I understand the battles you are having with the strata managers but the solution agreed to is just bowing to them.
No, you don’t understand, because you don’t know the facts. I was dealing with a strata manager who was used to running the show and periodically updating owners on what was going on. Nothing sinister there – it’s just they way they usually worked and most of their clients were happy to go along with it.
When we asked for the strata roll, they refused to hand it over, saying it wasn’t their normal practise and in any case it was private. The former was irrelevant, the latter was not supported by any law that I know of.
When I wrote an email telling them that they were in breach of the Act, all Hell broke loose with their CEO chipping in with seriously unhelpful comments.
Then last week, I had a chat with Strata Commissioner John Minns and his offsider Lachlan Malloch and asked them for a definitive ruling on this. I didn’t get one.
Instead, it became apparent that, while the law is exactly as you have outlined in your post (and as I have constantly argued), it was written before corporate cyber attacks and before innocent people could click on the wrong apparently authentic email and find all their email addresses being posted on the dark web.
The feeling I got was that taking this argument to court or a tribunal was far from the slam-dunk you suggest. So I suggested the super-secure storage option. They would give the strata secretary the strata roll with email addresses and we would store it somewhere it was safe. Even I don’t have access to it.
If owners wanted use the email addresses – to which they are legally entitled – even to run a campaign against the strata committee, we would dutifully forward the emails provided they were legal, and neither offensive nor defamatory.
My personal view is if that wasn’t sufficient, they could take us to a tribunal and seek orders and, between you and me and the FlatChat faithful, I wouldn’t recommend spending a cent on lawyers to defend the case.
However, I might turn up myself, hook my thumbs in my waistcoat and say “cyber security – we’re protecting the owners from the dark web while ensuring they can communicate with each other.”
Now, as with the judge who had to have it explained what the Rolling Stones were, I might have to elucidate on the Dark Web, but I think I could give a random pod-botherer a run for their money.
So, bowing to the strata managers? They didn’t want us to have the strata roll and email addresses, now we have them – the conditions applied were those we, not they, suggested but they could live with them.
Meanwhile we have the opportunity to mend fences at the local level, communicate directly with the scheme’s ownership and in these, the early days of the strata scheme, right the ship and set a true course.
And we got what we wanted without going to a tribunal or a court; you must know that the five words a lawyer most wants to hear are: “It’s a matter of principle.”
And as an aside, the simplest way to make the roll non accessible is to store it on a USB stick (not on your computer or device) and put that in the top drawer. No cyber criminal will find it there.
Hmmm. Same difference. But when your local keyboard warrior demands the email addresses so they can spread conspiracy theories about the whole committee being in cahoots with the developer/strata manager/building manager/plumber (delete as necessary), what do you do then?
I know what I would do and I wouldn’t be bowing to anyone.