Pajero Club: President’s Report
May 2020
We are still very much under the huge shadow of Covid-19 with its social isolation rules impacting on our meetings,
trips and training, and the coronavirus being a health risk for all of us. During this time, we have made a special effort
to keep in touch with our members and maintain regular news flow. We have used the time to push ahead with our
new Wild Apricot IT system which will handle our membership records, renewal payments, training, shop and trips. It
has been reassuring how our Implementation Team has spent time getting the choice of software correct, doing
detailed testing, and then trialling it with the Committee and others. I hope you will be excited when we roll out Wild
Apricot during May 2020.
We have talked about biosecurity at several general meetings in 2019 and in these monthly reports, so it is interesting
to reflect how tame those biosecurity comments now seem. We asked everyone to keep vehicles clean, do not spread
diseases and weeds if you are travelling between regions of Australia, and be biosecurity aware during trips that
traverse private property. Covid-19 has given this biosecurity message a much more personal meaning for all of us.
The Strategy weekend in early February seems a long time ago and we have already partially reported back on
discussions from that event which was facilitated by Grant Cavenagh. An early exercise on that weekend was for each
Committee member to list some of the achievements of the Pajero Club over the previous year, and a common theme
was mention that we had completed the new Policies sitting beneath our Club Rules. The next session that weekend
was about identifying the issues to be addressed in 2020 with priorities, responsibilities and resources. We focussed
on how to work better as a committee and improve our meetings, develop some Procedures beneath our Policies to
assist all future leaders of the Club, and we discussed the future of the Pajero Challenge.
Temporary membership has been signed off by the Committee and is now in the recent revision of the Policies. The
two-tiered Temporary membership depends on whether a person is in a Member’s vehicle or bringing one’s own
vehicle. We expect that it will strike a balance between encouraging family members (e.g. grandchildren) but also be
clear that we want regular drivers to join the Club as full members.
It was necessary to cancel the 2020 Pajero Challenge this February and the Committee has been taking suggestions
about the future of this event given its long and successful history in the Club. We need to address two factors for it
proceed though. One factor is to build the Club participation; the other is the difficulty and risks of running a major
forest event in Summer. We welcome Member input as to how the Challenge might be modified to interest a wide
cross section of Club participants. The difficulty in scheduling summer forest activities is not unique to the Challenge
but is experienced by all events needing long term planning. Regulations and community expectations are quite
different today compared to ten and twenty years ago, and it is most unlikely we will ever receive guarantees one
month out that a Challenge will definitely go ahead. Instead one scenario is that active fires in summer give us plenty
of notice that a Challenge needs to be cancelled. A second scenario is that in the final week the conditions might be
very favourable, and we can proceed with the Challenge barring any outbreaks. A third scenario is that we remain
uncertain even a day or two before the event. None of these scenarios are acceptable if Club members are investing
months of effort and resources in the lead up. One possibility might be a different form of event that can be notified
within a few days as we might do for a summer day trip. Another possibility is to reschedule to a cooler month but
when tracks are still open. We welcome ideas for a different format and different timing.