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Can someone put this into Plain English?
“This is a special resolution which requires not more than 25% of financial owners voting at the meeting to vote against the motion, for the motion to pass.”
Does it mean:
“This is a special resolution which requires at least 75% of financial owners voting at the meeting to vote for the motion, for the motion to pass.”
And if it does, why didn’t it say so in the first place?
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Why, indeed?
The statement isn’t entirely accurate in any case since all special resolutions are conducted as poll votes and so it would be 75 and 25 percent of unit entitlements held by those voting …
I suspect it’s worded that way, partly to help eliminate the abstention argument: If you are abstaining then you are not voting, and therefor your vote is not counted when calculating the percentages.
Even so, it might just be a way of emphasising the status quo, which remains if more than 25 percent vote “no”.
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Why not just use the wording from the Act? That way, you can be sure you have it right.
I won’t get pedantic about ‘the abstention argument’ for NSW because I am in the ACT and NSW wording could be different. Where I am in the ACT, a special resolution requires:
“(i) the number of votes cast in favour of the resolution is greater than the number of votes cast against it; and
(ii) the votes cast against the resolution number less than 1/3 of the total number of votes that can be cast on the resolution by people present at the meeting (including proxy votes)”
or the same thing except by unit entitlements, if a poll is demanded.
In the ACT, if there were 100 people (or unit entitlements) present at the meeting (including by proxy) and 51 voted ‘yes’ (a majority in favour) and 32 (less than one third) voted ‘no’ and 17 people present at the meeting abstained on that particular motion, then the motion would pass.
NB. in NSW it is 1/4, not 1/3 opposed that can kill a motion, and the wording could be different anyway.
The point of a special resolution is to determine that there is not a substantial level of opposition (less than a third in the ACT or less than a quarter in NSW), not to determine the size of support beyond the requirement for a majority.