OC records and email privacy

The topic of privacy within an Owners Corporation or Body Corproate and access to their records comes up a fair bit on Flatchat.

Here is a curious VCAT case:

http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/vic/VCAT/2021/573.html

The main matter was about a committee meeting that was conducted by email.   Only the resolutions of the meeting were released in the minutes.  Some owners wanted the meeting’s committee email correspondence, apparently in the OC records, to be made available to them.  The OC refused to supply the emails, claiming they were internal committee discussion emails and as such were private.

VCAT noted at 35:  “It is axiomatic that, in general, the nature of the discussion and exchanges at a meeting held in person of the committee will not ordinarily form part of the records of an owners corporation.”

That’s true for every in person OC/BC meeting that I have attended.  Discussions at the meeting don’t tend to wind up much (if at all) in the minutes and therefore not in the records.

But VCAT concluded at 40: “the emails exchanged between committee members at such a meeting, to the extent that they contain the record of the resolutions passed and a record of voting at the meeting, would be records of the owners corporation.”   VCAT ordered those emails at least to be released.

Perhaps the lesson is, if you want internal OC discussions to be private, it’s probably not wise to conduct those discussions via email.