@Austman said:
Does simply sharing a driveway, and absolutely nothing more, give an OC committee the legal right to represent all the lot owners on matters that don’t directly relate to the common property in that strata plan? I sure hope it wouldn’t!
I am getting a bit weary of this “legal right” argument. Do I have the legal right to express an opinion in public? Yes, I think I do. Is my “freedom of speech” defined in Australian law? No, I don’t think it is. By your logic, that means I don’t have the legal right to express an opinion
I have friends living in strata Plans of Subdivision where only some of the lots are members in an OC … to me, the above demonstrates the reason an OC is created is very much to do with common property maintenance and not much more.
In that specific instance you might be right. But those are very specific instances. They certainly don’t apply to all strata schemes.
I’m not so sure that I agree that a committee should be allowed to automatically legally represent me on those issues.
Again, the weasel words “legally represent”. How is expressing an opinion to a public body (or, indeed, the media) legal representation?
They can speak out if they want, as residents and ratepayers but I’m still struggling to see how they can legally say they represent the views of 190 owners (as is the case in one of my OCs where I am a committee member) on matters not defined by law as a committee’s function.
And again … “legally say”. If we are going to go full Rumpole on this, the NSW Fair Trading factsheet on what a strata committee does says this right at the top: “The strata committee of the owners corporation represents owners or owners’ nominees.”
That’s it. No exclusions, qualifications or definitions of “represents” (although it does go on to specify other duties, which include the secretary “doing all administrative and secretarial duties for the owners corporation and the strata committee.”)
In your nightmare scenarios of owners who only share a driveway but find they are, let’s say, supporting a high-rise brothel on the street corner, the solution is simple – you hold a meeting, you instruct the committee to write to the council and say “we have no opinion on this.”
Except you wouldn’t. You’d say, the views expressed previously were not representative of the majority of owners and this is what we actually feel.
I find it astonishing that, given the checks and balances referred to several times before, we are still discussing this as if strata committees were issuing edicts like Stalinist propagandists and owners had no recourse to correcting the situation. Neither of these situations pertain anywhere that I know of.
And if they did, the mechanisms are there to put things right. Expressing an opinion is not legal representation – except, for instance, when the committee attaches the strata seal to a development application.
I am often called upon to express the opinions of Flat Chat readers – I do my best to give the general consensus but I and the people I’m talking to know that I don’t represent every one of the readers of this website and, indeed, that some readers disagree with my views quite vehemently.
And here’s the other thing – if you don’t want your committee to get involved in any local issues outside the strata scheme, there’s a mandatory motion (in NSW) in every AGM agenda where owners are invited to instruct the committee not to even discuss certain matters.
Try running a ‘no comment’ motion at your next AGM – you might be surprised by how many people want to be represented by the strata committee – and there is absolutely nothing in the law that says they can’t be.