Brat dumping – when parents buy an apartment for their teenage or young adult offspring so they can offload the results of their lack of child rearing skills on to otherwise happy and peaceful communities – is spreading.
West Australia may be a bit behind the times when it comes to apartment living but they too have their share of selfish investors, happy to dropkick the kids into someone else’s comfort zone.
Wherever you are in Australia, unwilling neighbours of these barely house-trained party animals can then spend months if not years dealing with the noise, disturbance and generally selfish behaviour of these entitled yahoos, while the ‘major fail’ parents enjoy peace and quiet that they truly have not earned.
What can we do about it, wails a WA reader HERE. Normally he would tackle bad tenants through their rental agency and the terms of their lease but there is no lease and the parents don’t seem to care.
The answer is to make them care. Strata laws differ from state to state, and by-laws from scheme to scheme, but some basics are pretty much universal.
One is that residents are not allowed to disturb the their neighbours’ peace and quiet, the other is that owners aren’t allowed to let the occupants of their lot breach by-laws.
So you have them in a double whammy and you just need to find the appropriate method for your area to pursue BOTH the kids and their parents for breaches of by-laws.
In NSW, as well as action through Notices to Comply with by-laws and NSW Civil Administration Tribunal orders, there is a legal precedent for slamming the owners as well as the occupants.
Albeit from a fairly low-level court in NSW, a ruling a couple of years ago said that if the owners of a unit are in a position to stop the occupants from behaving badly and they fail to so, they – the owners – can be subject to legal action such as a noise abatement order.
The beauty of Noise Abatement Orders is that breaching them is a crime; no namby-pamby- meaningless petty fines here.
Go to this web page if you want to pursue a noise abatement order. And there’s this handy guide to pursuing a strata complaint in NSW.
As for our friend in WA, this web page, run by West Australia Legal Aid has a stack of links to the relevant legislation and information.
Elsewhere in Australia, if your strata scheme can’t silence the spoiled ones, then contact your local police and councils about noise abatement. And wherever you are, if your building has been turned into a Brat Dump, talk to your strata manager or a strata lawyer – then hit them and their pathetic parents with everything (legal) that you’ve got.
A version of this article has also appeared on the Sydney Morning Herald’s online pages and in the print edition of Domain.