PENNANT HILLS PHOTOGRAPHIC CLUB INC.

 NOTICE OF SPECIAL GENERAL MEETING

 TO BE HELD AT 7.45PM ON MONDAY 6TH AUGUST 2018

at the Uniting Church hall, Corner of Boundary Rd and Bellamy Street, Pennant Hills

PURPOSE: The purpose of the meeting is to approve a special resolution to adopt a new Club Constitution.

MOTION: That the Pennant Hills Photographic Club adopt a new and revised Constitution based on the NSW Department of Fair Trading Model Constitution for incorporated associations as distributed with this notice of meeting.

BACKGROUND: Members who attended the last AGM will recall that the immediate past-president proposed that the outgoing committee be able to assist the new incoming committee in managing the club’s affairs until the end of the year. Functions such as trophies, the presentation night, and finalising next year’s calendar, which all happen at the end of the year are difficult to transfer to new committee members in the very short term available. Our current Constitution makes no allowance for this to occur.

In addition, our current Constitution is old though it appears to have been based on an earlier version of a Model Constitution. NSW Fair Trading have a newer version available. For those interested in accessing a clean copy of the model, it can be found here:http://www.fairtrading.nsw.gov.au/ftw/Cooperatives_and_associations/Incorporating_an_association/About_the_constitution/Model_constitution.page

Organisations adopting the Model Constitution verbatim automatically have their Constitution updated whenever Fair Trading update the Model (refer to the cover page). However in order to give effect to what was discussed at the last AGM we have had to modify the Model; and because that negates the automatic updating the Committee have taken the opportunity to make a limited number of other minor changes to the model to suit the club’s operation. In short, the proposed new Constitution is only changed from the Model to the minor extent it has been necessary.

ATTACHMENTS: Attached to this message are three documents for your consideration:

  1. The Club’s existing Constitution – PHPC constitution
  2. A marked up copy of the Model Constitution showing the changes made to adapt it to PHPC (NOTE – this copy has no proper pagination and table of contents) – PHPC_constitution_draft_3_mark_up
  3. A clean copy of the document with pagination and a correct table of contents – PHPC_constitution_draft_3 (clean)

COMMENTS: There are some differences in the new Model compared to our existing Constitution such as:

  1. A reduction from 20% to 5% of the club membership who may requisition the Committee to convene a Special General Meeting (Section 27)
  2. The quorum for general meetings is reduced from 10 members to 5 members (Section 29)
  3. There is no longer any provision for proxy voting (Section 35)
  4. There is provision for use of technology at meetings (Section 37)
  5. In the Model Constitution we are referred to as an “Association”. We have not attempted to change that because we were trying to move away from the Model as little as possible.

The changes relating to the outgoing Committee helping the incoming Committee are at Section 13(d). Section 13(e) was added to acknowledge the fact that the Committee has a set of bylaws to assist it in running the Club.

Nancy Morley
President