andrewmcleod
Well-known member
The following comments are purely my personal opinion 
It's much easier to agree that something is bad and should be changed than to agree on _what_ should be changed. Hence it is not surprising that last year's motion had a clear majority, whereas all three options this year had lesser support.
There was a consultation on Section 10.1 prior to a number of meetings where it was discussed at the Constitution and Operations Working Group. The consultation was largely to find out what the hell Section 10.1 actually meant (or at least what people thought it meant, which is much the same thing really). Only one regional council, the CSCC, responded at this time. No responses gave any suggestions of new wording. What the consultation really showed was that there was significant disagreement about what it meant, whether it was good and what should be done with it. No single form of words was going to please everybody.
This wasn't an exercise in pushing some desired outcome; it was a genuine attempt to present the membership with a set of options which reflected the range of opinions they held.
In my _personal_ option, by far the best option was to dump it entirely. I am a strong believer that any restrictive clauses in a constitution should be very specific and clear, which this is not. I would also like to see a more compact constitution. Therefore, not presenting an option to remove it entirely (2A) would have been a missed opportunity.
However, only presenting an option to remove it entirely would not have been suggesting a 'new form of words', and would be ignoring the responses of all the people who felt it was important. So we also included a cut-down option where only part of it was included (this was, I believe, the only explicit suggestion actually made by anyone to me although I could have forgotten some). Hence option 2B.
Finally, some sort of compromise option was needed or we would just be ignoring a significant fraction of the responses. Unfortunately, the problem is that Section 10.1 is terribly vague but has all this additional baggage. Consequently, it is not possible to state exactly what it means, and therefore it is very hard to even rewrite it without potentially changing it completely, let alone try and reach some compromise. Thus 2C was spawned out; a horrific mishmash of compromise that takes far too many words to try and say some of what Section 10.1 was saying, but with extra arbitrary conditions. I think it was pretty awful, but it was the best I could do - in fact I was going to withdraw it at the meeting I first presented it, but we decided to keep it anyway. Despite writing and proposing it, I actually voted against it on principle (and then pointed out when the results were initially released that it had in fact _not_ passed, although I would of course have done this anyway). It's therefore ironic that it did the best out of the three options - apparently people like a wishy-washy compromise with too many words in it...
What I would point out though is that a majority of voters wanted to remove Section 10.1 entirely. They failed to pass the constitutional threshold of 70%, but the majority of members are in favour. Thus, it probably shouldn't be seen as some sacred principle of the BCA delivered by the members... it is a horrifically ambiguous clause, and AGMs and the membership could interpret it in all sorts of ways (as is their right).
Where to go from here? Well, I am confident we have fulfilled the requirement from the 2020 AGM and can now waste no more time on it. I don't think Section 10.1 really does anything significant, although I respectfully acknowledge others would disagree. It remains in the constitution, but I think the majority vote to remove it is a vote of no confidence in the principle it (attempts) to state. And any member who can actually think of anything better to replace it can submit something to the 2022 AGM (please do)...
It's much easier to agree that something is bad and should be changed than to agree on _what_ should be changed. Hence it is not surprising that last year's motion had a clear majority, whereas all three options this year had lesser support.
There was a consultation on Section 10.1 prior to a number of meetings where it was discussed at the Constitution and Operations Working Group. The consultation was largely to find out what the hell Section 10.1 actually meant (or at least what people thought it meant, which is much the same thing really). Only one regional council, the CSCC, responded at this time. No responses gave any suggestions of new wording. What the consultation really showed was that there was significant disagreement about what it meant, whether it was good and what should be done with it. No single form of words was going to please everybody.
This wasn't an exercise in pushing some desired outcome; it was a genuine attempt to present the membership with a set of options which reflected the range of opinions they held.
In my _personal_ option, by far the best option was to dump it entirely. I am a strong believer that any restrictive clauses in a constitution should be very specific and clear, which this is not. I would also like to see a more compact constitution. Therefore, not presenting an option to remove it entirely (2A) would have been a missed opportunity.
However, only presenting an option to remove it entirely would not have been suggesting a 'new form of words', and would be ignoring the responses of all the people who felt it was important. So we also included a cut-down option where only part of it was included (this was, I believe, the only explicit suggestion actually made by anyone to me although I could have forgotten some). Hence option 2B.
Finally, some sort of compromise option was needed or we would just be ignoring a significant fraction of the responses. Unfortunately, the problem is that Section 10.1 is terribly vague but has all this additional baggage. Consequently, it is not possible to state exactly what it means, and therefore it is very hard to even rewrite it without potentially changing it completely, let alone try and reach some compromise. Thus 2C was spawned out; a horrific mishmash of compromise that takes far too many words to try and say some of what Section 10.1 was saying, but with extra arbitrary conditions. I think it was pretty awful, but it was the best I could do - in fact I was going to withdraw it at the meeting I first presented it, but we decided to keep it anyway. Despite writing and proposing it, I actually voted against it on principle (and then pointed out when the results were initially released that it had in fact _not_ passed, although I would of course have done this anyway). It's therefore ironic that it did the best out of the three options - apparently people like a wishy-washy compromise with too many words in it...
What I would point out though is that a majority of voters wanted to remove Section 10.1 entirely. They failed to pass the constitutional threshold of 70%, but the majority of members are in favour. Thus, it probably shouldn't be seen as some sacred principle of the BCA delivered by the members... it is a horrifically ambiguous clause, and AGMs and the membership could interpret it in all sorts of ways (as is their right).
Where to go from here? Well, I am confident we have fulfilled the requirement from the 2020 AGM and can now waste no more time on it. I don't think Section 10.1 really does anything significant, although I respectfully acknowledge others would disagree. It remains in the constitution, but I think the majority vote to remove it is a vote of no confidence in the principle it (attempts) to state. And any member who can actually think of anything better to replace it can submit something to the 2022 AGM (please do)...
