Timeline

Because this is more complex than our regular Annual Meeting, all parishes have been given permission by our Diocese to bring preparations for their Annual Meetings forward. Our Parish Council has agreed to the following timeline:

• Thursday 23 September – Opening of electoral roll nominations

• Friday 15 October 5pm – Closing of electoral roll nominations

• Thursday 21 October - Publishing of preliminary electoral roll on the secure portal

• Thursday 28 October – Nominations for parish offices open

• Wednesday 3 November – Latest dates for reports to arrive at church office in electronic form for compilation into Annual meeting reports

• Sunday 7 November – Final electoral roll published on the secure portal

• Sunday 7 November – Latest date for publishing Annual Meeting reports on the secure portal

• Sunday 14 November 5pm – Nominations for parish offices close

• Sunday 14 November – Voting papers (if needed) begin to be delivered to all members on the electoral roll

• Wednesday 17 November 5pm – Final date and time for questions and comments for the Annual Meeting to be sent to the chair of the meeting

• Sunday 21 November 11.30am – Date and time of Annual Meeting in 2021

• Sunday 21 November - If no elections required, results of parish offices declared

• Sunday 21 November - If an election required, voting papers may be given in person  at the Annual Meeting or, if posted to the returning officers must be  post-marked 21/11 or earlier in order to be valid

• Monday 6 December – Date returning officer can declare the results elections

• Monday 20 December – First meeting of the new parish council

Notice of Annual Meeting

Date: Sunday 21 November 2021

Time: 11.30am

Nominations from and by persons on the parish electoral roll are sought for the following offices in the parish of St Columb's Hawthorn.

o      Two church wardens

o      Up to nine members of Parish Council

o      Two members of the incumbency committee

Nominations must be given to the Vicar of St Columb's by 5pm Sunday 14 November 2021

The business of the annual meeting is to include after prayers—

(a)  The minutes of the previous annual meeting and of any subsequent statutory parish meeting;

(b)  The reception of the parish electoral roll;

(c)  The annual report by the vicar that includes the entries in the registers of the Parish for the financial year, including numbers of baptisms, persons received into communicant membership, confirmations, marriages, funerals, Sunday services, acts of communion and such other statistics from the registers as Archbishop in Council determines;

(d)  An annual report on the proceedings of the parish council and together with a report by the parish council on the pastoral care, evangelism, social and ecumenical programmes of the parish and on future plans for the parish;

(e)  A report by the churchwardens on the fabric, goods and ornaments of the worship centre and the vicarage and other buildings of the parish;

(f)  The audited or independently examined accounts and financial statements of the parish and any accompanying papers required by the Act;

(g)  The budget approved by the parish council for the year in which the meeting is held;

(h)  Reports by other parish groups;

(i)  The election of churchwardens and members of the parish council; [See revised timeline above]

(j)  The election of an auditor or independent examiner;

(k)  The election of lay representatives to the parish incumbency committee; [See revised timeline above]

(l)  Any other matters of parochial or general church interest. [In 2021 these matters will be referred to the incoming parish council for their consideration]

Electoral roll - now closed for the purposes of this annual meeting

Our  Diocese has advised that parishes in 2021 should:

1. Retain our electoral roll from our 2020 Annual Meeting for the 2021 Annual Meeting.

2. Only to remove from the roll people who have died, moved away or given notice that they have left the parish.

3. Only to add to the roll people who have made it clear that they have joined the parish

The electoral roll committee (L. Evans, S. Hale) decided, in consultation with Parish Council, to adopt the following process for St. Columb’s:

1. Advise the parish when the electoral roll is open for applicants and of the required qualifications for applicants.

2. Potential electoral roll members will be encouraged to contact the electoral roll committee members to discuss their application before completing an application form. 

3. Members of St. Columb's eligible to join the electoral roll will be those who would have met the criteria, according to the Parish Governance Act, as at March 2020.

The criteria for being eligible for joining the electoral roll in the Parishes Act are:

• Be a layperson (i.e. not ordained);

• Be over eighteen years of age;

• Be baptized in a Christian denomination;

• Have regularly and habitually attended public worship in that parish; 

  1. • Please note: Someone who has regularly and habitually attended public worship in a worship centre in a parish 12 times in the preceding 12 months and three times in the preceding three months is considered to have regularly and habitually attended public worship at that worship centre. (Parishes Act, 4:1:9:4). 

• Be a member of the Anglican Church of Australia or of a church in full communion with the Anglican Church of Australia;

• Not be a member of another church or denomination;

• Not be on the electoral roll of another parish or congregation;

• Have completed and signed an application to be on the electoral roll.

To download the application form below - click  on the  boxed arrow in the upper right corner of the document frame below.

Email completed forms to office@stc.org.au our Electoral Roll Committee. 

Parish offices nominations - open  28/10 to 14/11

These revised instructions combine decisions of our Diocese and parish council.

• Nomination forms will need to be used and signatures are required. 

• Electronic signatures are acceptable. 

• Signatures for nominations, seconders and acceptance of nomination do not all have to be on the same piece of paper or facsimile but can be sent in on separate nomination forms either by email or post provided they arrive in the required time before the Annual Meeting. [See time table above]

• Nomination forms will be available from the parish website (or upon request, by post) by the required time.

