Published: 27 April 2010.

Contributed by Michael Kleinschmidt of MacGillivrays Solicitors

If you are a Resident Unit Manager then you are also a non-voting member of the Body Corporate committee. Under the Body Corporate and Community Management Act 1997 the committee has a statutory duty to maintain “full and accurate minutes”; see section 55 of the Standard Module and Accommodation Module.  The phrase “full and accurate minutes” is separately defined and includes the when, where and who of the meeting.  Aside from these administrative details the only other things needed to comprise a “full and accurate” set of minutes for the Act are:

• details of correspondence, reports, notices or other documents tabled at the meeting; and
• for each motion voted on at the meeting:
• the words of the motion; and
• the number of votes for and against the motion.

Every member of the committee (including the non-voting ones) and every lot owner (excluding lot owners who have opted out) is entitled to receive a copy of the minutes within 21 days after the meeting. Every now and again I get a call from a client who has received their minutes and believes that they are wrong. Almost always the ‘error’ is about who said what, not what they voted on or the outcome!

It is not uncommon for enthusiastic Secretaries to mistake the obligation to maintain “full and accurate minutes” with a requirement to record, often verbatim, what was said and by whom.  If you look at section 55 the scope of the information to be recorded is actually quite narrow. 

Recently I represented a Body Corporate where the committee had received verbal reports from a couple of its members (the Chairperson and Secretary). Parts of the verbal reports were then incorporated into the minutes, either by themselves or as parts of a motion passed.
The reports and motion concerned the tail end of a long running dispute between the Body Corporate and a particular lot owner. When that lot owner received the minutes, they objected to the verbal reports as being ‘untrue and misleading’.

The lot owner brought an application for the offending portions of the minutes to be struck out and replaced.  Curiously the Applicant admitted that the minutes were an accurate reflection of what was said in the meetings but disagreed with the truthfulness of what was said. 

The Adjudicator in The Avenues [2010] QBCCM Cmr 0055-2010 (29 March 2010) concluded that while portions of the minutes perhaps went beyond what was necessary to be recorded they were entitled to be recorded; in effect a verbal report was still a ‘report tabled’ for section 55.  While the Adjudicator could not necessarily determine, without a great deal of further effort, whether the statements in the minutes were misleading or not, this was irrelevant because:

• there was no evidence that the minutes were not “full and accurate”; and
• the Applicant hadn’t shown any mischief or damage that would arise if the minutes weren’t amended.

If you are a member of a Body Corporate committee bear in mind the scope of what the minutes should contain and, I would recommend, consciously adopt a policy of minimum compliance:

• avoid ‘chatty’ minutes;
• write down the ‘who, where and when’ of the meeting;
• record the correspondence & reports tabled; 
• record each motion and the voting on them, and
• when minutes are distributed check them and raise any concerns at the next meeting, or sooner if the matter is very serious.  

If you do have to make a report, while verbal reports can be ‘tabled’ it is almost always better to report in writing. Nobody can later argue that what was minuted was not what you said and … you won’t ‘hang’ on a minute!

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