Meetings · General Committee Meeting - 11 August 2026
General Committee Meeting - 11 August 2026
Five attempts to get legal advice or ask the Minister a question were voted down, one on the chair's casting vote. Nine days later council did two of them anyway.
The short version
Item 7.1.3, the Noosa Heads Lions Park Land Management Plan, is the reason to look at this meeting.
The committee adjourned specifically to obtain legal advice, which was read into the record: that local government trustees cannot rely on s 52AA of the Land Act 1994 as an alternative to the s 52AB management plan process, and that council should proceed on the basis a management plan is required.
Cr Lorentson and Cr Phillips then tried five times to test that advice — asking for advice on whether the use is inconsistent at all, on what would satisfy the tests, for a scoped plan covering only the 21 days actually at issue, for written advice on whether s 52AA applies, and finally simply to ask the Minister whether he would consider a s 52AA application.
All five failed. One — the scoped, proportionate plan — was lost on the chair's casting vote at 3–3. The last, asking the Minister a question, was lost 1–5.
Cr Lorentson tabled her own analysis of s 52AA as an attachment to the minutes. Cr Stockwell was absent.
Why this reads differently now
On 20 August, council was told s 52AA is available after all and that no management plan is required, and it resolved to write to the Minister. That is substantially what defeated Amendments 4 and 6 had asked for.
The full sequence is in the Lions Park dossier.
Also on this agenda
The General Committee recommendations from this meeting went to the 20 August Ordinary Meeting as an en bloc item — including the annual delegations review transferring powers to the CEO, and the review of the Community Purpose Land and Infrastructure Tenure Policy. Items that move through committee and then an en bloc adoption get two chances at scrutiny and frequently receive neither.