Episode 12: Working together for an efficient election

To ensure that federally registered organisations are accountable to their members and function democratically, the regulatory scheme governing them requires that office holders in organisations and their branches must be elected. The majority of elections for office holders in federally registered organisations are conducted by the Australian Electoral Commission through arrangements made by the Registered Organisations Commissioner and in accordance with the regulatory scheme. In this episode we discuss how organisations and branches can lodge their prescribed information (P.I) with the ROC in a way that supports the efficient arrangement of their elections. In the 2019/20 financial year, the ROC took an average of 21 working days to issue an election decision following the lodgement of PI. We work with organisations and other stakeholders to issue timely and accurate election decisions and there are a range of issues which contribute to how long that takes, including the necessity for the ROC to seek additional information and in some cases, where organisations request that decisions be delayed while they are seeking to have rule alterations approved by the Fair Work Commission. The ROC is seeking to reduce the average time taken to issue election decisions and we know that registered organisations who use the ROC's prescribed information template, which identifies all of the relevant information they need to provide, are more likely to have their election arranged quickly.