Page 3692 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 26 August 2008
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problems for the majority of people in unit titles. It will, in fact, make it worse. There are plenty of models that he could have adopted. There is the Queensland model. The government asked Mr Bugden to come down and run the consultation, given his knowledge of the Queensland system, but they did not adopt the Queensland model.
There is this hugely bureaucratic system about who can be the manager of a body corporate and who may not be a manager of a body corporate. If this legislation passes, there are body corporates all across the territory which will be thrown into confusion simply because there are people around this town whose job it is to manage body corporates, and they do not manage one, they might manage three or four or five or six. Most of those people will only be able to manage one, so the other four or five or six are going to be without a manager and they are going to have to go out and find a manager. All of these things add to the confusion and do not actually address the legitimate concerns that people have.
There are still vetos in body corporates, and that will not necessarily be overcome by this. It is just going to be overlaid with more and more bureaucracy. I know there are people who are concerned about this and who have a miserable time living in their units and their town houses and their apartments because of the way the body corporates are run, and that should be addressed. But this bill does not do that, and it will create a whole lot of other new and different problems.
That is why the Canberra Liberals have said that we will oppose this bill. It is why we have said that when we come to government after the next election it will be the first bill that we repeal, because we do not want to create a situation that is worse than it currently is. We will run a proper consultation. We will probably start with the work that Mr Bugden has already done, which got rave reviews from the people that I speak to at shopping centres who come to me and say, “What are the Liberals going to do about this dreadful unit titles legislation?” They said they started off with high hopes, because Mr Bugden did great work. They had high expectations, and they have not been met by this legislation. We would probably start with that work, but we would work with the community.
There are people who have real concerns which should be addressed. There are people who have real fears because of the way the ACT government has managed this, and those fears need to be addressed and those people need to be assured that a Canberra Liberals government will not have their hands in their pockets unnecessarily. That is why the Canberra Liberals have said that we will oppose this legislation. When we come to government, we will repeal it and we will write new and better legislation in consultation with the community.
MR STEFANIAK (Ginninderra) (10.02): Carrying on from where my colleague Mrs Dunne finished, let me say that over the years I, too, have heard lots of concerns by unit holders. There are some clear things that need fixing up. There are ongoing problems, for example, in a large complex in Belconnen where owners have had people wandering through and trying to vandalise cars and other things and, simply because of issues with the body corporate and other areas—indeed, I think in some aspects of the law—they cannot protect their motor vehicles because of needless bureaucratic problems. These things all need to be fixed up.
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