Can you selectively grant permission

As I said on the radio just the other day, there are no strata police going around checking up on who is doing what and whether or not it is illegal. If you have an issue with something, you have to raise a complaint either internally or through the Fair Trading/CTTT system.

To take the example of the EC office-bearers granting themselves use of the common property for parking.  This would quite reasonably be seen as a “perk” that office-bearers are not strictly entitled to.

If the by-law says you can’t park on common property, then they are in breach of their by-laws and any owner can seek redress through the CTTT.

If the by-law says you can’t park on common property without permission, and they have given themselves permission, that’s something you sort out at your next general meeting where you ask the whole building if they are happy for office-bearers to have these perks. 

Some people might think that the Chair and secretary do enough unpaid work for the building that this perk is entirely justified and leave them to it.  Others might object on principle.

But there has to be flexibility to allow communities to set their own standards. If an elderly owner, for instance, was visited regularly by a family member and they had to get permission to park somewhere no one else was allowed to, would that be something you would pursue?

I know of people who reluctantly took a resident to task for consistently leaving their wheelchair in the entrance lobby rather than take it up in the lift to their apartment where it was “in the way”.  The EC was within their rights to ask for it to be moved – but were they morally right?

In the case of the permission for pets being denied where others have been allowed, the hot button is the word “unreasonable”.  If, for instance,  a tenant who had permission from their landlord was denied approval to have a pet in a building where owners were allowed to have pets, that would be unreasonable and discriminatory.

I am told that the CTTT in NSW doesn’t use precedent from other cases but does look at established practice in individual buildings. And I believe this has been used to allow owners who have always treated common property as if it was their own – gardens outside ground-floor units, for instance – to continue to do so. 

But some issues are only problems if someone chooses to make them a problem.  And if a practice is discriminatory, surely it’s better for each  community to set its own standards rather than have some over-bearing catch-all law to cover every eventuality.