Another State Reckons With Strata. South Australia Still Hasn't.

In March we wrote about what New South Wales' strata overhaul meant for South Australian owners. Six weeks later, the Australian Capital Territory joined the queue.

On 29 April 2026, an ACT Legislative Assembly committee handed down 33 recommendations after a year-long inquiry into strata management: licensing for managers, standardised contracts, a no-cause right to sack your strata company, tighter commission disclosure, levy transparency in property advertising and a dedicated Strata Commissioner. It is the same shopping list reformers have been assembling across the country.

Two states and a territory have now formally examined how strata is managed and reached broadly the same conclusion: the system is not serving the people it exists to serve. South Australia has not held that conversation. That doesn't mean we don't need it.

The pattern is the point

It would be easy to file the ACT report under "Canberra problem" - local managers, local complaints, a local fix. But look at what the inquiry actually heard: owners who couldn't obtain records about their own buildings, who felt pressured to accept defects, and a fee model in which insurance commissions can make up nearly a third of a management company's revenue.

None of that is unique to the ACT. It is what happens when the company managing a building answers to its own shareholders rather than to the owners who pay it.

Why disclosure isn't the cure

The ACT committee, like the NSW reforms before it, leaned heavily on disclosure - tell owners about the commissions and let sunlight do the work. It is a sensible floor. It does not change the incentive. A manager who earns up to 30 per cent of revenue from insurance commissions still has every reason to place the policy that pays best, disclosed or not. Telling owners about a conflict of interest is not the same as removing it.

That is the limit of regulation. It can punish the worst behaviour and force more honesty about the rest. It cannot reach into the ownership structure and realign whose interests the company is built to serve.

The South Australian gap

South Australia's schemes operate under the Strata Titles Act 1988 and the Community Titles Act 1996 - legislation that has not faced anything like the scrutiny NSW and the ACT have applied. Disclosure rules here are lighter. There is no Strata Commissioner. The protections an ACT or NSW owner is about to gain simply do not exist for an Adelaide owner today.

The conditions that produced the complaints interstate exist here too. The only difference is that nobody has held the inquiry yet.

A different answer

There is a way to deal with the conflict of interest that doesn't depend on waiting for legislation: change who owns the manager. In a member-owned model, the people who own the strata management organisation are the owners it serves. There are no outside shareholders expecting a return, so there is no structural reason to favour commission income over the best outcome for the building.

It is not a loophole or a workaround. It removes the conflict that the ACT and NSW inquiries spent months documenting - and it needs no Commissioner, no licensing scheme and no government response due in August to make it work.

The reform conversation will reach South Australia eventually. Owners don't have to wait for it to start choosing better.