A Body Corporate and Community Management (BCCM) Adjudicator must have tired of waiting for the Queensland Government to change the legislation, so decides to change how it is applied herself!

On 21 December 2021, an Adjudicator decided to give many stakeholders in the strata industry an early Christmas present – she broke into new ground by pathing the way to order someone to no longer smoke on the unit’s balcony and to take reasonable steps to ensure smoke does not emanate from the unit when smoking inside (by closing doors and windows).

Here’s the catch: the Adjudicator found that there was not enough objective evidence to establish that the smoking was causing a nuisance. 

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Instead, the Adjudicator did what so many have been waiting for the Queensland Government to do, in a strata context, for more than a decade: she found that tobacco smoke drift is a hazard and there was no safe level of exposure to it, so others in the strata community must not be exposed to it any longer.