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 adopted 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.

The key recommendations from the external review are:

Improve how Council communicates its process and efforts to make Council meeting information available to the public.

What have we done? We have outlined how we manage confidential meeting information on our Council decision making process webpage. This page also provides access to our Register of Public Release of Confidential Information - Statutory Meetings that lets the community know what information has been classified as confidential at Council meetings and provides links to documents that are no longer confidential:
Update a number of relevant policies to improve both access and management of Council information.

What have we done? We updated policies as recommended to provide guidance and clarity on how we manage information access; Information Access and Use Policy; Information Access and Use Guideline; Custodianship Policy and Custodianship Guideline; 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.

What have we done? We implemented the Policy and Training Implementation Plan. The training program has been developed, staff training has commenced, and ongoing training has been built into Council's mandatory staff training schedule.