How Noosa councillors voted
Every decision in council's minutes since 14 January 2016: 4,522 of them, across 422 meetings. Most passed with nobody opposed. 462 did not, and those are the ones worth reading. But the first thing this page has to tell you is how much of it council actually wrote down, because for the first four years the answer is almost none of it.
Three ways of writing down a vote
Council has minuted its decisions three different ways in ten years. They look alike in a list and they are not the same kind of fact, so every figure on this site is split by which one it came from.
| What the minutes say | When | Decisions | What can be known |
|---|---|---|---|
| “Carried”, and nothing else | 2016 to 11 September 2019 | 1,157 | Nothing. Not who voted for it, not whether anyone opposed it. The record does not say. |
| “Carried unanimously” | from 12 September 2019 | 2,435 | Who was in the room, and that they all agreed. The names are worked out, not written down — marked inferred everywhere they appear. |
| For: and Against:, by name | divisions only, then every vote from June 2025 | 930 | Exactly who voted which way, in council's own words. |
An inferred vote is not a recorded one, and this site never shows it as one. When the minutes say “Carried unanimously” they are making a claim about everyone entitled to vote, so the voters can be worked out: the members the minutes place in the room at that point, less anyone the same block says was not eligible. That is a real inference from council's own words, and it is how 13,872 of the 19,718 individual votes here are arrived at. It is still not a list a clerk wrote, and it is labelled on every page that uses it.
How wrong can that be? About one time in twenty-two. Where council did write the names, they can be checked against who the minutes place in the room. 43 of 973 such decisions disagree. In 32 of those 43, fewer people voted than were expected to — someone in the room did not vote, or left without the minutes saying so. So inference counts too many people more often than too few. Those 43 decisions are held back from the register rather than tidied up.
And in the other direction: 35 recorded votes are cast by a councillor the attendance record does not place at that meeting, every one of them before 2020. They arrived after the roll was taken, or the roll did not name them.
The law asks for less than you would think
None of the silence above is a breach. The Local Government Regulation 2012 requires the minutes to name who voted and how only when a division is called — s 272(2)(b) in the 2016 and 2019 versions, renumbered s 254F(2)(b) since. For an uncontested vote, “Carried” satisfies the law completely.
So the change in June 2025, when council began naming every vote on every item, was council's own decision and not something it was made to do. It is the single largest improvement to this record in ten years, and it could be reversed tomorrow without anyone breaking a rule.
One more provision worth knowing, because it means an abstention is not a neutral act: a councillor who is present, entitled to vote and does not vote is taken to have voted against (s 254E(2)(c), formerly s 260(2)(d)).
By year
| Year | Decisions | Contested | How the voters were recorded |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 136 decisions | — contested | |
| 2017 | 266 decisions | 1 contested | |
| 2018 | 327 decisions | 17 contested | |
| 2019 | 397 decisions | 58 contested | |
| 2020 | 373 decisions | 47 contested | |
| 2021 | 713 decisions | 82 contested | |
| 2022 | 549 decisions | 45 contested | |
| 2023 | 478 decisions | 29 contested | |
| 2024 | 481 decisions | 59 contested | |
| 2025 | 500 decisions | 69 contested | |
| 2026 | 302 decisions | 55 contested |
named inferred not recorded — the whole of 2016 and 2017 is the third colour.
Councillors
Their own voting record, each one split three ways. There is no ranking here and there should not be one: a councillor who sat before September 2019 cannot be compared with one who sat after it, because the minutes of their term did not record who voted. The table is in order of when they first appear.
| Councillor | Voting in this record | Recorded | Inferred | Contested |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frank Pardon | 20 April 2017 – 28 November 2019 | recorded 46 | inferred 62 | contested 46 |
| Ingrid Jackson | 20 April 2017 – 19 March 2020 | recorded 85 | inferred 128 | contested 82 |
| Jess Glasgow | 20 April 2017 – 19 March 2020 | recorded 64 | inferred 141 | contested 62 |
| Brian Stockwell | 20 April 2017 – 17 September 2026 | recorded 798 | inferred 1952 | contested 437 |
| Tony Wellington | 20 April 2017 – 19 March 2020 | recorded 78 | inferred 146 | contested 75 |
| Frank Wilkie | 20 April 2017 – 17 September 2026 | recorded 843 | inferred 1962 | contested 428 |
| Joe Jurisevic | 20 April 2017 – 15 February 2024 | recorded 267 | inferred 1564 | contested 260 |
| Karen Finzel | 17 April 2020 – 17 September 2026 | recorded 753 | inferred 1686 | contested 341 |
| Amelia Lorentson | 17 April 2020 – 17 September 2026 | recorded 740 | inferred 1784 | contested 344 |
| Clare Stewart | 17 April 2020 – 15 February 2024 | recorded 190 | inferred 1548 | contested 188 |
| Tom Wegener | 17 April 2020 – 17 September 2026 | recorded 754 | inferred 1818 | contested 368 |
| Jessica Phillips | 8 April 2024 – 17 September 2026 | recorded 556 | inferred 404 | contested 173 |
| Nicola Wilson | 8 April 2024 – 17 September 2026 | recorded 562 | inferred 393 | contested 179 |
“Voting in this record” is the first and last decision they appear on, not their term of office. Anyone who sat before the minutes named voters has a small number in the first column for that reason alone.
Contested votes
462 decisions where councillors did not all agree, out of 4,522. Every one of them names who was on each side, because that is the case the law requires council to write down.
Who votes with whom when council divides, pair by pair →
Where this comes from. Council's published minutes, read as text, one decision block at a time: the header, the mover and seconder, the motion, the outcome and any names. Nothing here is typed in by hand and nothing is corrected by guesswork. Where the names in a block cannot be reconciled with who the minutes place in the room, the block is held back and counted as unparsed — 115 of them — rather than published with the disagreement smoothed over.
What is not here. Anything decided behind closed doors, which is its own register. Minutes that council has not published. And the true position on every uncontested vote before September 2019, which no amount of reading can recover, because it was never written down.
Elsewhere on this site
Every page here that links to this one, by section.