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Are our governance members legally allowed to do paid operational work for our Incorporated Society?

Yes they are.
It is important that this is allowed for in your Rules/Constitution.

It is also important to declare this to the members of your Incorporated Society at the AGM.
You should report to members on any wages paid to board members for work done for the Inc Soc.

Can we determine whether we have ‘tiers of members’ with different rights?

Yes, Incorporated Societies can determine their categories of members, and determine the rights of these different categories. This will need to be passed as a decision made by the members. This should then be written in your organisation’s Constitution to make it explicit.

People then have the right to choose which category of membership they want to join.

Members can choose whether to exercise their vote or not.. generally only those who attend the AGM can participate in voting (rather than all members), so this helps keep the decision-making group smaller. i.e. most times passing decisions from AGM voting is based on the ‘% of members present at the meeting’, not the ‘% of overall members’.

The issue with reducing your pool of full voting members too much is that the smaller the quorum, the less democratic it becomes.

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#4

Is our accountant or bookkeeper allowed to be part of our board’s Finance Sub-committee?

If there are not enough financially literate/skilled members on the Sub-committee, you can bring in these skills from people external to the board and ‘co-opt’ them onto the Sub-committee. It is therefore OK for these two roles to help manage the work as part of the Sub-committee.

HOWEVER - if any operational staff (employees) are involved in work for board committees, this should be at the discretion of the General Manager, as the General Manager is responsible for, and in charge of, employees.

With external accountants. you may have to pay for their time working as part of the Finance Sub-committee. They are not obliged to join the Sub-committee.