UNIT TITLES AMENDMENT BILL 2007 Second Reading Speech

Northern Territory Second Reading Speeches

UNIT TITLES AMENDMENT BILL 2007

(This an uncorrected proof of the daily report. It is made available under the condition that it is recognised as such.)

Dr LIM (Greatorex): Madam Speaker, I move that the bill be now read a second time.

Before I commence, I understand the Leader of the Opposition will be making her address in reply to the Appropriation Bill at 11 o’clock.

Madam SPEAKER: That is correct, member for Greatorex. I will indicate when you should pause.

Dr LIM: Madam Speaker, 18 months ago I raised this matter in this House seeking support form the Northern Territory government to support amendments to the Unit Titles Act to enable body corporates to enforce lawful parking within their premises. At that time the government responded in the negative. I will address those issues presently.

I raise this again today because in the 8 months since the last attempt nothing has eventuated. If the government was doing anything, the industry is not aware. The industry has not been appropriately consulted and the government has not provided any indication of what progress that has been made. I raised this 18 months ago and I am raising it now because of complaints I have received from people who live in apartments and units, in areas that have body corporates to manage the common areas.

I suppose the worst problem is when unlawful parking takes place in an area that is designated as a parking area for a tenant or the owner/occupier of a unit or apartment. Those parking areas are usually clearly indicated so that there is no confusion as to who owns that particular parking space. I sought industry consultation in 2005 and have since consulted industry again and indicated to them that I will be raising this matter today. Again, I have received support from industry that this is something that is needed and I therefore urge the government to consider this again and in a different light to what it did previously. At that time they said they were not going to support for some various and quite spurious reasons, and I will proceed with arguing for the support of this again.

I received an e-mail from a very angry owner of a commercial premises and he was prepared for me to mention who he is and to identify his location and his problems. He wrote this e-mail on 21 November last year and addressed it to several people including me and members of government. I will read this to indicate his problem. This e-email also was published in the NT News as a letter to the Editor:

Sir or Madam,

Late in the evening on Monday, 20 November, or very early the next day, a vehicle with flat tyres was abandoned on the driveway at Tiwi Medical and Professional Centre, 5 Tiwi Gardens. This vehicle must have been towed there because it appears that it has not been driven for years and had been used as storage for unwanted family items. The police had put a sticker on the windscreen that states ‘Police aware. Any questions regarding this vehicle telephone NT Police on 131 444, PROMIS No P06172273, date 21 November 2006 at 02.55 am’.

My wife and I own a business at this location. I arrived there at approximately 2.30 pm on the 21st. I telephoned the police number and informed the person that answered that the vehicle was a traffic hazard, that it was blocking four of our parking spots.

He provided me with a photograph of the offending vehicle and how it impacted upon four parking spots in his body corporate area, and I seek leave to table that photograph.

Leave granted.

Dr LIM: I will read again:

I telephoned the police number and informed the person who answered that the vehicle was a traffic hazard, that it was blocking four of our parking spots. I was put on hold and later told that the vehicle owner could not be traced and there was nothing the police could do about moving the vehicle. I then telephoned city council. The person there informed that because the vehicle was on private property, there was a long procedure to go through before the vehicle could be legally moved. The procedure could take up to 10 weeks. I replied the vehicle is a hazard to any traffic through the complex. I had already two complaints from clients that the vehicle was indeed a traffic hazard. I was informed that it was illegal to move the vehicle and that the laid down procedures had to be adhered to. Both persons that I spoke to were polite and informative.

They had gone through this same absurd procedure in March 2004 with an abandoned van, and I table a photograph, also provided to me by this person, indicating the van had been parked unlawfully on the body corporate premises.

Madam SPEAKER: Do you seek leave, member for Greatorex?

Dr LIM: I seek leave.

Leave granted.

Dr LIM: Thank you. I will keep going with this e-mail:

Our body corporate person has informed me that abandoned vehicles create problems on many body corporate controlled properties in Darwin.

Then he goes on to say he had been told that a politician in the past had proposed a bill to resolve this problem, but was voted down.

I asked how difficult it would be for whatever level of government is responsible to pass a bill or whatever to allow abandoned vehicles to be impounded and moved to a secure location until the owner can be traced or the vehicle is disposed of. If the owner is found, they should then be liable for towing and storage costs.

