Classification and management of Council information

Sunshine Coast Council generates, receives and holds a large amount of information relating to how it goes about its day-to-day functions, how it communicates with customers and the community, as well as about the delivery of projects, activities and resources. This information is critical to maintaining compliance with legislation and recordkeeping standards.

Council must also balance its responsibility to meet its statutory and legal obligations while making available to the community as much information as possible.

Council, via this project, aims to improve the availability of the information it holds to give the community confidence that the information is appropriately managed both securely and transparently, as far as permitted by law.

To meet this aim, Council unanimously adopted the recommendations of an independent, external review into the classification and management of the information held and generated by Council at the 27 July 2023 Ordinary Meeting.

To enact the recommendations, Council also endorsed the development of a detailed implementation plan.

The Implementation Plan is the roadmap to how Council can, and is, improving community accessibility to the information it holds. It also demonstrates how Council is progressing against each recommendation.

Council has already met a number of milestones outlined in the Implementation Plan including:

Creation of a register to inform the community of information that has been classified as confidential at Council meetings and provide links to documents that are no longer confidential: Register of Public Release of Confidential Information - Statutory Meetings
Update a number of relevant policies Information Access and Use Policy; Custodianship Policy; Administrative Access and Right to Information Policy; Administrative Access and Right to Information Guideline
Develop a comprehensive training program for staff to ensure the new policies are implemented and to enable an organisational shift that recognises that Council held information is available to the community by default and only kept confidential if there is a legislative reason to do so Policy and Training Implementation Plan