• When nominations are made, seconded and accepted via email, the Vicar will text all nominees and nominators to authenticate the nominations. 

• Because completed nomination forms for parish office candidates cannot currently be displayed or viewed in the church, a list of nominees will be provided on a password-protected portal accessible from our web site.

Qualifications for parish office holders

There are conditions that disqualify a member of the electoral roll from standing for a parish office. They are:

• Being a partner or member of the immediate family of another parish office holder or staff member (parishes act, schedule 1:1:1)

• Being an undischarged bankrupt (parishes act, section 19)

• Mental or physical disability either permanent or for a period of 12 months that prevents a person carrying out the duties of an office. (s19)

• A  prohibition order  against serving in  a parish office under the professional standards act (2009). (s19)

To download the nomination form below - click  on the  boxed arrow in the upper right corner of the document frame below.

Email completed forms to our Acting Vicar, Stephen Hale (office@stc.org.au) 

All emails must arrive by 5pm on Sunday 14 November to be valid.

Voting

If voting is needed for appointment to parish council, wardens or the incumbency committee then we will proceed in the following way:

• Though the Archbishop in Council (AiC) guidelines for 2021 allow us to vote electronically, the advice of the Bishops is to use signed and numbered paper voting forms physically distributed to electoral roll members before the Annual Meeting. This advice is chiefly because the requirement of the parishes act for voting to be secret, auditable, and yet to ensure one vote per electoral roll member is difficult to achieve electronically. It is also to ensure that people without internet access are able to vote.

• Numbers are to be randomly allocated; no list of numbers allocated to members will be retained. This will be noted in the Annual Meeting minutes.

• Envelopes will be addressed, then numbered papers shuffled and inserted.

• Numbered voting papers will be pre-distributed to all electoral roll members according to the timeline above.

• Electoral roll members are entitled to vote regardless of whether they attend the AGM.

• The voting system is a ‘first past the post’ voting system, where each voter may cast up to the same number of votes as there are positions to be filled.  

• The deadline for the return of the voting papers is 21/11. Voting papers, if posted to the returning officer, need to be post marked on or before 21/11 (the day of the Annual meeting) or placed in the provided envelope at the on-ground version of the Annual Meeting  (see also last dot point below).

• The early return of the voting papers is encouraged.

• Anyone who wishes to vote on appointments in person at the Annual Meeting will need to bring their own numbered voting paper which would have already been delivered to them. Any votes delivered at the Annual Meeting will be placed into an envelope addressed to the returning officer.

• While nominees for any election will be contacted with the result before hand, it is likely the keenly awaited results of our election will be announced in the parish eNews of Thursday 9 December 2021.

Questions we have been asked about parish offices and voting.

Q: What are the different parish offices for?

A: Broadly the church wardens are responsible for property and finance, the parish council is responsible for setting the annual budget and consulting on general matters of parish life. The incumbency committee consults with others on choosing a new incumbent (vicar). At St Columb’s the current vicar also asks the incumbency committee to assist with staff reviews near the end of each staff member's contract. A plain English explanation (written by the team who drafted the parish council Act) can be found in the Parish Council Handbook (2019) pages 13 to 15.

Annual Meeting  reports - available from 7/11

Annual Meeting reports will be available to St. Columb's members who: subscribe to our eNews, request a hardcopy version of the reports to be posted to them, through our secure portal link below.

Running the meeting

Because our Annual Meeting this year will be both online and on-ground we have adapted how we will run the meeting. These revised instructions combine decisions of our Diocese and parish council.

Voting on motions or other business at the Annual Meeting :

• Questions and comments about ministry reports, plans and finances are to be submitted in writing before the Annual Meeting (by 17/11). This process mirrors the process that is used in Synod.

• Given the challenge of running hybrid meetings (on-line and on-ground) and given there is no requirement in the parishes act for Annual Meetings to have to deal with comments or motions raised from the floor of the meeting without notice, the Diocese have asked us to limit discussion and voting for this year to matters that the Annual Meeting is required to discuss and to refer other business matters to the first meeting of the new parish council.

• The motions required for our Annual Meetings are:
  Receiving reports
  Receiving financials
  Appointing an auditor
  Votes of thanks

Accessibility 

To make our meetings as accessible as possible, we have been asked to hold the on-ground component in the church building and aim to have the online component accessible to those in the building as well.

For St Columb’s this will mean a Zoom meeting of the Annual Meeting. Online participants will be able to see and hear the chair of the meeting. It will not be possible for online participants to speak to the meeting, however, a Zoom master will monitor the chat to enable questions to be asked from those online.  We hope that the majority of those wishing to attend will be able to do so in person.

Communication 

To avoid losing documents and details in email strings, St Columb's staff will establish a public webpage outlining the Annual Meeting processes, and including a link to a secure (password-protected) portal on which we will post nominations and other documents normally available in the church leading up to an Annual Meeting. 

Electoral roll members without internet access will, at their request, have reports and papers delivered to them by the staff team.

Document folder

The button below will provide access to a password protected folder to allow members to view  documents that would normally be displayed in our church building in the weeks leading up to an on-ground Annual Meeting. These documents are:

• Completed nomination forms for parish offices

• Annual Meeting ministry reports (including the revised electoral roll)

• Annual Meeting financial reports