1. Before November 2010 there had been problems with the functioning of the intercom system at the entrances to premises at 6 Brad Street, East Bentleigh where Mr Tourtchine resides; unit 4 is at those premises. During November 2010 heavy rain led to further problems. There was sparking from the wiring and Mr Tourtchine received an electric shock from the system. He gave evidence that he telephoned Mr Macallister about this but Mr Macallister did nothing for about 15 days until he (Mr Tourtchine) wrote to the manager on 18 November 2010; Mr Macallister replied on the following day, saying that a tradesman would attend the next Friday and that the issue would be raised at a meeting of members to be held on the following Tuesday. In the meantime, Mr Tourtchine had attached a sign to the intercom system warning that there was an electrical malfunction. To his displeasure, a neighbouring unit owner tore down the sign.
2. Mr Campbell gave evidence of what his company's records contained about the intercom system. A tradesman had given a report on 24 November 2010 that there was a faulty button. At an annual general meeting of members on 29 November 2010 the embers had resolved to seek a quotation for the replacement of the system. The manager obtained a quotation. By 19 January 2011 a majority of the unit owners had approved it. The work was done in February 2011.
3. Mr Tourtchine seemed to me to have expressed three grievances about this matter. The first was the length of time that it took for the manager to act upon his report that the intercom system was malfunctioning and dangerous. The second was the neighbour's removal of his sign. The third was the fact that the system was replaced without (according to Mr Tourtchine) the manager ever having got to the bottom of what was wrong with the system and without having investigated whether it could be repaired rather than replaced.
4. As to the second of those grievances, the removal of the sign was something that was completely out of the manager's control and cannot support any complaint that Mr Tourtchine has against the manager. As to the third, it appears that the majority of unit owners were satisfied that the solution was to replace the system, and there is no reason why the manager should have interfered with their decision.
5. As to the first grievance, in the absence of any evidence from Mr Macallister (who no longer works for the manager) I am prepared to accept that he should have acted upon Mr Tourtchine's report of danger more quickly than he did, and that Mr Tourtchine was entitled to be unhappy about that. Eventually, however, the manager did attend to rectification of the problem. It is more than three years since this grievance arose. In the meantime Mr Macallister ceased to have any involvement in the management of the owners corporation. He had had no involvement since late 2011. Whatever failings the manager had had in 2010 on the matter of the intercom system are not a justification for the making of an order now for revocation of the manager's appointment.

1. The 2011 annual general meeting of members of the owners corporation commenced on 6 December 2011, at the manager's office. Mr Tourtchine and two other members were present. So were Mr Macallister and Ms Dimech.
2. Mr Tourtchine announced that he would object to Mr Macallister continuing as chairman of the meeting. (Evidently he had been the chairman at an earlier meeting.) Mr Tourtchine admitted during his evidence that he had got 'a bit excited' at the meeting. Ms Dimech's evidence was that he was 'irate' and would not accept that the other members present wanted Mr Macallister to chair the meeting. Mr Macallister adjourned the meeting. Ms Dimech gave evidence that because Mr Tourtchine 'could not get past the point' of objecting to Mr Macallister's chairmanship and continued to protest about it the meeting became impossible to conduct; he adjourned the meeting and asked all members to leave the meeting room, but Mr Tourtchine refused to leave.
3. The police were called, and attended the manager's office. Mr Campbell spoke to Mr Tourtchine and eventually persuaded him to leave the building voluntarily and avoid confrontation with the police. Mr Tourtchine gave evidence, which I accept because Mr Campbell did not dispute it, that he and Mr Campbell shook hands and Mr Campbell said that he would chair the next meeting.
4. Because Ms Dimech and Mr Campbell are more likely than Mr Tourtchine, in his agitated state on that day, to remember accurately the events which occurred on 6 December 2011, I accept their evidence about those events and prefer it whenever it conflicted with Mr Tourtchine's evidence, which was not often.
5. On 7 December 2011 Mr Tourtchine sent a letter to the other owners. He started his letter by saying that he regretted his behaviour of the previous day. That was a good start. Unfortunately, the rest of the letter was a sustained and intemperate attack upon Mr Macallister, whom Mr Tourtchine described in it as a 'cowardly criminal'.
6. On 8 December 2011 the manager sent its own letter, signed by Mr Macallister, to all owners, stating that the annual general meeting had been adjourned because of the 'disruptive behaviour' of one member. Speaking of the meeting that would proceed on whatever was the adjourned date, the letter continued:

In the event of disruption to the meeting, the offending party or parties will be given 3 opportunities to behave in a suitable and acceptable manner. If this does not occur, the meeting will be adjourned and the disruptive party will be asked to leave. If necessary, the police will be called to have the party or parties removed from the premises.

