From the beginning, people have had problems with rules.
Australia’s 600,000 not-for-profits – those clubs, charities, environmental groups, school committees, and welfare groups – aren’t immune. Rules are something we hope will keep them running efficiently and honourably. Especially since two thirds of Australians over 21 belong to one or more non-profit group.
When it comes to rules, do you draw them in enough detail to cover every eventuality? Or, do you just sketch in general principles and let people sort it out depending on “the vibe” on the day? Making them simpler doesn’t necessarily make them easier to manage.
In the garden of Eden there was only one rule – don’t eat the apples – and they couldn’t even keep to that.
Actually though, that seems a little implausible. Wouldn’t Adam and Eve have needed a dishwashing roster, and a designated latrine area, and a rule for breaking ties over the naming of the aardvark, not to mention the other animals?
If you don’t have some rules, that means you just have the same arguments over and over, which doesn’t sound like paradise to me.
Still, there were rules we can deduce they certainly didn’t have. And, among them are the rules of natural justice. If the management decided to expel you from your time-share condo there was no legal comeback, if only because there were at the time no other people in existence to sit on an appeals tribunal.
After the Fall, however, came lawyers. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Queensland listened patiently to about $50,000 worth of them going into the finer details of the constitution of the Nambour Bowls Club in the course of determining that a member had been wrongly expelled and should be readmitted, awarding costs against the club.
What happened, evidently, was that an argument over leftover coleslaw escalated into personality conflicts over club administration.
The committee resolved to expel the alleged troublemakers, and took advantage of a minor dispute over what exactly the applicable annual fees were, to declare them unfinancial. Along the way, some i’s were left undotted and some t’s uncrossed. Disaster followed.
I wouldn’t be surprised if for the next few years the Nambour Bowls Club’s management committee runs every communication between the club and any member past a QC before sending them off.
If every Australian club had to do that though, the legal profession would become a larger section of the economy than the mining sector and the baristas combined, a waste of national resources comparable to the time we currently spend on Facebook.
So how can this be avoided? We could, I suppose, try and work it out mechanically. We could draft a constitution that would in fifty-seven volumes define every possible reciprocal interaction between office bearers and members down to the smallest detail, covering every micro-responsibility and every nano-duty.
We at Our Community could develop a toolkit, or even an app, to provide templates for such things as fee renewals, where the club would plug in its dates and its charges and let the computer zip them out to members. We have the technology!
I have to say, though, I have grave doubts that even that would work.
Could any conceivable rules cope with Murphy’s law, not to say coleslaw? Would we need to send out updates to cover new technology, or changing meanings, or judicial reversals?
There is, after all, another approach to the bowls club’s brouhaha. At any point, any of the participants could just have laughed.
The affair was, as so many disasters in Australian not-for-profits are, deeply, deeply ridiculous, calling not for judges but for someone with the authority to stand everyone in the corner with instructions not to come out until they were prepared to say sorry. In the not-for-profit world, we want to preserve the rights of members to differ with their office bearers, we want to avoid allowing organisations to be diverted from their core purpose, we want our community groups to have the strength to drive their community.
In pursuit of these ends, we want our associations to have firm rules, clear responsibilities, and the good sense not to use either when it seems likely that the result will be injustice, distress, or a never-ending spiral of bad feeling.
Codes of conduct (and Our Community can provide you with useful examples) are just ways of reminding people to act like decent human beings and, are pretty helpless if people don’t.
One rule, really, would be enough; eat all the apples you like, but don’t be a total dick.
Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise and B-corporation providing help to not-for-profits.
