About 50 Apexians from across the state along with observers from Victoria and Queensland attended the conference and were addressed by Senator John Williams and Mayor Mal Peters during the course of the evening.

President of the Inverell Apex Club, John McGregor, said the conference held several positives.

“For a start our district governor, Andrew Kerr, was announced as district governor of the year, which was good to see,” John said.

“Richard Jane was made a life member of the Inverell Apex Club, which doesn’t happen very often and is quite rare. Richard moved to Bingara last year with his work. It was all a very emotional moment with Richard’s wife having to read the first half of his acceptance speech.

“We also won the Dinner Notices Award, which is basically for the best newsletter,” John said.

But the conference also held some bad news for all those within Apex who want organisational change.

“We couldn’t make a quorum, we needed 15 to attend and only had 13, so we could discuss matters but we couldn’t move any motions,” John said.

“We wanted to get a state restructuring, Apex is in decline so something has to happen to turn that around,” he said.

Currently Apex is operated on a state-by-state basis, something John said needs to change.

“The clubs will come under the national board and that can happen as early as next January,” he said.

“I think it is overdue, it has been discussed within Apex for about two years now.

“But there were members of the national board here so they were able to take back some of our thoughts on the matter,” John said.

APEX chief executive officer, Noel Hadjimichael, said the conference made the biggest decision, to support changes to APEX’s structure, in 25 years.

“I thought it showed a lot of guts and the guys at Inverell were at the forefront of this,” Noel said.

“Because we didn’t have a quorum we called a special meeting, so whatever is decided there goes out to the other clubs for them to vote on and ratify.

“These changes will pull down the whole middle tier of state management and see the organisation meet once a year at a national meeting,” Noel said.

At the present time it looks as though NSW will be the first state to accept the changes.

“This is a big turning point for APEX, all the other states will come on board and this will be the biggest change ever in APEX,” Noel said.

“As far as I’m concerned there was only good new to come out of the Inverell conference,” he said.