The specific example that peaked my curiosity is as follows…
The individual units (flats, balconies, storerooms, gym, etc) are called “sections”. In our management rules, a legal document that is filed with the deeds office, there are a set of clauses as follows (I’m simplifying the text vastly and using made-up section numbers)…
7.2 Sections 1,2,3,4,5 and 6 are for residential use only
7.3 Sections 7, 8 and 9 are strictly not for residential use
……7.3.1 Don’t do bad stuff in a section
.….7.3.2 Don’t play TV, radio or sound systems loudly or do anything else that will disturb other people
……7.3.3 Some other stuff clearly applicable to residential units.
[ End of clause 7.3 ]
(Sorry about the dots to get the indenting, spaces didn’t work and I don’t want to spend time right now trying to find out how to do the formatting properly.)
In my layperson’s view the above really should have had 7.3.1, 7.3.2 and 7.3.3 at the top 7.x level as clauses 7.4, 7.5 and 7.6 since, again as a layperson, I could interpret the fact that the sub clauses are nested under the clause that explicitly talks about non-residential sections as meaning that they only apply to those sections explicitly identified at the top level of 7.3, i.e. non-residential sections, despite the fact that the sub clauses in my view clearly talk about behaviour in residential sections.
What is the legal import of the current nesting? Is tidying this up something that is just a nice-to-do activity that could be done at a time when there is some other more pressing need to revise the document or is this something that could potentially undermine the ability to enforce those sub clauses for occupants of the residential sections identified in clause 7.2?
- Julian