u/INVADER-GRIM

EDIT TO ADD: Thanks all for the roach advice, but to be clear I'm looking for LEGAL advice. The whole floor (at the very least) is infested, and building management won't do anything more than their monthly hallway sprays. Fixing my apartment won't do anything more than provide a temporary reprieve, and I don't want to pay out of pocket for something that won't actually solve the issue.

TL;DR Legally what are my rights/next steps if there is a floor wide cockroach infestation as a owner occupier?

Hey Reddit, at my wits end so hopefully someone can point me in the right direction. I've seen a lot of info online about roach infestations in apartments, but they all focus on renters getting through to their landlords.

I'm an owner occupier in an apartment in Victoria, and there's been a horrible infestation of German cockroaches coming up on 2 years. Some examples to give you an idea of how much it's affecting my quality of life

• Killing upwards of 30 cockroaches a day (these are just the ones I can get to, I see plenty more)
• 20+ dead cockroaches found around the place every day
• Waking up because a bug has crawled onto me
• Bugs crawling onto the ceiling and falling onto me/my guests
• Lost a meal consisting of $30+ worth of ingredients (thanks colesworth I love that pesto pasta costs that much) because I found a bug cooked into it. I checked the pans before starting, all the foodstuffs were sealed, and I covered the pans the entire time. This isn't the first time it's happened.
• Needless to say my friends are less than keen on coming over due to all of this.

There are sometimes roaches in the lobby, but it seems that my floor might be the worst (building management has eluded to this and I see multiple bugs consistently crawling in the hallway at all times of day at all, times of year) The building management does monthly sprays of our hallways, but this doesn't seem to do much.

I have multiple types of bait out, all food is sealed in tubs, and the place is kept to a reasonable level of cleanliness. I also took time off work and spent a week wrapping all my belongings up to bug-bomb the place, which didn't help at all. I feel I'm doing all that is reasonable on my end to stop the infestation. And yet, I've still seen 5 roaches in the time it took me to type this out.

What are my next steps? Can I force the strata to take further action? Can I get compensation for the money & time lost + loss of quality of living due to this? If I was renting I would have moved out long ago - in fact, there are multiple 1 star google reviews of people who did just that, citing the cockroaches as the reason.

Thanks for reading my manifesto, hopefully there's some kind of recourse I can take.