Statutes Amendment (Community and Strata Titles) Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 18 September 2025.)

Mr TEAGUE (Heysen—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (12:54): I rise to indicate I am the lead speaker for the opposition and I indicate the opposition's support for the bill. That is in the context of a series of amendments that are on the file that we will deal with in the course of the committee process.

The minister brought the bill to this chamber some little time ago, not quite a year ago, and it is another round of response to calls for updates, in particular the work of the Environment, Resources and Development Committee, the subject of its 81^st report.

I want to highlight that the bulk of what is to be amended, the subject of this bill, is uncontroversial and it goes to the very practical day-to-day arrangements that will ensure that members of strata and community titles are appropriately able to participate in the necessary decision-making from day to day of their community and, to that end, makes some specific changes to obligations on managers of those communities.

The issues that have been therefore of keen interest to the industry stakeholders, for want of a better word in this context, have come back in terms of three categories of further improvement that have been posited. I continue to look to work on the merits with the government about the capacity to take on board those changes—all practical, not really in any sort of ideological category or really even a wrestle about relative rights but really about what is practical in the day-to-day administration of communities.

So the concerns the opposition has are really in three categories. The first is procedural—time requirements for the provision of information and the provision of notice and such things. The second is a discrete point that finds its way into several references throughout the course of the bill, going to the question of materiality with respect to gifts. It finds itself frequently referred to in the bill. The third is a question of what might be the limited capacity of a meeting to conduct business in circumstances where there might be some impediment on ordinary quorum. As I said at the outset, those matters might, I expect, find themselves most productively aired in the committee process.

That is the nature of the categories of concern to raise them in advance. I am very conscious of the time and was on my way to saying that I was grateful to the government in terms of the way it has conducted itself in the lead-up. I am conscious of the time and, in those circumstances, with a few short remarks remaining in the second reading I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

Sitting suspended from 13:00 to 14:00.