About Noosa Council Watch
Noosa Council Watch indexes everything Noosa Shire Council puts on the public record and links each piece to every other piece that touches it. The point is accountability: a decision can be followed from the agenda to the vote, to the money, to the court, in one place.
Council's record is scattered. Agendas sit in one system and recordings in another; grants, contracts and registers arrive as separate PDFs on their own schedules. Here they are joined up. A councillor's page leads to their votes, their words in the chamber and their declared interests. A development application leads to every meeting and court case that names it. A meeting leads to its decisions, its closed items, and the moment in the video where each was taken.
What is here
- Meetings since 2014: papers, decisions and recordings, and from April 2023 the video cued to the second each item was taken.
- What was said: machine transcripts of council's recordings since 2019, each passage linked to that second of the video.
- Votes, deputations and closed doors: every decision council minuted, who addressed council, and every item taken in closed session with the ground council gave.
- Grants, other funding and contracts, joined from the separate documents council publishes them in.
- Development applications, court cases and local laws. Council publishes no list of its litigation, so the court register is assembled from its agendas and published judgments.
- Councillors' registers of interest and council's documents, by series.
- Issues and meeting write-ups: our own writing, on matters council returns to over months or years.
What is new across all of it is on Latest, and in the feed.
Why we link documents instead of hosting them
Council's document service hands out links that expire within minutes and require a private header, so a copied link is broken before anyone clicks it. Rather than pretend otherwise, we name each report and attachment exactly as council listed it and send you to council's own portal for the file. That also means the record you read is the record council stands behind, not our copy of it.
Meeting video is different: those URLs are public and stable, so we link them directly and deep-link to the second.
Where the facts come from
Meeting dates, agenda structure, item names, video timestamps and document listings are pulled from council's published meeting feed. The closed-door register is compiled by parsing council's own agendas and minutes. Development application figures come from council's public application register. Transcripts are made by us from council's recordings by automatic speech recognition and are not checked line by line, so quote the recording, not the transcript.
Analysis, summaries and dossiers are ours. Every page that carries them says so. We separate the two deliberately: you should always be able to tell council's record from our reading of it.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, please let us know.
Independence
Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or funded by Noosa Shire Council, any councillor, candidate, developer or political party.