The disclosure log Queensland stopped requiring

If you ask Noosa Council for documents under the Right to Information Act 2009 and win, council may put what it releases on its website. It does not have to. It never has.

That is not a criticism of Noosa. It is what the Act says, and for most of the Act's life it said something better about the state government. Until 1 July 2025 there were two disclosure-log sections sitting side by side:

	Departments and Ministers	Local governments
Publish the documents released	must — s 78(3)	may — s 78A
Keep a public list of every application received	must — s 78(2)	no duty

Section 78 was titled, in the Act itself, "Disclosure logs—departments and Ministers". Section 78A was titled "Disclosure logs—other agencies". The line between them is drawn in s 14(1), which defines an agency as "(a) a department; or (b) a local government; or (c) a public authority" and so on. A council is an agency. A council is not a department. It sat in the second column, always.

What went on 1 July 2025

The Information Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2023 commenced that day. Section 78 is in the consolidation in force on 1 June 2025 and gone from the one in force on 1 July. What went with it:

• the only mandatory duty to publish an RTI release anywhere in the Act. No Queensland agency now has one.
• the public list of applications. Old s 78(2) made a department record, for every valid application, "details of the information being sought by the applicant, as stated in the application" and "the date the application was made" — as soon as practicable after it arrived, and whatever the outcome. That was a register of what people were asking government for. It no longer exists.
• the hook to ministerial standards. The 2023 consolidation carried two duties to comply "with any guidelines published by the Minister on the Minister's website" — s 78B(1) for disclosure logs, s 21(3) for publication schemes. The current consolidation carries neither.

What survives is s 78A, which now covers everyone and says a released document may be included in a disclosure log. It says "may" three times.

The only "must" left anywhere near a disclosure log is s 78B, and it points the other way: an agency must delete from anything it does publish any information that is prevented from publication by law, may be defamatory, would unreasonably invade privacy, was communicated in confidence, is protected by contract, or would cause substantial harm.

There is still a mandatory publication scheme under s 21 — every agency must publish its structure, its functions, the types of information it holds and how to ask for them. That is a description of the filing cabinet. It is not the contents, and it says nothing about the outcome of any application.

Nothing in the Local Government Act 2009 or the Local Government Regulation 2012 mentions right to information or disclosure logs at all.

What discretion looks like at Noosa

Council reports its RTI numbers in each annual report. Five years:

Financial year	RTI applications received	Finalised	Pages released	Pages refused	Disclosure-log entries by decision date
2020–21	24	19	1,284	812	6
2021–22	15	11	728	474	3
2022–23	5	2	42	144	1
2023–24	16	13	440	433	2
2024–25	8	5	174	132	1
Total	68	50			13

Council has kept this log a long time. It runs to twenty-five entries and the oldest is from January 2014 — parking infringement statistics. The thirteen above are the ones council decided inside the five financial years the annual reports cover; a fourteenth, a lease agreement, was decided in April 2026, after the window closes.

Only nine of the twenty-five come with a document you can open, all of them from May 2021 onward. For everything before that the log gives the date, the reference and a description, and council's page says those "can be requested by emailing the Governance Team". A decade of the log is an index, not a library.

Four of the twenty-five are the same subject — documents about the use and operation of the Noosa Airport, decided between May 2021 and April 2022, sixty-five megabytes between them. Council began Planning & Environment Court proceedings over the Noosa Airfield in 2024. The applications ran two to three years ahead of it.

Four entries on one contested subject in two years is not a coincidence, and it is not generosity either. It is what a disclosure log is for: publish once, and the fifth person reads it instead of lodging an application somebody has to process. The Act helps, in a way most people never see, though which way depends on something council does not publish. Where the applicant collects the documents within the access period, council may put a copy straight in the log under s 78A(1)(a), or list the details under s 78A(1)(b), in which case s 78A(2) gives anyone else access for no charge. Where the applicant never collects, s 78A(3) lets council list the documents with a charge attached, s 78A(4) makes the next person pay it, and only once that person has paid does s 78A(5) switch the charge off for everyone after them — and allow a copy into the log.

A downloadable PDF on the page is consistent with either route, so nothing here infers which one any particular release travelled. What can be said is that on the first route council forgoes no revenue by publishing, because there was never a charge to collect.

Thirteen entries, sixty-eight applications

Thirteen entries alongside sixty-eight applications and fifty finalised is the number worth sitting with — and it is worth being careful about what the two counts are. Applications are counted when council received them; entries are counted by the date council decided them. An application made in one year can be decided in the next, so these are two measures of the same five years rather than a tally of what became of those particular sixty-eight.

Nor is the gap explained by the personal-information carve-out, at least not on anything published. Section 78A(1) only permits publication where the released document does not contain the applicant's own personal information. Applications made solely for a person's own records are counted separately, under the Information Privacy Act, and council records five of those across these years. But an RTI application can still turn up documents containing the applicant's personal information, and council does not report that. How far the carve-out reaches into the sixty-eight cannot be worked out from the annual reports.

Two things do a lot of the work. Applications are withdrawn — three in 2022–23, two in 2024–25 — and produce nothing. And a great deal of what is assessed is never released at all: across these five years council refused 1,995 pages and released 2,668.

The rest is discretion, and council publishes the grounds on which it exercises it. Its disclosure log page lists seven reasons a released document may be kept off. The first four restate s 78B — prevented by law, defamatory, an unreasonable invasion of privacy or substantial harm, confidential or contractually protected. The last three are council's own:

• "There would be limited (or no) value in publishing the information, particularly if it lacks significance or demand";
• "The information, or significant parts of it, have already been published elsewhere";
• "Another clear reason, at the discretion of Council."

That last line is the whole subject of this piece in seven words. It is not a criticism to say so — the Act gives council exactly that discretion, and council has been open about holding it. It is simply worth knowing that the standard governing what a Queensland council shows you, of what it has already decided to release, is council's own.

Why it matters more now than it did

For Noosa, the 1 July 2025 repeal changes nothing: the mandatory section never applied to councils, and what council does with its log today is what it could always have done. Anyone reading this as a duty council has lost has it wrong.

What changed is the floor under everybody else. Before that date a resident who wanted to know what was being asked of a Queensland department could read the list, because the department had to keep one. There was a published standard for what a disclosure log should look like, because the Act required compliance with the Minister's guidelines. Both are gone, and what replaced them is a single section that says an agency may publish if it likes.

Councils are now held to exactly the standard they were always held to. The state has come down to meet them.

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Sources. All statutory text is quoted from the Right to Information Act 2009 (Qld) as published by the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel: the current consolidation, current as at 1 July 2026, and the consolidation current as at 1 March 2023 for the sections since repealed. The commencement date is established by comparing the consolidations in force on 1 June and 1 July 2025; the amending Act is named in the Act's own part 9, "Transitional provisions for Information Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2023". Application numbers, pages released and pages refused are council's own, from the Right to Information table in each of its annual reports for 2020–21 to 2024–25. The disclosure log holdings are read from council's own Disclosure Log page, which lists twenty-five entries by decision date and reference number, the oldest from January 2014 and nine of them carrying a downloadable document. The count per financial year is taken from those decision dates, not from the year in the reference number, which is the year the application was made. The seven grounds for withholding are quoted from that page. The court proceeding is Noosa Shire Council v Noosa Airfield Pty Ltd & Anor (No 2) [2024] QPEC 38 and the substantive proceeding behind it. Nothing here alleges that council has failed to meet an obligation: on the evidence set out above, it has not had one.