Disputes about animals in a body corporate
You need to understand your scheme’s animal by-laws if you want to have an animal on the property.
If you disagree about your body corporate committee’s decision not to allow you to have an animal on the property, you can:
- attempt to resolve the issue with them
- try conciliation and then adjudication.
Guide, hearing and assistance dogs
If you have a disability under the Guide, Hearing and Assistance Dogs Act 2009 and rely on your animal, you do not need to ask permission before bringing a dog into a body corporate property.
Find out more about where you can take your guide dog.
Adjudicators’ decisions
When helping to resolve disputes, adjudicators make orders on a variety of issues relating to animals.
Orders could include:
- overturning committee decisions on animal approvals
- invalidating unreasonable by-laws
- removing animals that cause nuisance.
There are also a number of adjudicators’ decisions that deal with the validity of by-laws prohibiting certain animals or imposing weight limits on animals.
Adjudicators’ orders are published on Australian Legal Information Institute.
You may wish to search for orders that deal with the different types of animal by-laws outlined above, and body corporate decisions about the keeping of animals, to help you with your own situation.
Significant decision
The complete ban on keeping animals in a community titles schemes has been the subject of numerous dispute resolution applications lodged with us.
Since the introduction of section 180(7) of the BCCM Act in 2008 by-laws that have prohibited pets have been consistently ruled as oppressive and unreasonable.
In one application, the adjudicator’s order (which supported the no pet by-law) was appealed at the Queensland Commercial and Consumer Tribunal (CCT) (now known as the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal—QCAT).
In this case, decided in June 2008, the member of CCT considered whether a by-law that set an absolute ban on all animals was reasonable. He considered a hypothetical situation where an owner sought approval to keep a gold fish, and stated:
‘Since there is clearly no rational basis upon which it can be said that the keeping of a gold fish in a safe and healthy environment could be a matter which could cause any difficulty to any other lot owner, yet is the subject of an “absolute” ban, the conclusion is fairly open that such a by-law is “unreasonable”.’
Based on that order, adjudicators have consistently found that by-laws that impose a complete ban on animals are invalid.
When a body corporate might reasonably say no
There have been circumstances where a body corporate’s decision to say no to a pet request has been upheld by adjudicators.
The adjudicators considered the impact of the pets on other owners when they made their decisions. In these applications other owners provided evidence that they suffered from severe allergies or phobias to dogs.