Strata Schemes Management Act: True or False?
The examples below are of unnecessary red tape in the NSW strata legislation.
The original (ground breaking) strata laws in NSW contained only 29 provisions. Today, the strata and community scheme laws are spread across five separate acts and five associated regulations. In total there are now more than 1500 provisions covering some 926 pages.
This unnecessary complexity creates an environment where unintentional breaches of the law are common and many people feel the need to go to the trouble and expense of obtaining advice and assistance from specialist lawyers, even on fairly routine matters.
One option to reduce this uncertainty and confusion is to combine all the laws into the one act. This approach has been taken in many other jurisdictions, including Queensland, which has one act common to all schemes with five different sets of regulations for different types and sizes of schemes.
These anomalies have been highlighted in the discussion paper on the Strata Schemes Management Act recently released by the Department of Fair Trading.
Let’s hope the government does something about it this time!
Col Myers
Small Myers Hughes
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