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Our owners corporation recently decided at an AGM to draft a new By-law which when completed will be circulated and then decided at an EGM by proxy.
The By-Law will be controversial.
With a fist full of proxy votes in the hands of the Chair and perhaps other members of the EC, the quorum for a special resolution will be met, the motion will be passed and the coterie will roll on!
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Pete – I don’t know about the ACT but perhaps your namesake “Peter C” will jump in on that one, but in NSW a General Meeting has to be convened at a physical location that allows Proprietors to personally attend if they choose to do so, and any Owner who instead chooses to grant their proxy, can at Item 2 on the prescribed Form instruct, or more correctly place a limitation upon the matters that their appointee may vote on, and how they want that vote to be cast.
Whilst any proxies that your Executive Committee can successfully “harvest” would certainly count in terms of determining a quorum for the Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM), in order for those proxies to be validly exercised and be included in the ≥75% calculation to determine the outcome of the vote on that Special Resolution (i.e. a “poll vote”), the appointee must vote in accordance with the proxy-giver’s instructions.
So in NSW, the solution is to in the first instance find out from your Secretary or Strata Manager the “place where the Meeting is to be held”, and to then lobby your fellow Owners to ensure that they either physically attend OR that they note at Item 2 on the prescribed Form a “limitation” setting out how it is that they want their vote to be cast on the Special Resolution (and indeed on any other about which they have a preference).
Pete– thanks…. and on the subject of limits to proxy-harvesting, the NSW Government recently announced the third iteration of its long-promised reforms to the 18 year old Strata Schemes Management Act, and one of those was to limit the proxies that any person can hold to number equivalent to 20% of the Plan’s total Lots, or to 5 proxies; whichever is the lesser number.
But that, and a range of other reforms that Jimmy T recently summarised HERE are still just proposals, so right now all that you and other affected Owners can do is to make yourselves aware of those few limitations that do currently exist, and to do your collective best to outsmart the coterie (that’s often not smart).
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