choux flat said:
When buying a unit in a strata, you own a physical asset much of it shared, and you 'bought' a set of rights and restrictions. Can this be seen as a contract of sort? Once an issue is brought to the attention of the Owners Corporation, does it then become their obligation to deal with it?
If only it was as simple as that. When you buy an apartment you do, indeed, undertake a contract to abide by the by-laws. But unlike in other states there is no legal obligation on the NSW Owners Corporations to enforce those by-laws.
Now, that's not to say the OC has no obligations. The Strata Act details the requirement to, for instance, carry building insurance and maintain and repair common property. And there are other external legal obligations such as Occupational Health and Safety regulations.
Some might argue that the OC has a 'duty of care' which effectively works as an obligation to enforce by-laws. But if that can be proved – and I don't know if it ever has been – it would be as a consequence of not taking action, not (as far as I'm aware) to to force them to do something.
As the coming weekend's Flat Chat column will argue, all of this makes by-laws in NSW effectively optional. And that means the grounds on which they are selectively enforced could theoretically be challenged as prejudiced against targetted individuals.
There's an easy fix – make by-law enforcement obligatory, as it is elsewhere. Sadly, the mandarins of Fair Trading aren't even remotely interested in what strata dwellers want or need – that would undermine their frequently promulgated fiction that they are doing a good job.