The Court held that proceedings commenced by an executive committee of an owners corporation in contravention of s 80D of the Strata Schemes Management Act 1996 (NSW), and without compliance with the exemption conditions in Regulation 15, are invalid and must be dismissed. Regulation 15 requires both a valid executive committee decision to take specified legal action and a correlative reasonably estimated cost of that action; the cost cannot be artificially minimised by staging estimates up to arbitrary procedural points rather than estimating costs to final resolution. The Court declined to follow Kirby J's obiter distinction in Owners SP 46528 v Hall that invalidity would not apply where the defendant is not a lot owner, holding that the protection of lot owners is achieved by knowledge that non-compliant decisions will be invalidated regardless of who benefits.
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