Membership Import using custom date fields

As described in the forum post at http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,34566.0.html

With version 4.5.0 importing data into custom membership date fields results in incorrect dates being stored/displayed.

With version 4.5.2 the import is rejected, reporting that a date - which is self evidently valid, e.g. 14/07/2014 - is not valid.

It may be that the date format being set on the import wizard is not being respected.

the issue was first spotted on a production site running 4.5.0 and when attempting to reproduce on the demo site, running 4.5.2, we noticed the revised behaviour, neither of which are as expected.