Painting a picture of entire jurisdictions based on anecdotes about individual buildings isn’t particularly useful. They can be useful if the context and framework that led to the failure is known, and highlighted.
This is a hugely relevant point. Years ago I did a story about one major and highly regarded developer who was demanding proxy votes from owners as a condition of purchase of their units.
[…]
In both cases, the stories were about single instances but they illustrated a larger or wider problem. Random anecdotes are often just little local difficulties, but when a number of them expose the same flaws in the system, they are worth telling and re-telling until someone pays attention.
I haven’t had to directly deal with much internal strata nonsense (Furiously touching wood). But, it sounds like we’re probably on the same page.
So much of the bandwidth of strata difficulties is taken up by people complaining about situations where they’re either in the wrong, or were unaware of how things worked, and led themselves down the garden path… then don’t have the humility to step back or to the side. I can’t imagine how much nonsense NCAT/VCAT has to deal with based on the stories I’ve come across over the years.
Otherwise, the solid anecdotes where individuals or small groups are largely playing by the rules but still getting grafted by the system are, as you say, worth telling and re-telling until someone listens.
That’s why I like highlighting the disparities between different jurisdictions, for any type of issue. Technical standards, laws, bureaucratic frameworks, etc. It gets people thinking about the frameworks, the predominant cultural values, and perhaps wondering – “Maybe there’s a better way to do this”.
They may not be fair comparisons to determine who is better, but there’s nothing like a bit of inter-jurisdiction political rivalry to get some conversations started. The advocates driving those conversations just need to remember it isn’t actually about who is better.
The Victoria-NSW contest is great to do this with for NSW issues, especially with their respective Labor and Liberal state governments and a pending NSW state election.
- This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by .