Resignation

The meeting first mentioned on the REACTION page was held on September 11th (a significant date in the history of the modern world) and it was not a discussion - it was more like a kangaroo court. The Webmaster was handed printed copies of the two complaints shown on the REACTION page.

The truth of the complaints was simply assumed - with no evidence presented. The Webmaster was then asked to remove two of the web pages he had recently added to the SBW website - "SBW Inc" and "The Role of the President".

The third web page - "The Term of the President" - had already been taken down because Brett believed that the actions of the committee members involved (Mary Furness and Julienne McKay) showed the club in a bad light. He still wanted it on the website - in the Members Only Area - where it would not be seen by the public but where club members could learn from it.

The meeting at the Webmaster's home showed the new President's complete non-compliance with the club's constitution, aided and abetted by the two longest serving committee members (apart from the Webmaster). John Souter maintains that it was not a complaints meeting, but Brett believed otherwise because he was handed printouts of two complaint emails and was asked to explain his behaviour. In addition, the September committee meeting minutes refer to those emails as complaints. The meeting ignored the rules of the constitution which allow the accused time to prepare a defence.

If the meeting was not a complaints meeting but just a new President bypassing the committee to make decisions about the website, it also ignored the rules of the constitution. And if it was the President "directing the general functioning of the club" by directing the Webmaster to remove web pages, then that is the job of the committee, not the President and two committee members, both of whom had previously joined an illegal sub-committee at a President's bidding.

Over the next few days Brett made sure that all of his outstanding jobs as Webmaster were complete and that the website - and the club - could run effectively and "unattended" forever, given that he had already changed the Program and News pages so that non-technical people could update them.

His jobs were completed by September 16th. Coincidentally, on the morning of the same day the Shoalhaven Bushwalkers Secretary Clare Lord sent out an email with the subject "Work done on Safety Procedures". A legal (surprisingly) safety sub-committee had been set up at the previous committee meeting to simplify the four page safety procedures document produced by Julienne McKay and David Campbell earlier in the year.

The constitution says "a Sub-committee shall deal with matters of a special nature and shall be confined to the terms under which the Sub-committee is established." The constitution was again ignored, as the sub-committee's work was not confined to the terms under which it was established, and its output ran to 16 documents!

This final violation of the constitution, after all those that had gone before, was the last straw for the Webmaster who no longer wished to be associated with the SBW committee, its terrible decisions and its ignorance of the SBW constitution.

Brett resigned from the SBW committee on the evening of September 16th, 2023.

For the next chapter in this history, go to the SECRETS page ...

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