Page 390 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 18 February 2020
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very well when you have got residential complexes. It has been pretty easy to work out if you have got a bigger, three bedrooms basically, unit. You pay more than for two bedrooms, who pay more than for one bedroom. That was pretty straightforward. But when you have got restaurants, gyms, offices and then a few residential units as well it is not nearly as obvious how the strata unit levies should be paid. This is really important stuff going forward.
Another one, which will be very interesting, is a shift in the threshold for special resolutions to require a 75 per cent majority and a special resolution, rather than an unopposed one, to make certain changes such as to grant use of common property. These are really important because what you have got in a strata title of community is, as I have said, the word “community”. It is sometimes a very small community. In fact, it can be a community of only two households or it can be a community of several hundred households and you may or may not know your neighbours.
Nonetheless, you are all joined in living in basically the same place, and decisions made collectively may well have a significant impact on your quality of life. Working out how you are going to negotiate those decisions also can have a significant impact on your quality of life. If you are living in a strata community then the executive committee and the strata manager make decisions about your common property which will include what you would call driveways but in other places you would call roads, and quite a bit of landscaping.
For the people of Canberra who do not live in unit titles or strata communities, we, as the ACT government, are their decision-makers. TCCS gets to make all those decisions for the other people about their roads, their access, their landscaping. It is a microcosm of what goes on here, you could say, but fortunately it is not party political.
I will now go very briefly through some of the amendments that are going to be moved to this bill. I understand that they are all going to be supported, which is very nice. We will be supporting all of Mr Gentleman’s small number of amendments, and they are mainly minor and technical in nature.
Mr Parton has also circulated amendments to this bill. One has been informed by the Owners Corporation Network, or OCN, who have been advocating for a change to the way that insurance is managed in multi-unit complexes. The OCN have informed Mr Parton and me and, I am sure, Mr Gentleman’s office that they are aware of a number of instances where individual owners have been told by strata managers or the executive committees of owners corporations that they must file an insurance claim themselves.
For many people this would be bewildering. They would not even probably know who the insurance company is, to start with. It is quite possibly a time-consuming process They might also, rightly, wonder why they have been saddled with this task, because in many instances the insurable event relates to a fault in the building—for example, a water ingress issue that has nothing whatsoever to do with any action of their own.
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