I'm not sure I like the sound of that.
All-elected Boards sound like a wonderful, utopian idea in theory but in practice are too easily dominated by poorly qualified numpties who can't see past their own specific agendas in order to govern in the best interests of the whole game.
It's possibly not such a big issue at NZF level but at Federation level - yuck. People are fond of saying "the clubs need more representation" or "the clubs should be running the game" but the truth is "the clubs" themselves don't often agree on very much.
The appointed positions at least allow for a bit of quality control, and there's still a basic level of democracy because on a seven member board the three elected members (presuming they agree on something) only need to influence one appointed member to get a majority. I've always thought that provides a nice buffer against letting clubs (at Fed level) and Feds (at NZF level) completely run the asylum.
That said I don't much like the way the current system only lets most NZF members vote at club committee level but not Federation or NZF.
I guess the devil's in the detail of what a new system might look like. And I suppose after a few go-rounds of having idiots elected to Boards the voters might actually start to take it seriously, which would be an improvement.
The most interesting line in that release to me is "No new elections or appointments will be made to the NZ Football board until new rule changes are in place". There were two elected positions meant to be up for grabs at the next Congress. Does that mean they won't get elected now until after the new rules are adopted at Congress? Does that mean Frank van Hattum gets yet another reprieve? It's going to be getting close to a year since he announced his resignation. He resigned in January. Congress was meant to be in May but got shifted to September. Now it sounds like they won't elect any new Board members until after that.
Think we are in a unique situation here.
Removing unelected positions is to prevent corruptions/nepotism. Which is something we have very little of.
However, our small population size, and lack of money, means there is a potential that the elected people are muppets.
On a side note, I think the congress was shifted to accommodate the changes they need to make.
Yeah, I'll be really interested to see what they come up with.
Elections also only really work where you have engaged voters, which by and large we don't. Most club committees in NZ are elected by the 15-20 people who can be bothered turning up to the AGM, and the committee members themselves are often elected unopposed because no-one else wants to do it. That's then your pool of candidates for Fed Board elected positions, and on up to NZF (under the current set-up).
We also have these voting rules where only club reps can vote for Fed Board members and only Fed Board reps can vote for NZF Board members. I think that's probably historical and largely to do with making election administration easy and cheap (in the past, if you allowed all NZF members to vote for Fed and NZF Boards how do you easily/cheaply verify legitimate votes?).
Maybe it's time to take advantage of technology (and the Sporting Pulse database) and actually allow all NZF members to vote electronically for their local Fed Boards and the NZF Board? You would still have a major problem of voter ignorance/apathy though.