Body corporates are a legislative necessity in Australia. They have similar counterparts in other countries around the world.

Someone has to be responsible for the building, collective responsibility in an ideal world. In reality it falls to a small group of people that want to have input into how the place they live is maintained.

Some residents will have no clue on who or what the body corporate committee does other than those notices that appear in the lift. Other residents might complain they interfere too much or have stupid petty rules. Some will get the body corporate committee, the body corporate manager and the building manager confused. It all comes down to down to how the committee operates and how visible it wants to be.

We have six people on our committee and five of us live in the building so can have easy communication. Except we now have two new people on the committee and they want to have preliminary meetings to discuss what will be talked about at the formal meeting. I spend way too much time in meetings at work, I’m not going to have extra meetings in my personal time. Unsurprisingly, the two people keen to do this are a retired person and someone who works from home a lot. People who have time in their day as they don’t have to travel to work and back.

Looking at the items they want to discuss I can see it’s going to be a long road. Trying to resuscitate an issue we’ve dealt with and don’t have money to do and also trying to ask what we’re doing about flood mitigation measures. One of these people opposed the special levy we implemented for flood mitigation works and managed to get enough people onside to spread over a two year period. We don’t have all the funds yet. Are we paying with bottle tops as my Nan used to say?

Collective responsibility, what a wonderful concept. Pity it rarely works where it’s imposed rather than organic.