Special General Meeting to vote on Rules

About

Over the past year, through a thorough consultation with our membership, we've reviewed and updated the ACE New Zealand Rules. The Rules are now ready to be accepted or rejected by vote at this Special General Meeting, hosted by our President, Ceinwen McNeil. 

Why are we changing the Rules?

ACE New Zealand is an incorporated society under the Incorporated Societies Act 1908. This requires us to have Rules that set out our role, how we operate, and member rights and obligations. The Rules are effectively our constitution. While incremental amendments have been made over the years, there has been no comprehensive review to ensure the Rules reflect a clear and relevant purpose for our organisation today, reflect what it means for a firm to be a member of ACE, so clients and stakeholders know what our members stand for and their value as a consultant of choice, and to ensure they give us flexibility to run the organisation and deliver on our purpose for members effectively and efficiently. 

We think it’s a good time to review our Rules because many of them are out of date, some are particularly wordy, and new legislation just passed means we need to update our Rules to include new provisions we don’t currently have. Plus, our fresh new direction requires us to be able to clearly articulate our purpose and value as an organisation and as members – our new Rules will help us do that.

Consultation process

This year, we have consulted with you on changes to our Rules.

First, we consulted with you on the broad opportunities arising from our review and asked for your input into the direction the review should take. 

Then, we considered your feedback and drafted a new set of Rules based on what we heard. The biggest changes we proposed in the new draft Rules were in our purpose or objectives, the commitments you make as ACE members, and membership categories and criteria. We also proposed a lot more clarity around what complaints ACE can consider and how complaints are managed. In other areas like governance and member fees, we suggested clarifications, more detail, and plain English.

In October, we asked you to consider the draft set of Rules and provide us with any final comments.

The feedback was supportive of the new Rules. Some editorial corrections have been made based on feedback, but no substantive changes.  

The ACE Board has now resolved to put these Rules to members to vote on the proposed changes.

Once approved, the new Rules will be lodged with the Registrar for Incorporated Societies and will come into force.

Read the rules

Read the draft ACE New Zealand Rules for vote

Agenda

• Welcome
• Context for the review
• Discussion and Q+A
• Resolution presented
• Member vote
• Closing comments

Register

If you are the ACE New Zealand member representative for your firm or an honorary ACE member, please register to attend this meeting or submit your proxy form to Helen Davidson no later than 5pm on 14 December 2022.

We need 20 eligible voters to have a quorum for the Special General Meeting, and we need 75 per cent of those attending or by proxy to vote in favour of the new Rules, for the resolution to pass.