26 AUGUST 2020

It could soon be near-impossible for any apartment building to vote to keep pets out after a last-minute amendment to an unrelated bill scored a shock win in the NSW Legislative Council just before 10pm on Tuesday night.

The move by the Animal Justice Party (AJP) means that, if the bill is passed by the Lower House in September, no strata scheme will be allowed to have a bylaw to ‘unreasonably’ ban animals.

And while pet-lovers celebrated, other apartment owners are up in arms over what they see is a hammer blow to their democratic right to decide issues like pets living in their blocks for themselves.

“The people who supported this show that they don’t have a clue how strata works,” said strata lawyer Stephen Goddard, the former chair of the apartment-owners’ peak body, the Owners Corporation Network. “This is a terrible example of self-interest being allowed to trample over the collective whole. “A community should have the right to decide for themselves how to run their buildings. This has little to do with pets, and everything to do with the survival of the democratic process.”

> Read full article at Domain.com.au
Sue Williams