 Suggestions resulting from the illegal and disgraceful “Special” meeting process |
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From: Brett Davis To: info@shoalhavenbushwalkers.com Subject: Suggestions resulting from the illegal and disgraceful “Special” meeting process Date sent: April 8, 2025 |
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Hi SBW committee, A SECRET committee meeting was held at the home of Clare Lord on March 5th, 2024, as shown by one laughable version of the minutes of that meeting which is available to club members on our website. The name of that minutes document is “SBW Special Meeting 5th March 2024 - Website v.pdf”, but the title within the document is “SBW Additional Meeting Tuesday 5th March 2024 – Website version”. Was the meeting a “Special Meeting” or an “Additional Meeting”? Special general meetings are detailed in the SBW constitution, but there is no mention of special committee meetings. Additional meetings of the committee are mentioned in the constitution, and they have their own rules detailed there. Rule 23(i)(i) of our constitution says the Presiding Officer can restrict attendance to all or part of the meeting - but Presiding Officers are not actually decided until just before a meeting is opened as a Presiding Officer can only be chosen from people who are in attendance at the meeting. What would happen - for example - if the following situation occurred? The President decides that he will be the Presiding Officer at the next committee meeting and that it would be a SECRET meeting where no club members were allowed to attend. This is advertised to club members who are advised not to go to the meeting as their attendance will be restricted. On his way way to the meeting, the President has a car accident which forces him to miss the meeting. The Vice President then becomes the Presiding Officer, and he decides that there is no need for any restriction to the attendance of club members at the meeting. Unfortunately, the members who wanted to be there have already been told that they can't attend the meeting, so the part of the constitution that says "committee Meetings shall be open to Club members subject to a decision by the Presiding Officer" has been effectively ignored. Getting back to the additional meeting - Rule 23 says that committee meetings shall be open to club members, but club members were not informed that this meeting was taking place. Not advertising the meeting to club members could be considered illegal, but I won't worry about all that in this email. The minutes of the additional meeting state that “the purpose of the meeting was to consider the conduct of a member of SBW in relation to Rule 6 (Cessation of membership) of the SBW constitution.” The name of the member is not mentioned in the minutes. The minutes of that meeting further state that “the committee resolved to make two judgements pursuant to Sub-rule 6(a).” The details of those judgements are not mentioned in the minutes – i.e. there are no details about who proposed and seconded the resolutions, and no details about whether the resolutions were passed or not. The minutes then state that “the member was notified of these judgements by letter dated 8th March and delivered on 10th March”. The contents of this “correspondence out” is not detailed in the minutes. As no members of the club were removed from the membership list available on the website in the three months after that meeting, it could be assumed that the member was found not guilty of whatever conduct he or she was accused of, and it could be further assumed that his or her name was not included in the minutes to prevent embarrassment to the member who had been wrongly accused. This whole process would obviously also be an embarrassment to the committee as they appear to have made false, unfounded accusations. A search of all committee meeting minutes since the additional meeting shows that the minutes of the additional meeting have never been approved – so what legal standing do they have? I suppose it doesn’t really matter, as the minutes don’t actually say anything concrete, meaningful or actionable anyhow. However, this whole farce gets worse! As mentioned earlier, the name of the minutes document is “SBW Special Meeting 5th March 2024 - Website v.pdf” while the title within the document is “SBW Additional Meeting Tuesday 5th March 2024 – Website version”. No other SBW minutes in the history of the club – whether for an AGM, a general meeting or a committee meeting – contains “Website version” or “Website v” in its name or title. A document being a “website version” presupposes that a different version of that document exists elsewhere. Apparently the SBW committee has decided to produce two different versions of the minutes for the additional committee meeting held on March 5th, 2024 – one for the website and therefore for club members, and one for the committee that is being kept SECRET from club members. At the moment the club’s standing resolution #27 states that the SBW club must follow the NSW Fair Trading’s Model Constitution’s Sub-rule 43 (4) which says that under certain circumstances “the committee may refuse to allow a member to inspect or obtain a copy of a document”. This rule says that the contents of a document may be kept from members, but it does not say that two different versions of the minutes should be made – one containing information that the committee wants its club members to know, and another version containing information that the committee wants kept SECRET. Is this the proper way to run a club? Is this legal? Is it moral? Is it desirable? May I ask whether newly elected committee members are informed about the SECRET minutes after they are elected? If not, the committee will eventually be composed of people who are all unaware of the SECRET minutes, in which case those minutes would effectively disappear from official club records. Therefore, it can be assumed that new committee members must be informed about the SECRET minutes. However, whose job is it to inform new committee members about the SECRET minutes? Why is there no mention of this job in the club’s job descriptions? Or do we now also have SECRET job descriptions as well? In short, the committee held a SECRET meeting where an unknown SBW member was accused of some undisclosed wrongdoings, the committee made two judgements, but we don’t know what they are, and the member was allegedly notified of those judgements by letter, but we don’t know the contents of that letter or even if it actually exists. Two sets of minutes were apparently created after this meeting – one set for club members and a SECRET set exclusively for the committee members at the time, but not necessarily for future committee members. Additionally, neither set of minutes has been approved at any subsequent committee meeting as being a true and accurate record – although a second SECRET committee meeting may have occurred where the SECRET minutes of the second SECRET meeting have recorded that the SECRET minutes of the first SECRET meeting have been SECRETly approved. 😃 Can the committee see how complicated everything becomes when it insists on secrecy over openness and transparency? As Sir Walter Scott famously wrote “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive ...” Further to the approval of minutes, and given the behaviour of recent committees, it is quite telling that no committee meeting minutes and no general meeting minutes have been declared to be “true and accurate” since the middle of 2023 when this practice used for the lifetime of the club was apparently discontinued. I suggest this practice be reinstated so that we might get closer to having true and accurate minutes in the future. And given that the club now has SECRET meetings, SECRET discussions, SECRET decisions, SECRET correspondence, SECRET minutes and possibly SECRET approval of the minutes of SECRET meetings, plus possible SECRET job descriptions as well, I suggest that the committee should repeal Standing Resolution #27 which supposedly allows this behaviour to occur, and replace it with a resolution for the committee to refrain from any SECRET activity and return the club to the openness, honesty and transparency that it enjoyed prior to 2020. Please note that I understand that the committee has “invasion of privacy” concerns with minutes, and I will deal with those concerns in a future email. Regards, Brett |
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