Page 1469 - Week 04 - Thursday, 26 March 2009
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acknowledgement before occupational sale would—and in this I am quoting Leon Webcke, who was kind enough to give me some words describing this:
… make owners corporations confront the realities of being part of a self-governing community with responsibilities for the common property and towards all of its individual members; It makes individual members, current or prospective, adapt their expectations to the realities of being or planning to become a member of that community; And it provides a basis for an instruction to managers as to how the owners want their corporation managed.
My amendment was pulled at the last minute because I was informed that many owners corporations do not, in fact, hold complete copies of their own articles; they rely instead on the default articles and the records kept by the registrar-general of any amendments made by special resolution of the owners corporation over the years. It seemed to me to be unreasonable to suddenly impose an obligation on them to compile such a document without any forewarning.
Nevertheless, it seems obvious to me that every owners corporation should have a copy of the legally binding rules that apply in their units and also that prospective owners and tenants should have their attention drawn to the rules and understandings which they are about to be legally bound to comply with. It is always better to prevent misunderstanding and conflicts from arising by establishing the rules in advance. This is one amendment which I hope not to wait 12 months to implement, and I will be resubmitting my amendment as soon as I and my staff have been able to deal with the technical difficulties that we encountered in attempting to draft it and table it last week.
As I stated, I will not be supporting Mrs Dunne’s amendment today. The reasons for this lack of support are numerous. I do not think it deals adequately with the transitional arrangements that would have to be in place to protect the interests of those who have prepared documents in the expectation that the government’s amendments will take effect next week.
I also regret to inform the Assembly that I was given no assurance that ACTPLA would not withdraw the approved section 75 form which determines the substance of section 75. Without the reassurance provided by the long form section 75 statement and without the reassurance provided by the implied warranty divisions that Mrs Dunne’s statement would take away, any prospective seller would be put in the invidious position of having no reassurance that they are receiving all of the relevant documents as well as not being able to trust that the seller or their agent were disclosing all information or documents in their knowledge or possession.
Given that, it is possible that people would be unable to obtain finance to purchase units until either the complete long form section 75 became a statutory requirement or the implied warranty provisions were passed. It may be that some of these concerns would not have eventuated, but I felt that it would be irresponsible to risk creating such uncertainty and the potential for chaos in the market. So, with considerable regret, I withdrew my amendments and decided I could not support Mrs Dunne’s.
I would have to say this is not the result of a Faustian pact with the Labor Party. I can assure Mrs Dunne we do not have any such pact. We did obtain a number of positive
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