The meeting will proceed from that point until its conclusion. Members can table any query or complaint regarding the finances, maintenance or management of the development. They are asked to do so in good time so a full response can be prepared without delaying the meeting.

The police were required to escort a member of the owners corporation from the building as this member refused to leave of their own volition. Members are advised the police response that was required on December 6th was approximately 30 minutes.

From the evidence on both sides it would seem that the last paragraph in the letter was incorrect. The police were not 'required to escort' Mr Tourtchine from the building. They were called for that purpose but were not required for that purpose. Contrary to the statement in the paragraph, Mr Tourtchine did leave of his own volition, eventually.

1. After that date, Mr Macallister had no further involvement in the management of the owners corporation, so far as I could tell from the evidence.
2. The adjourned general meeting resumed on 11 January 2012. Ms Dimech chaired it. In her evidence she said little about that meeting so I accept Mr Tourtchine's evidence about it, which was as follows. He tried to complain to Ms Dimech about the owner who had torn down his sign from the intercom system. She brushed aside his complaint. He was 'quiet and patient' during the meeting. Ms Dimech said that her firm had been re-appointed as owners corporation manager. Mr Tourtchine disputed that and asked to see the contract of re-appointment. In a letter sent to Mr Tourtchine shortly after the meeting Ms Dimech stated there was no new contract and that the previous appointment had rolled over because there had been no objection to a re-appointment.
3. The fact, as Mr Campbell admitted during his evidence, was that there was a gap in the continuity of the manager's appointment and that it was not correct to say that the appointment had rolled over. Because of the adjournment of the annual general meeting the need to have a fresh contract of appointment signed had been overlooked. Nevertheless, a new twelve-month contract for the next year was signed on 23 November 2012. Despite the absence of formality in the period from November 2011 to November 2012 I have no doubt that the majority of members of the owners corporation agreed to the respondent being its manager during that period.
4. Nothing that happened on or shortly after 2012 would justify a conclusion that the manager is unfit to act as such or that its appointment ought to be revoked. If Ms Dimech regarded Mr Tourtchine's raising of a complaint about the removal of the sign from the intercom system as stale and irrelevant, as her conduct indicated that she might have, it was reasonable for her to have regarded it in that way, in my opinion. Her incorrect statement that there had been a re-appointment of manager did not have any significant consequence, even though it annoyed Mr Tourtchine; for all practical purposes the manager remained as such, even though there had been no formal re-appointment.
5. As to what had happened on 6 December 2011, in my opinion Mr Macallister acted properly in adjourning the meeting once he formed the view, which I think he was entitled to form, that Mr Tourtchine was making it impossible, or at least very difficult, for the meeting to continue. The incorrect statements in his letter of 8 December 2011 about the role of the police, and about Mr Tourtchine not leaving the building voluntarily, were unfortunate but do not support the case that the manager was or is unfit to hold office as such or that its appointment ought to be revoked.
6. The letter set out what in my opinion was and is an appropriate protocol for an owners corporation manager to follow whenever a member is disrupting a meeting or making it difficult for the meeting to occur: first, a series of warnings; secondly, an adjournment of the meeting if the warnings are not heeded; thirdly, the disruptive member being asked to leave the meeting place; and finally, as a last resort, the calling of the police. Although Mr Macallister did not follow that protocol completely on 6 December 2011 he did so to a large extent.
7. Regrettably, that appropriate protocol was not followed at the next annual general meeting.

