Points of Order: Meeting procedure in Australia and the UK – free/open source e-book

Points of Order

Meeting procedure in Australia and the UK

This book is about meeting procedure in Australia, with rough applicability to countries with similar procedures, such as the UK, from where Australian meeting procedure originates, and other Commonwealth countries.

This book takes a descriptive,… »

Rules of order rant: ‘That the words proposed to be omitted stand part of the question’

In traditional Australian and UK meeting procedure, a curious procedure takes place when an amendment is proposed to omit words from a motion, including to omit words and substitute other words. Traditionally, the question proposed from the Chair, in either case, is:

That the words

Rules of order rant: Prior amendments

In Australian and UK meeting procedure, there is a rule relating to the order in which amendments may be moved, known as the ‘prior amendment’ rule. Citrine's The ABC of Chairmanship describes this as follows:

when an amendment has been moved to alter the latter

Model Standing Orders (Australia/UK meeting procedure)

Some model Standing Orders for general meetings, committee meetings and so on of organisations using Australia/UK meeting procedure. Based on John Rigg's How to Conduct a Meeting: Standing Orders and Rules of Debate, and the Standing Orders of MUMUS Inc.

Licensed under the Creative… »

Australian (and UK) meeting procedure reference books

Sadly, unlike in America, where Robert's Rules is all but synonymous with meeting procedure, the situation in the UK, and hence in Australia, is far more complex. As such, I've compiled a list of relevant reference works on meeting procedure here, based on Appendix 6… »

This day six months: The day that never comes

A curious procedure used in Wesminister parliaments is the so-called ‘six months’ (or ‘three months’) amendment, which provides a method for opposing a reading of a bill by moving an amendment to the motion (e.g. ‘That the bill be now read a second time’) to… »

The curious history of the previous question

While parliamentary procedure is generally very similar between American and British/Commonwealth parliaments and meetings, one curious difference arises in the notion of the ‘previous question’. While such a notion exists both sides of the Atlantic, everything from the form to the function appears to be… »