The tumbling tumbleweeds of NSW Strata Law Reform
It’s been pretty quiet on the NSW strata law reform prairie. Whilst more tumbleweeds roll by ….
When I started to write this newsletter in early 2020, there was much excitement about major reforms of NSW strata laws. But, almost 2 years since the reform process was announced, I’m still watching the strata tumbleweeds roll by without anything useful really happening. Why am I surprised?
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NSW strata stakeholders continue to wait for law reforms
One of my first newsletter articles for GoStrata Stak was ‘NSW Strata Law Reform Déjà vu’ where I cynically said “I really wonder what the point of this is? “ since I’d been through this more than a few times over the last 25+ years and both questioned the need for the review and the likely slow path to law reform.
Sadly, my cynicism has proved true.
Worse still the efforts of many committed stakeholders in early 2021 to make detailed to submissions to the NSW government have been rewarded with virtually nothing.
More than 222 detailed submissions were made at the time [including mine which is summarised in ‘Strata Reforms [NSW]: Stage 1 Wrap Up’] and 2,329 people answered various surveys that were issued.
But none were made publicly available and my request for copies of other submissions to see what stakeholders said was answered by NSW Fair Trading with the statement:
‘‘All submissions received during the consultation process will be carefully considered and we endeavour to make submissions publicly available at a later date. However, submissions that have requested to be anonymous will not be made publicly available.”
as I explained in the article ‘NSW Strata Law Reforms [Non] Update’.
In November 2021, The Report on the statutory review of the Strata Schemes Development Act 2015 and Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 was published with 139 recommendations. You can read it here.
But, there’s no scheduled follow-up or next steps in the strata law reform process and nothing more has been published or said to strata stakeholders about the reform process since then.
So, we all sit and wait patiently whilst problems in the governance of strata buildings continue and the new social, political and economic pressures that our post-Covid world presents were entirely missed by the consultation process.
Meanwhile …
But, it’s not as though nothing has happened to NSW strata laws during 2021 and 2022 since the government has done a few things as follows.
Firstly, NSW dogs and cats have had plenty of attention as strata laws changed to make it harder for strata buildings to make by-laws prohibiting or restricting animals or to refuse requests for approval to keep animals in their buildings.
You can read more about those changes in my articles ‘It's an NSW Pets Fest’ and ‘Covid-19, Pets & Strata in 2021’.
And, we now have the NSW StrataHub!
It’s a government-run electronic strata information platform that all strata buildings must report to [at least annually] with basic information about their buildings and pay annual charges for.
Unfortunately, the information at StrataHub is limited and not very useful to most strata stakeholders.
Plus, it’s not accessible to most people [since only registered strata lot owners can see it] and even strata lot owners can only get the following information:
the email address of the secretary and chairperson [but not their phone numbers],
strata manager contact details [in case they didn’t already have that ???],
building manager contact details [in case they didn’t already have that too ???],
the date of the latest annual fire safety statement [but not a copy of it], and
if a strata renewal committee has been established for their building,
which is less information than most strata owners already have.
So, it doesn’t really look like much of a strata information revolution to me.
The cynical me [remember him] also wonders whether Stratahub has just created more work and cost for lots of strata stakeholders to recreate useless strata information that is less available than under existing mechanisms to fewer people than can access it now.
But then again, perhaps Stratahub isn’t really for the benefit of strata stakeholders.
So, what’s next ?
Who really knows what’s next on the NSW strata law reform journey?
It’s probably another long discussion paper that identifies new issues that have arisen in the last 2 years asking for more submissions from strata stakeholders. Or, it might be some hurriedly prepared draft legislation circulated to limited stakeholders for urgent comments before being considered in parliament.
Either way, it won’t happen in a hurry unless and until it becomes urgent.
Plus, since there’s a NSW state election due in March 2023, I’m betting it will be left to the next elected government and responsible minister to deal with.
September 26, 2022
Francesco ...