› Flat Chat Strata Forum › Living in strata › Are abstentions a vote or not › Current Page
@noshirts said:It is quite possible that the NSW legislation intended to operate similar to the ACT but just worded it badly.
Anything is possible – but if that was the NSW legislators’ intent why then have the current crop come up with a slight clarification that is different from the ACT regulations in precisely the way I have outlined above.
The wording of the current law – “one-quarter in value of votes is cast …” – is only slightly more ambiguous than the proposed law: “… 25% of the value of votes cast …” However, it clearly refers to the votes actually cast rather than, as in ACT regs, the number of votes that could have been cast.
You will still get pedants who will argue, quite wrongly, that an abstention is the casting of a non-vote and therefore should be counted in the overall total.
However, this Act has been in place for almost 20 years and I am yet to come across a single example of a court ruling creating the precedent where an abstention at a strata general meeting is counted as a vote.
So, no more hypotheticals on this please. As my mother used to say, “If ‘ifs and ands’ were pots and pans, there’d be no need for tinkers.”
Also, with all due respect to Mr Ilkin, if all lawyers agreed on interpretations of the law they would do themselves out of a job.