› Flat Chat Strata Forum › The Professionals › Lawyers say they will only deal with strata manager › Current Page
Is there a remedy? NCAT?
Only if the law is being breached or if the scheme is clearly dysfunctional, or decisions are being made that clearly benefit some owners to the financial detriment of others, or if the committee is engaged in fraud or financial impropriety or the scheme is not fulfilling its legal obligation to maintain and repair common property.
NCAT will look at valid proxies as an indication that those people are generally happy with the way things are being run. The easiest way to change things may be to harvest some of those votes for your side.
Obviously, when you say 5 committee members control 11 proxies, you are including their own votes plus another from supporters. In a scheme of 21 lots, each owner can only carry one proxy.
That would be a very fragile majority if the other 10 owners were united in opposition and persuading one owner to change sides would change everything. But that’s easier said than done and the scenario you describe is very common.
In the days prior to limits on proxies, in one scheme I know of, before each AGM the chair used to diligently go round people who weren’t interested in attending and offer to vote on their behalf, however they wanted on the issues they cared about, which might only be one or two motions.
Armed with that proxy, he might even have voted against his own motions but he had their votes for all the other motions on the agenda.
He had done nothing legally wrong and NCAT would not have raised an eyebrow – even when he turned up at an AGM with more votes and unit entitlements than everyone else put together and used them to replace the only dissenting voice on his committee.
Later, with the 2016 law changes imminent, his submission to Fair Trading on why there shouldn’t be limits on proxy farming was a master class in equivocation.