He goes on for a couple more paragraphs and then says:

This is just too much. Some action on the matter should be taken immediately.

This man approached many people, including myself, before Christmas last year. I believe he has been to his local member and sought advice and assistance to get the currently abandoned vehicle out of the car park that he is entitled to use for his business. The advice from his local member was astounding. The local member said to him that he should push the vehicle out of the car park on to the public road, to park it by the kerb side on the road pavement. This gentleman, fortunately, realised that to do that was an illegal act. He was not allowed to tamper with the vehicle in any way and had he pushed the vehicle on to the carriage way, parallel parked next to the kerb and there was an accident because of the vehicle, who would have been liable for that accident? He would have been the one who placed the object on to the road itself. So to advise any one who has a vehicle that is parked unlawfully in a body corporate area is, in my opinion, improper and no one should be advising people to commit an illegal act.

So I come down to why this amendment is drafted the way it is. At the moment under the Unit Titles Act, the body corporate has no legal power to deal with a wrongfully parked vehicle. You can ring the police, but, as we saw in this instance, the police did not want to know about it. They can ring the council and the council will tell you that it is on private property and will not do anything about it. You ring a tow truck company, and the tow truck company says, no, we are not going to do this, we do not want to be involved. If we touch the car at all in any way we could be charged with tampering with a motor vehicle. The tow truck company will not want to take illegal possession of the vehicle anyway if they towed the vehicle away. And if, in the event there was any incidental damage in the towing process, the tow truck company would also be liable for that.

Nobody wants to know, and here you are, the rightful owner of the parking allotment, or allotments as in this case, you are stuck between a rock and a hard place and you have nowhere to go at all. The government knows that this is a problem. It admits it in the former Attorney-General’s response to this amendment bill more than 12 months ago, he admits that this is a problem. So we need to reapproach this issue from a completely different perspective.

Let me now go through the process and how this amendment will address the problem. It is constructed in such a way that there is an escalating level of penalty for wrongful parking of a vehicle in a body corporate area. The legislation empowers the body corporate to do several things to address the protection of the rights of the rightful occupants or owners of the parking space. For instance, you come home one night after work, you drive into your block of units to approach your rightful parking area, and you find a vehicle that is parked there and that prevents you from parking your own car. Your concern then is, where do I park my car? Do I park my car in another spot that does not belong to me? And, in doing so, I will pass that same problem to the rightful owner of the car parking allotment that I have taken now that does not belong to me. Sometimes there are no parking spots left in the body corporate area because of this strange vehicle. So you are compelled to park your car on the road, on the curb side, if you can find a parking spot there because there are probably lots of other cars parked out there anyway. And then all night you will be worrying whether your car will be safe out there, whether it will be vandalised through the night. You wake up in the morning, go to work and, going out to your car, you are wondering if the car is still there, if it had not been stolen. And just like the owner of a Mercedes the other day, when the three kids absconded from Don Dale – an expensive Mercedes got stolen and wrecked.

It is important to ensure that, for people who have lawfully allocated car parking areas in the body corporate area, that they have the right to access those areas without any hindrance. When the person comes home and sees that the car park is taken up, the thing for the offended person to do is to report the incident to the body corporate managers. Then, the body corporate managers have a series of actions that it can take. The body corporate manager can, first of all, follow up with the complaint by placing a sign on the car explaining to the unlawfully parked vehicle’s owner that that is not the rightful place for their vehicle and the vehicle should not be there. I believe that a gentle reminder to the owner of the offending vehicle will be a very appropriate and friendly way to get the vehicle to vacate the space.

However, if the unlawful parking continues, the body corporate is empowered by this amendment to seek the name and contact details of the registered owner of the vehicle from the Motor Vehicle Registrar, on the undertaking that that information as provided by MVR is only to be used as a means to contact the lawful owner of the vehicle.

Following that, the body corporate may then issue a penalty notice, not exceeding one penalty unit or the equivalent of $110, to the registered owner of the unlawfully parked vehicle for each day that the car is unlawfully parked in that spot.

It is important that the body corporate is empowered to obtain the name and contact details of the registered owner of the offending vehicle because, currently under the Information Act, specifically under the section entitled ‘Information privacy principles’, MVR may not provide the name and contact details of the registered owner for privacy issues ...

