Generally the chair can (and perhaps should) take the sense of the meeting and decided that certain matters may be contentious and so move them down the batting order, perhaps to get procedural matters out of the way first.

If any owner objects to this, they can raise their objections and call for a vote that the order  remain the same or be changed differently .

It helps a lot if strata committees have standing orders that cover this kind of thing but almost none of them do.

And, generally speaking, the chair is in charge of the meeting, so changes must come from or through them.

Why do you ask?

You should only add new items at the meeting if all owners are in attendance.  Even if a majority of owners attend but some don’t you can only discuss and vote on items that are on the agenda.

This might work in a small block where everyone turns up for the meeting.  But I don’t even think it’s valid if some owners are represented by proxies.  It’s all about owners knowing in advance what is going to be discussed.

The other consideration is, if the matter isn’t that big a deal, why make a big deal out of it?

If a major issue has been snuck on to the agenda, it can be challenged retrospectively at NCAT, but only provided someone was:

a) deprived of the opportunity to vote (e.g. by not knowing the matter was going to be discussed) and

b) their vote would have made a difference to the final outcome.

We can get too hung up on procedure – but we should be wary of too many decisions made on a nod and a wink.