What I found when I took up office January 2011

The Secretary election was decided in August 2010. From that week until the end of the school year I repeatedly asked Adam Lampe, the defeated Secretary, to provide a transition. He refused every time. I asked about all on going matters, in particular about member issues that would not be settled before he left the office. He refused to discuss it. I had to defend the AEU NT election process in Federal Court mid December 2010 and the then AEU NT FTOs (Rod Smith and Adam Lampe) authorised $60,000 of AEU NT funds to pay lawyers to say that perhaps the AEU NT did not do the right thing during the Secretary election. I won that case and took up my position as Secretary in January 2011.

I found the following:

• Many individual member file notes contained in the President and Secretary diaries, desk files and computer files were missing or had been destroyed.
• All emails had been deleted.
• All contact details had been deleted.
• This included contact details of the ongoing negotiations for a new CDU Enterprise Agreement and BIITE Agreement along with all notes of negotiations to date.
• All records of the recently completed 2010 Teacher and Educator Enterprise Agreement negotiations were missing.

In the first 6 months both Matthew Cranitch as the new President and I as Secretary dealt with a very large number of distressed members who had expected further contact from the Union and when they contacted us they had to resend all emails and other documents for us to create a new file. One of the reasons I have replaced our computing system is to ensure that this behaviour can never happen again. We now have a central system that is maintained by Area9 Computing and files are always recoverable if any officer accidentally or purposefully deletes them.