Wang v State of New South Wales (No 2)

THE COURT: By its judgment of 20 February 2020, this Court dismissed an application by Ms Li Wang for leave to appeal against a number of decisions (Wang v State of New South Wales [2020] NSWCA 21). Those decisions and the background to them are described in that judgment. By her notice of motion filed on 3 March 2020, which is the subject of this judgment, she seeks to reverse the result of her earlier application.

Ms Wang relies first on r 36.15 of the Uniform Civil Procedure Rules which enables a court to set aside one of its judgments if there has been an irregularity, illegality or want of good faith in the making of the judgment. As stated in Huang v Wong (No 2) [2019] NSWCA 18 at [24], for this rule to be attracted, there must have been some irregularity, illegality or want of good faith “in the procuring of the judgment or order sought to be set aside”. Ms Wang has not advanced any arguable basis for concluding that that occurred in the present case.

Secondly, Ms Wang relies on r 36.16 of the UCPR. This gives the Court discretion to set aside a judgment or order if (as occurred in the present case) a notice of motion seeking an order to that effect is filed within 14 days of the judgment or order. As stated in Majak v Rose (No 5) [2017] NSWCA 238 at [12], the rule does not however “give a licence to disgruntled litigants to re-agitate, in the hope of obtaining a more favourable outcome, issues that have been determined against them” (see also Zepinic v Chateau Constructions (Aust) Ltd (No 2) [2019] NSWCA 187 at [13]).

Apart from raising the possibility that a presently immaterial factual error was made, Ms Wang has raised no new argument of any substance on the present application. Her principal contention is that various arguments that she raised at the previous hearing were not dealt with in the judgment. However the Court is not obliged to deal with every matter raised by a litigant. In particular it need not deal with assertions that are not arguable. In its previous judgment, the Court dealt with the substance of the matters upon which Ms Wang relied. Her present application is thus simply an impermissible attempt to re-argue her application that the Court dismissed on 20 February 2020.

For these reasons, Ms Wang’s notice of motion filed on 3 March 2020 is dismissed with costs.