Page 3690 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 26 August 2008
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people to throw the thing out and start again. At the same time, it is tempered by a level of frustration amongst people who live in unit titles and who are affected by this legislation because, at the moment, the system does not work.
I have worked in this place for 13 years, and all the time that I have worked here, either as a member or before that as a staffer, I have dealt with people who have had problems with various iterations of the unit titles legislation. There are some standout and spectacular cases of where the unit titles legislation does not serve the people who live in units. We have to remember this—and Dr Foskey is right—there are increasing numbers of people who live in units, apartments, town houses and the like who are governed by body corporates. There are an increasing number of people in the ACT who are paying a very high price by having many of the freedoms that we take for granted taken away from them.
Many people who live in unit titles do not have the true enjoyment of their property that people have come to expect, especially when you live in detached housing. It is nigh on impossible to own a pet, and that is a great disincentive, as Dr Foskey pointed out, for many people. This legislation, of course, does take steps towards addressing that issue, and that is welcome. There are some changes in the bill that are welcome. However, the overall effect is still a flawed piece of legislation. I suppose it is what we have come to expect in the ACT, year in and year out, and, I have to say in all honesty, government in and government out, in that the unit titles legislation does not meet the needs of the people of the ACT who live in units, apartments and town houses.
The fact that I am saying this today is not new; it has been like this for 13 or 14 years to my knowledge. When I first came to work in this place as an adviser to Mr Humphries, who was then the planning minister, I had a lot to do with people who were tearing their hair out in frustration at the capacity for one person in a unit title to veto anything that was going on. There were problems with the raising of money for sinking funds; there was the differential treatment between class A and class B units; and there were problems over time with encroachments which made it impossible for people to sell properties that were subject to unit titles. The problems go on and on, and there has been a bandaid here and another bandaid there.
To its credit, the government started a consultation. The feedback that I have had from many people who were involved in that consultation was that it started off very well indeed. They felt that they got a really good hearing from the official, Mr Bugden, who came and spoke to people about unit titles. He worked through their problems, and they felt that they were actually going to make some progress. But, somewhere along the line, all the work of Mr Bugden seems to have been thrown out like the baby with the bathwater. It now seems that the model proposed by Mr Bugden was unacceptable to the government and that the government has decided to reinvent the wheel.
What we actually have now is a hugely bureaucratic structure which will make it, in most cases, harder for people to run their unit titles. There will be much more constraint and much more recourse to an outside umpire for even the simplest things. Mrs Burke pointed to the fact that it will now become the case that you actually have
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