1. The 2012 annual general meeting of members occurred on 15 December 2012, at the manager's office. Ms Dimech chaired the meeting. Three members attended: Mr Tourtchine, Jackeline Swiecicki and Mr Yohanan. Mr Tourtchine was greatly distressed by what happened on that day and so is less likely than Ms Dimech to have remembered and recounted the events accurately. So, again, whenever their evidence conflicted I have preferred Ms Dimech's evidence. Again, however, there was little conflict.
2. Mr Tourtchine entered the meeting with a grievance against the other two owners. The grievance had to do with gates to the premises which were capable of being locked. According to Mr Tourtchine's evidence, the members of the owners corporation had decided in 1998 to keep the gates unlocked because a policeman had suffered an injury while climbing over the gates where they were locked. Those two members Ms Swiecicki and Mr Yohanan were new and were wanting the gates kept locked. Mr Tourtchine's evidence was that he tried to give an explanation to those two members about the history of the gates and why they should be kept unlocked but Ms Dimech did not give him the chance to do so. In her evidence Ms Dimech did not mention the matter of the gates or mention Mr Tourtchine having raised the matter at the meeting. So I think it likely that Mr Tourtchine did not articulate his views on this matter as clearly as he thought he had.
3. Mr Tourtchine and Ms Dimech came into conflict during the meeting. According to Mr Tourtchine, the conflict occurred because Ms Dimech 'skipped over' the topic of re-appointment of the manager, a matter that he wanted to debate, and he objected to her doing so. According to Ms Dimech, the conflict occurred because Mr Tourtchine began to read out a statement, the other members said they did not want to hear it, and Mr Tourtchine became agitated and tried to continue to read the statement. Mr Tourtchine acknowledged in his evidence that he did begin to read a statement, and said that Ms Swiecicki had urged Ms Dimech to let him continue for a couple of minutes but neither Ms Dimech nor the other member agreed. While I accept that Mr Tourtchine did raise an objection to Ms Dimech's handling of the re-appointment issue, I accept Ms Dimech's evidence that the primary cause of the conflict was Mr Tourtchine's attempt to hold the floor by reading his statement.
4. Once the conflict arose and Mr Tourtchine became agitated, Ms Dimech asked him to leave the meeting. Mr Tourtchine refused. Ms Dimech opened the door to the meeting room and again asked him to leave. When he did not, a man whom Ms Dimech described as 'another manager', but did not identify by name, escorted Mr Tourtchine from the room. According to Mr Tourtchine, the man pushed him into the foyer and then pushed him out of the building, twisting his arm as he did so. I accept that Mr Tourtchine was man-handled in the way he described, because he attended a doctor afterwards for treatment on an arm injury. In short, he was physically ejected from the meeting. Although the police were called to the scene Mr Tourtchine had left before they arrived.
5. Mr Tourtchine is obviously elderly. He told me that he is 77 years old. He is of below average height and slightly built. The evidence has revealed him to be a difficult and stubborn man but he is not violent, physically imposing or a danger to anyone.
6. I feel obliged to say that in my opinion the treatment of Mr Tourtchine was unwarranted and that the manager did not handle the occasion well. I acknowledge that Ms Dimech was in a difficult position and had to make a decision quickly. But it was the wrong decision. The right decision would have been to warn Mr Tourtchine that she would adjourn the meeting if he continued to disrupt it, then adjourn it if he ignored the warning, and call the police as a last resort if Mr Tourtchine refused to leave. The protocol that had been set out in the letter that Mr Macallister wrote on 8 December 2011 ought to have been followed. Ms Dimech told me, and I accept, that the other two members had not wanted the meeting to be adjourned. But their wishes should not have overborne her judgment. The use of force by the manager itself was also a wrong decision, in my opinion; if force was necessary, it should have been the police who exerted it.

1. Section 165(l)(i)(ii) of the Owners Corporations Act 2006 empowers VCAT to make an order revoking the appointment of a manager. A proven breach of a manager's duty under s 122(1) of the Act to act honestly and in good faith, or to exercise due care and diligence in the performance of the manager's functions, may, if sufficiently serious, afford a reason for VCAT to exercise this power. There are other circumstances in which VCAT may see fit to exercise the power even though there has been no proven breach of one of those duties. For example, if a manager had sought to prevent a member from exercising the member's right to attend a meeting and participate in the meeting, and were to be shown to have done that because of unreasonable hostility towards the member, VCAT might consider that the manager's behaviour demonstrated that the manager was incapable of impartiality and unfit to act as a manager, and might revoke the manager's appointment, irrespective of whether the other members of the owners corporation approved of the manager's conduct.
2. I have been critical of the way that Mr Tourtchine was excluded from part of the meeting held on 15 December 2012. It is a serious matter to exclude a member from a meeting or from part of a meeting, particularly if it is done by physically ejecting the member. But I do not consider that Mr Tourtchine's exclusion was a result of unreasonable hostility to him. I think the manager had reason to believe that Mr Tourtchine was a serial offender when it came to disruption of meetings of the owners corporation. There was the knowledge that Ms Dimech and Mr Campbell had of Mr Tourtchine's conduct on the adjourned date of the previous annual general meeting. Moreover, according to Mr Campbell's evidence, the records of the owners corporation that his firm had inherited from the previous manager contained minutes of a meeting held in September 2007; the minutes recorded that Mr Tourtchine had monopolised the meeting for 20 minutes while complaining about the then manager's conduct, and the police had to be called to the meeting. I am not saying that I accept that the allegations contained in those minutes are necessarily true. The evidence that Mr Campbell gave on the matter was hearsay evidence only. What I am saying is that the presence of those allegations in the minutes was another fact that gave rise to a reasonable belief that Mr Tourtchine was a serial offender, whether or not the belief was correct.
3. So I conclude that the manager's conduct on 15 December 2012 when, ignoring its own protocol, it caused Mr Tourtchine to be ejected from the meeting, is not a good reason for revoking the manager's appointment. I have said earlier that no other conduct or failing during the period of management is a good reason for revoking the appointment.
4. For those reasons the proceeding will be dismissed.

