Australia, June 27 -- New South Wales Land and Environment Court issued text of the following judgement on May 26:

1. THE COURT: This judgment concerns a motion seeking re-opening of an earlier decision. The core purpose of judicial power is to quell disputes. In the nature of things, many litigants are unhappy with the result of proceedings. In some cases such litigants will exercise a right to appeal or seek leave to appeal. However, some litigants, commonly unrepresented, find it difficult to accept that a court has ruled against them and approach that court asking it to re-open its decision. Such applications often manifest the subjective certitude of the litigant that any court which properly understood and considered their contentions could not possibly reject them. Of course, in some cases there is due cause to re-open judicial decisions. It is possible, for example, that the court in question has simply overlooked some argument that was made or some evidence that had been drawn to attention. But such cases are rare. This is not one of them.

2. On 29 April 2025 we handed down a decision refusing the applicant, Dr Renuka Mendonca, leave to appeal in a dispute relating in substance to costs: Mendonca v Tonna [2025] NSWCA 82 (J). The applicant had also filed a notice of appeal in separate proceedings but she conceded that she needed leave to appeal. On that basis we also made orders dismissing her appeal as incompetent. We summarised the context of the application for leave to appeal as follows:

[1] The applicant, Dr Renuka Mendonca, and the current respondents, Mr Mark Tonna and Ms Lorraine Tonna, have been engaged in a long-running dispute about a property in Galston in the Hills District of Sydney. The last set of iterations of that dispute were case managed and determined by Kunc J in the Supreme Court, leading up to a long judgment on various costs disputes handed down on 15 August 2024: Mendonca v Tonna; Mendonca v Hathaway; The application of Hathaway and Hosking [2024] NSWSC 1024 (Costs Judgment). The decisions reached in that judgment were crystallised in orders made on 3 September 2024.

[2] The applicant seeks leave to appeal from part of the orders made as a result of the Costs Judgment, along with various earlier orders made by his Honour (on 24 October 2023, 14 February 2024, and 3, 5 and 10 April 2024). The current respondents - whom we shall refer to as the Tonnas to avoid possible confusion with the trustee parties in the proceedings below - resist a grant of leave.

3. On 6 May 2025 the applicant filed a notice of motion in her leave to appeal proceedings seeking to set aside the orders we made on 29 April 2025. The motion was supported by an affidavit by the applicant sworn on 5 May 2025, to which was attached a nine page submission.

4. On 8 May 2025 the Registrar of the Court of Appeal sent the parties an email indicating that the Court would consider how to proceed and inform the parties in due course. No order was then made for the respondents to file submissions in response to the application. In the event, it has not been necessary to put the respondents to the expense of taking that step. The applicant's motion has been determined on the papers, as is common practice for such applications: see eg Woolf v Brandt (No 3) [2024] NSWCA 6 at [21], and cases there cited.

5. The orders sought in the motion fall into three broad categories:

1) The applicant seeks that the motion be determined by "different Court of Appeal Judges that includes Judge Basten AJA" (prayer 1).

2) She now seeks an order joining the trustees for sale to the proceedings (prayer 4).

3) She asks that our judgment be set aside pursuant to rr 36.15 and 36.16(3A) of the Uniform Civil Procedure Rules 2005 (NSW) (UCPR), that leave to appeal be granted, the objection to competency dismissed and that she have a related extension of time (prayers 1-3 and 5-8).

*Rest of the document can be viewed at: (https://www.caselaw.nsw.gov.au/decision/196eacfe04882d2893aedfa8)

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