Question: What are the legal and insurance implications when one committee member consistently becomes involved with contractors and maintenance?
What are the legal and insurance implications for individual committee members when one member consistently becomes involved with contractors and maintenance, which has the potential for serious consequences?
Answer: Unauthorised committee members giving instructions directly to contractors creates real risk for the body corporate.
It’s a headache. Third parties can rely on instructions as a defence, in a sense, if the instructions have been received from someone they reasonably believe is authorised on behalf of the body corporate. They don’t need to go any further to check whether that authorisation actually exists.
If a body corporate manager sends a work order to Redchip for $3k worth of legal work, and I carry it out, I’m going to get paid, because I can rely on you being the right person. I’m not obliged to go beyond that and ask to see the committee resolution approving the engagement. Good practice would be to send it through anyway, but there’s no obligation to do so.
So when someone on the committee goes directly to the person on the ground and says, “no, actually, do this, do that,” that’s a recipe for disaster at some stage.
To me, appropriate practice matters here, and this is one of the difficulties that comes with volunteerism. You’ve probably got a strong personality doing these things. We need to make sure we’re all consistent. There needs to be one point of communication, and if there are changes to what’s been agreed, you need to come back to the committee and have a conversation first. Don’t go off half-cocked and change things along the way, because that leads to variations to contracts, works not being done in accordance with specifications, and other issues.
It is a risk, I think, a risk in terms of performance more than anything else.
This post appears in the August 2026 edition of The QLD Strata Magazine.
Frank Higginson Redchip Strata Law E: FrankH@redchip.com.au P: 07 3193 0500