EC Access to Private Garden

Hi,

I own an apartment in a four-story building and in general the members of the EC live in apartments on the top floors, while authority-less plebs like ourselves live on the bottom ones. 

As a bit of background, a few years ago the EC erected scaffolding in our backyard (and others) to complete work on upper floors and left it there for months. While the scaffolding is there it's very difficult to access our backyard, our washing line or to water the garden. 

Recently the EC has decided to do some remedial work on the top floor balconies, while I’m unsure of the need for this work that is not the purpose of this enquiry. 

Approximately a month ago we received an email from the strata manager stating that this work was going ahead, and that they would be accessing our backyard for the purpose of erecting scaffolding and completing the work. It was said it would last for two weeks. We replied with two objections; firstly objecting to the scaffolding being placed in our backyard at all, and secondly; if it did go ahead, we wanted to be contacted by the installer ahead of time so we could let them in and monitor them installing the scaffolding, rather than have them jump the back fence, install it themselves and break several pots and tiles like they did the last time. 

We received no reply from the strata manager, and the next week while we were at work the scaffolding contractors jumped the back fence, installed the scaffolding and broke several pots and tiles.

We contacted Fair Trading and they told us that the strata manager should have asked for our consent to use our land, rather than just notify us it would take place. They also should have given us sufficient warning to appeal to Fair Trading (the process takes a month they said), rather than just one week. They also said, however, that seeing as the scaffolding had already gone up there wasn’t anything we could do.

As you can imagine, two weeks has come and gone and nothing has happened. I contacted the company doing the repairs and they said that given weather and workload they probably can’t do it before Christmas.

Were Fair Trading correct? Is there really nothing we can do? Is our private land just open to use whenever and for however long the EC want?