1. Mr Tourtchine served five persons with summonses to appear on the second day of the hearing. They were Mr Campbell, Ms Dimech, Jackeline Swiecicki, Mark Macallister and John Burgess. When I say that he served them I do not mean that he necessarily served them effectively in a way that could require the Tribunal to compel them to appear. When I asked Mr Tourtchine how he had served Ms Swiecicki, he told me that he had left the summons with her tenant who occupied the unit that she owned; and when I went on to ask him whether he had left any conduct money with the tenant, he evaded my question.
2. Mr Campbell and Ms Dimech attended the first day of the hearing, and Mr Tourtchine had cross-examined each of them on that day, as he was entitled to do because they gave evidence in chief on behalf of the respondent, the manager. When Mr Tourtchine's cross-examination of Ms Dimech had finished I excused her from any further attendance. So Mr Tourtchine was not entitled to require her, by summons, to appear on the second day. Mr Campbell attended on both days, but Mr Tourtchine had completed his cross-examination of Mr Campbell on the first day.
3. Ms Swiecicki, Mr Macallister and Mr Burgess did not appear on the second day. Mr Tourtchine told me that Mr Burgess was a person from the manager's office. Although nobody told me what part he played in any of the relevant events I imagine that he may have been the person who ejected Mr Tourtchine from the manager's premises on 15 December 2012. Whether or not my surmise is correct, there is no reason to suppose that Mr Tourtchine would have gained any benefit from calling Mr Macallister and Mr Burgess to give evidence on his behalf. On the contrary, there is every reason to suppose that they would have been hostile to his case. As for Ms Swiecicki, there is less reason to suppose that she would have been hostile to Mr Tourtchine's case, but when I asked him whether he had any reason to believe that she would give evidence that would assist his case he told me that he did not. In his evidence he also described Ms Swiecicki as a person who sought to dominate the other members of the owners corporation.
4. Mr Tourtchine's actions in taking out and serving summonses directed to those persons have reflected a misunderstanding of the proper use of VCAT's power to issue a summons to a person to attend the Tribunal to give evidence. It is a misunderstanding that some self-represented persons have. When a party to a proceeding requests the principal registrar to issue such a summons, and serves it properly, the witness named in the summons is required to attend the Tribunal and give evidence on behalf of that party. That means that the party may lead evidence from the witness, but is not entitled to cross-examine the witness. Some self-represented persons think that by serving a proposed witness with a summons to appear they can cross-examine and browbeat the witness into telling 'the truth' so that the witness's wrongdoing is revealed and the party's cause is vindicated. They are wrong. It is an abuse of VCAT's process to serve a summons for that purpose. A proposed witness should be served with a summons to appear only if there is reason to believe that the witness's evidence, given in chief, would assist the case of the party that serves the summons. VCAT hearings are not Royal Commissions or inquisitions. They are proceedings between parties. I am speaking of course of proceedings in the Tribunal's Civil Division, in its original jurisdiction. While the Tribunal is not bound by the rules of evidence, that does not mean that the Tribunal should ignore them. One of the rules of evidence which I consider that the Tribunal should follow strictly, in proceedings of the kind of which I am speaking, is the rule that a party who calls a witness to give evidence is not entitled to cross-examine that witness.
5. So, although Mr Tourtchine complained on the second day of the hearing (and in later correspondence sent to the principal registrar) that the summoned witnesses did not appear and so the Tribunal could not and did not receive their evidence, I formed the view that Mr Tourtchine was unlikely to have derived any benefit, in any legitimate fashion, from their evidence and so did not see fit to adjourn the hearing further because of their non-attendance, or to do anything else about their non-attendance.