Golf club gets its rules right

This story has appeared in The Redland Times, Cleveland, Redland Shire, Queensland, Australia. Image from www.redlandbaygolf.com.au.

IMPORTANT paperwork capped off a busy financial year for Redland Bay Golf Club treasurer Peter Tucker and a small team that updated the club’s constitution.
A public notice in our Classifieds announced the special general meeting that adopted the draft on June 26 for submission to the Office of Fair Trading for official approval.
Peter chaired the committee with the brief to modernise the document, which Peter says was first written about 30 years ago and gathered "band-aids" over the years.
Club member and lawyer John Stoner donated his time to prepare the draft update, considering the Queensland model rules and the club’s individual circumstances.

"NOW we will have a constitution that you can actually read – sectionalised and indexed," Peter says.
"Bits were added and taken out over the years but related items were not changed and some of the references, such as to caddies and loose-leaf ledgers, needed a good tidy up.
"We haven’t changed it but have made it clearer and easy to read."
Club constitutional updates sometimes relate to internal politics but Peter says no specific issues were involved.
"The lack of controversy made it difficult to get the required numbers at the special general meeting," he says.
"This wasn’t something that fired people up.
"We had to adjourn the first attempt because we didn’t get a quorum and we only had about 30 members at the second, which isn’t a lot from a total of about 1500 members."

NEVERTHELESS, Peter hopes the approval will take effect before the club’s annual general meeting late next month because "now we will have a document that can actually be updated if anyone wants to do that."
Concurrent with the attention to such detail, the club has celebrated another major update, he says. "In the past year we have spent $200,000 modernising the clubhouse – now we have a fully operational function room for about 120 guests.
"Previously, a portion of the clubhouse had to close during functions so we have now given the clubhouse back to the membership and have additional poker machines."

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