Travels etc.

Today have contributed to Australian law by defending my application at NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal. The Tribunal ordered exactly as I expected. The application was lodged 19th March and the hearing has been set up for today 14th April. It is related to the building defects that were reported originally in December 2011 and the builder made several attempts to fix it without a proper result. There were several factors to that: - Negligence by the sub-contractors - No quality assurance by the builder - Builder was not willing to fix the issue which involved dragging process of numerous inspections, involving Fair Trading, the builder, independent inspector etc. - The builder tried to be smart and started coming up with ways to recover their costs - though all the work they did was part of statutory warranty. The conciliation went well and the matter proceeded to the hearing with a mutual agreement by the applicant and the respondent (the builder). As expected, the ...

Buying and managing a strata unit is a challenge sometimes, but the things can be worse if the property is located near an unscrupulous commercial tenants/proprietors. In some cases this is aggravated by local council. Here's an example of an issue that came up second time in two and half years. The council approves commercial operation (cafe) in a place that was not designed for this purpose. It is a mixed development that consists of a commercial shops and a residential strata: The building doesn't suit for a loud business, food serving business, bar or liquor serving business for a number of reasons: 1. Close proximity of the residential units 2. The design of the building that doesn't allow commercial food preparation and serving of patrons in the courtyards or when the shop doors are opened, because all odours and noise go inside the building and echo into all the units facing those commercial shops. 3. There is no waste management facility for commercial ...