Law School
BY: TIM SHEEHAN
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The good news for readers is that I have not met any famous people since the last edition and I won't be boring you with stories about my close encounters with living legends - like the previous article on my hero Bart Cummings. Post Script: Since I wrote that article my wife and I have had our 4th child who we christened "William Bartholomew" - not after the apostle but after the saint from Flemington.
So, in the absence of a new famous person story, I will be boring you with a story from my time at university - which promises to be even more tedious.
Around the end of January in 1992 was a landmark in my life. In that January my dream 5 year run at university came to an end and I confronted the brutal reality that I was not born a Packer or a Murdoch and consequently in order to make a living I had to enter the workforce as a new, wet behind the ears articled clerk.
In the first week as an articled clerk I was thrown a conveyancing file for somebody who was buying a townhouse off the plan. My career in strata was born with that conveyance file. Strata can be a vortex and once you enter you will never escape - just ask any lot owner who turned up at a general meeting just to see what is going on, and ended up being chairperson of the committee when nobody else would volunteer.
Having some legal experience gives you a good background for working as a body corporate manager - though I don't claim to remember as much as I should from my days at university. Many law students loved reading through the cases and dissecting the various lines of reasoning contained in each decision. They were fascinated as the judges would work through the multitude of arguments and dismiss or accept them. I always thought that stuff way too tiresome. I had a different style, "Just cut to the point. Don't tell me what is wrong. Just tell me what is right and what works. I just want to know what fixes the problem."
This edition of Silver Community Link is focused on "solving strata problems - the fix it issue". It could be 500 pages long. For every problem that exists in strata land I am sure there are a multitude of solutions. However, recognising the best solution is often dependent upon the definition of the problem, and the definition of the problem is often just as difficult as the solution.
Now, this is where I can draw on the very little that I do remember from law school to provided some words of wisdom (read this paragraph as demonstration that my time at uni was not a total waste). There is a passage in one particularly famous judgment (which one I don't recall) from one particularly famous and well respected judge (which one, again I don't recall - but I think it is an Aussie bloke) which comments on the nature of disputes and problems that appear before the Court, and the passage goes something like this: "It is rare indeed for the parties of a dispute to recognise what they are actually fighting over by the time their dispute gets to Court."
The failure to recognise the true nature of the issue in dispute can be substantially magnified and exacerbated in a body corporate dynamic. Every body corporate contains a group of people with different backgrounds and different interests.
A typical body corporate committee may contain a single owner occupier who lives in their apartment all year and is on a fixed income, married owner occupiers with more disposable income then they could jump over, an investor from Russia who locks up their apartment 12 months of the year, an investor from Sydney who rents out their apartment through the on-site manager, and an investor from Bundaberg who rents the apartment through the local real estate agent around the corner.
While all these people will undoubtedly want to do the right thing by the body corporate, their interpretation and understanding of "the right thing" will be driven by their frame of reference. Their views may conflict substantially. Their goals may be diametrically opposed, and even if their goals coincide, how they wish to achieve their objectives may be at odds.
This is the part where I should have some words of wisdom about how to solve this conundrum......well I don't have a solution. If I did, I would join the United Nations and work in Baghdad. I don't think we need to provide a magic solution because the melting pot which is a body corporate committee is just like life in general.
The best thing committees can do is keep talking through the issues. "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it. Note the Atticus Finch quote from "To Kill a Mockingbird" - who needs legal education from University when Hollywood can spoon feed you!
