genuine authority to actually do so.   But a BC can make its own by-laws,  so it really should at least attempt to enforce those before a Tribunal or Court gets involved.

    Regardless, if an OC/BC Committee doesn’t attempt enforce its by-laws/rules or actual laws what’s going to happen to the Committee?  Not much in reality.  So it’s not really “compelled”.