Madam SPEAKER: Member for Greatorex, I ask you to pause and continue your remarks after the Leader of the Opposition’s reply to the budget. I call on the Leader of the Opposition.

Debate suspended.

Dr LIM (Greatorex): Madam Speaker, I will resume where I have just left off a little while ago.

I have brought this amendment about to ensure that MVR is able to provide information about the legal owner of the unlawfully parked vehicle without any restraint but on the proviso that the information may only be used by the body corporate to identify the owner of the vehicle and use that information to then contact the owner. This amendment specifically addresses that an empowered body corporate can get that information.

The body corporate may impose a penalty for each day the offending vehicle is unlawfully parked. The body corporate may also issue a seven day notice to the registered owner of the unlawfully parked vehicle, that it would be removed from the premises. This amendment empowers the body corporate to recover from the registered owner of the unlawfully parked vehicle, all associated costs in issuing of the penalty notices including the penalty for parking unlawfully and remove the vehicle.

Finally, the body corporate may engage a towing company to remove the vehicle. Once the vehicle is removed, the vehicle would be a matter to be decided by general law.

I have deliberately constructed the amendment so that the police, local councils and the like are not involved in the imposition of the penalty notice nor in the implementation of the removal of the offending vehicle. We do not want to tie up our local government and police into effectively what is a civil matter.

The body corporate will then, under this amendment, be able to amend the articles and house rules to enable them to use the powers that are provided within this amendment. The body corporate can choose not to do that, or if they feel that they do not have the expertise to do, they do not have to go down this path. Most properties that are in body corporate areas are managed by professional body corporate managers and they would have the expertise to do that.

At the start of my support for this amendment I did say that the former Attorney-General accepted that this was a valid issue to be brought to this parliament. It was something that the government was also looking into.

Having said that, the government has its own process, and 18 months later nothing has happened. I wonder how important this matter is to government. I urge the government to consider that many people in the real world are facing great frustration on a daily basis. As for the owner of the Tiwi Gardens commercial property, he has been frustrated by what appears to be an abandoned vehicle, and even the police have not been able to identify the legal owner. The vehicle has been there since November. Why does someone who is trying to run his daily business have to be so inconvenienced by an abandoned vehicle that is parked in his lawful parking area?

The former Attorney-General spoke about these sorts of provisions being provided by the Cullen Bay Marina Act. If that enables Cullen Bay Marina proprietors to have legislative support to control their body corporate areas, why not give it to everyone else in the Territory? We all know that there are many units and apartments going up in Darwin. The burgeoning growth is going to increase the problem of unlawful parking.

The former Attorney-General said of the amendment I put:

It creates a new and potentially unfair penalty regime. It simply permits the corporation to impose penalties without any weight or consideration being given to the rights of the vehicle owner.

That is not true. As I described, the pathways where a body corporate can address this issue of unlawful parking, the body corporate has to first of all inform the registered owner of the vehicle that the car is parked unlawfully and then the body corporate has to give the registered owner of the unlawfully parked vehicle seven days’ notice before the vehicle will be removed. Steps are taken in an orderly fashion to ensure that the registered owner of the vehicle is fully aware of what is likely to happen if the vehicle continues to be parked unlawfully.

The other comment of the former Attorney-General was, and I quote:

Most unit title body corporations do not have the necessary skills or resources to fairly manage an infringement notice scheme and an enforcement regime.

I beg to differ. I have sat on body corporate committees and have discussed and negotiated with body corporate managers. They have the expertise and, as I said, for those people who choose not to adopt this facility, they do not have to; they simply don’t amend the rules of the body corporate.

Will it be exposed to abuse? Every law is exposed to abuse. You make laws for most law abiding people. Body corporate managers are very law abiding. They have to be law abiding to ensure that they do the right jobs for their clients.

The government says it will look at this in the broader issue of reform under the Unit Titles Act, but we have been waiting for a long while. There are people who are suffering economic loss as a result of the lack of good legislation to protect body corporate areas. To be advised by your local member to commit an illegal act is not on. Body corporate managers would like to see this happen and I urge the government to at least put this in place, support it, until your overall review of the Unit Titles Act can come into effect further down the line.

Once you do this, there is an opportunity for the body corporates to then exercise their legal rights to ensure that parking is done in a lawful manner.

Debate adjourned.

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