Rotting Victorian strata calls for a champion

Here in Sydney we have often wondered why we didn’t hear too much about defects in Victorian apartment blocks.

Was it because they built better buildings there? How about, maybe their strata laws offered better protection for apartment owners?

Well, guess what.  Neither of those things are true.  From what we hear, Victoria’s defective apartments scene is roughly where NSW was 15 years ago.

And that’s an awful place to be. Defects in buildings are ignored and left to fester until the cost of fixing them would be more than the value of the apartments.

Strata committees hide information from their owners – aided and abetted by strata managers and building managers – so that people don’t know what’s going on until it’s too late.

According to one detailed report we’ve received, strata committees won’t let owners know what the true situation is. Owners in Victoria have no right to attend strata committee meetings and strata managers won’t let them see paperwork because “you don’t need to know everything”.

Meanwhile, Consumer Affairs Victoria (the equivalent of NSW Fair Trading) say they can’t help and the tribunal (VCAT) says they won’t help.

We suspected this was going on but it’s all come to a head with an ABC radio report that reveals that work done to remove and replace flammable cladding has exposed buildings that are rotting from the inside out.

Why are they rotting?  Probably because previous strata committees have decided not to maintain and repair common property to keep fees down, in the hope that the next person to buy the apartment will pay for it.

Why would they do that?  Because Victorian legislation is so weak that there is nothing to deter or prevent them.

Who’s to blame? The developers who constructed sub-standard blocks, the owners who did nothing, the strata managers who sat back and watched it happen – saying nothing, so they could hold on to their contracts – and the politicians who don’t care because there were no votes in apartment owners.

Victorian apartment owners and some strata professionals are crying out for a Building Commissioner, like NSW’s David Chandler, who will cut through the BS and get things done.

According to the ABC report, Jonathan Barnett, an expert in fire safety engineering said there was nowhere near enough funding needed to fix the combined cladding and mould problems.

“Before the state-wide cladding audit, I would learn about unsafe, or non-compliant cladding, because of mould. It seems that mould and cladding go together, especially when we have expanded polystyrene walls,” he said.

He added that the cladding remediation budget of $600 million was inadequate: “They need something in the order of two and a half to three billion dollars.”

Mr Barnett said New South Wales had made strides in regulation with the introduction of a building commissioner and that other states should follow suit.

“He [commissioner David Chandler] has all the questionable practitioners shaking in their boots. He goes to building sites, he looks at drawings, he talks to people – and he is actually making a difference.”

“We have no [commissioner] in Victoria. We need a champion for the public. We need a champion for the consumer. We don’t have that person,” he told the ABC.