Impartial and unbiased As secretary, your duties unavoidably involve you in most of the contentious bits of governance. You’re the first stop for (among other things) complaints, membership applications, appeals against expulsion, and calls for special general meetings. You may – you should – have an opinion on whether the complaint is frivolous, the application should be refused, the expulsion should be expedited, or the SGM should be allowed to waste everybody’s time, but that can’t be allowed to affect anybody’s confidence that all these operations will be done by the book. On strictly practical grounds, you won’t be long in the job before you realise that trying to bury arguments only gives them extra zombie strength and persistence. It’s far better to be genuinely helpful and allow others to realise the futility of their case for themselves.
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5. What powers do I have? If you’re a member of the board, you have the same powers as every other member, which is basically not very much (the board as a whole has all the power going, but the individual member has only their vote). In addition, you can draw on some other sources of authority, outlined here.
Legislative powers There are some things that the law actually says are your job. And anything you’re specifically charged with doing you can probably do the way you want to without having to take instructions from anyone else. Unfortunately, different states are absurdly at variance about what these things are. In NSW, for example, the
