… 40 Owners could all vote for a motion and 10 other Owners at the AGM itself, opposed to the motion but knowing they could not defeat it, could simply amend it in a way to negate it…
I don’t know if there is anything specific in NSW legislation on this but all general guidance on meeting procedure would tell you that such an amendment would be invalid and should not be allowed by the chair of the meeting. Where I am, our meeting notice includes a statement for the benefit of anyone cating an absentee vote that their vote will still count if a motion is amended and that the chair will only accept a motion to amend if ‘the amendment is within the scope of the original motion and does not alter its nature’, which is a quote from Joske’s book on Meeting Procedure.
So, a valid amendment might be to change a notice period from 7 days to 14 days for some thing the meeting decides to do but the motion would still be about doing some thing and giving people reasonable notice of when it is going to happen. An invalid amendment would be to insert the word ‘not’ into a motion to do some thing.