agm tagged to 14 November town-hall talk
Sustainable Town-Hall Talks: The cost of hiring audiovisual equipment for each town-hall talk was crippling but was only ever intended to be a stopgap until the Warkworth Town Hall could boast its own, which it will be able to from 14 November onward, thanks to a grant facilitated by the Department of Internal Affairs, and the generosity of J Barry Ferguson. image Auckland Council | design Mahurangi Magazine
To save dragging some of the same folk out twice in one month, Mahurangi Action is tagging its annual general meeting to next month’s Warkworth Town Hall Talk.
This is not to suggest that the society is permanently abandoning its salubrious tradition of meeting at Scott Homestead, but 2018, being Warkworth’s year of structure-plan processes, deserves Mahurangi Action’s continuing focus. Self-interest alone suggests that the interests of the Mahurangi watershed are best served by Warkworth’s planned, five-times-larger population being mindful, amongst other things, of the harbours elevated sediment accumulation rate.
Annual general meetings can be productive. One, that of 1993, after its worth had received the fulsome endorsement of historian Beverley SimmonsSIMMONS, Beverley Alison (nee Bryant). At Warkworth on Friday 23rd November 2018; aged 90 years. Dearly loved wife of the late Ronald Henshall Simmons MBE, JP, and loving younger daughter of the late Gordon and Doris Bryant. A service celebrating Beverley's life will be held at the Warkworth Town Hall, Cnr. Alnwick Street and Neville Street, Warkworth on Friday 30th November 2018 at 11:00am, followed by private cremation., approved the publication of Dr Ronald Locker’s history of the Mahurangi. But generally, as democratically necessary as the process of electing—or, more typically, re-electing—a committee is, annual general meetings, for most, are the least endearing component of community engagement. And there is there is the attendant danger of election by ambushindeed, the writer’s introduction to community service at the treacherous hands of his father, at the ages 23 and 58, respectively. It might be a small democratic violation compared with what appears to be systemic in the New Zealand National Party, including the spousal-nepotistic stacking of council positions revealed this week, but it doesn’t make it right.
The need for incorporated societies to hold annual elections is almost never questioned. Yet parliamentarians, once elected, are generally free to make unfettered life-and-death decisions for others at least three years—five, in the United Kingdom; two in the United States, for members of the House of Representatives. Be that as it may, annual elections are more democratic, and democracy would be in considerably less danger now, has the Chartists’ sixth demand, for annual elections, been met:
On Wednesday 14 November, the annual general meeting will closely follow Professor Bill McKay’s talk—temporarily titled for him Life at the End of the Motorway—at about 7.30 pm. To vote for committee members or on other issues, members need to be financial. This can be done online easily enough by credit card: