Draft Public Transparency Policy

Consultation process

We invited community members to review and make submissions on our updated Public Transparency Policy following the August 2023 Council meeting.

Why did we consult?

We're required under section 57 of the Local Government Act 2020 ('the Act') to adopt and maintain a public transparency policy. This policy must give effect to the public transparency principles under section 58 of the Act, including:

• transparency with Council decision making
• public availability of Council information (unless it is confidential or contrary to the public interest)
• facilitated public awareness of and;
• accessibility to Council information.

This policy review was triggered by a review of another policy, the Confidentiality Policy (2018). It was found that the Public Transparency Policy covered Council's obligations relating to confidentiality. It is recommended that the updated Public Transparency Policy supersedes the Confidentiality Policy (2018) which is now out of date.

The proposed changes to the Public Transparency Policy remove reference to and definition of the public interest test as this is a principles-based test, and the principles are discussed in section 7.2.2 of the policy. Other minor fixes relating to grammatical and formatting issues have been made.

What did we find out?

We received one submission, which was addressed at the October 2023 Council meeting. No changes were made to the policy as a result of this feedback.

What happens next?

The updated policy was adopted by Council at the October 2023 Council meeting.