Parliament struck down the council meeting code, then the regulation written to stand in for it

Corrected 17 October 2026. This story, and our update of 10 October, described the June regulation’s measures as law. They are not. The Office of Local Government’s Model Code of Meeting Practice page, updated 24 September 2026, says The version of the Model Meeting Code prescribed in 2025 has been disallowed by the Legislative Council as well as an amendment regulation that sought to implement improved transparency measures for council meetings. We take that amendment regulation to be the June one: OLG does not name it, but we have now read the Local Government (General) Regulation 2021 as in force (the version current from 22 September 2026), and its meetings part contains none of the four measures in the table below: no compulsory livestreaming, no limit on councillors meeting staff, no expulsion from successive meetings and no county council meetings by audio-visual link, nor any clause voiding councils’ codes. The table now describes what the regulation set out to do. We had not then found the date of the disallowance (see the 18 October note). Our 10 October update was also wrong to say the staff-contact rule sits in the regulation now under review: by then OLG’s page already said the instrument holding it had been disallowed. The headline, standfirst and the sections from the table onwards have been corrected; what is in force now is set out below.

Updated 18 October 2026. We have now found the date. The Legislative Council’s minutes for Tuesday 22 September 2026 record a motion that this House disallows the Local Government (General) Amendment (Meetings) Regulation 2026, as published on the NSW legislation website on 26 June 2026, carried 19 votes to 16. That names the instrument, so it is no longer an inference that the regulation OLG’s page refers to is the June one. The version of the 2021 Regulation in force when we read it on 17 October starts on the same day, 22 September.

The sequence matters more than any single rule, so take it in order.

The government prescribed a new Model Code of Meeting Practice for NSW councils in 2025. On 26 May 2026 that regulation was disallowed by the Legislative Council. Disallowance is the parliament striking a regulation out, and the Office of Local Government’s own circular sets out what followed: the previous 2021 version of the Model Meeting Code now becomes the prescribed version, and councils were advised to rescind the resolutions by which they had adopted the 2025 one.

Then the constraint. Under section 8 of the Subordinate Legislation Act 1989, a new model code of meeting practice cannot be prescribed in the 4 months following the disallowance. The department could not simply write the code again.

So it did something else. The Local Government (General) Amendment (Meetings) Regulation 2026 has therefore been made to secure some of the policy objectives of the 2025 Model Meeting Code. That is the circular’s own description, not our characterisation.

What the June regulation set out to change

How it was meant to bind councils

The regulation was not meant to wait for anyone to adopt it. Under the circular, any provision of a council’s meeting code that conflicted with it is void and of no effect to the extent of the inconsistency, and only that provision rather than the whole code. The circular was explicit about the consequence: councils do not need to amend their code of meeting practice for the new provisions in the Amendment Regulation to apply.

That override went with the regulation. At least one council changed its own code to fit it: Dungog struck its pre-meeting briefing clauses in July. We have not checked whether any council has since changed its code back.

What applies now

OLG’s page says The currently prescribed Model Meeting Code for NSW councils is the 2021 Model Code of Meeting Practice. The regulation as in force says the same: section 232 prescribes the code published in the Gazette on 29 October 2021.

On broadcasting, the rule that applies is the older section 236. Each meeting of a council, or of a committee made up only of councillors, is to be recorded, and the recording made public on the council’s website at the same time as the meeting is taking place or as soon as practicable after the meeting, and kept there for at least 12 months after the meeting. So a council may post a recording afterwards instead of streaming live, and twelve months is the minimum, not the balance of the term. Closed parts of a meeting are excluded, and a joint organisation is covered only if it resolves to be.

Section 233 lets the chair require an apology, withdrawal or retraction for an act of disorder and lets a councillor who refuses be expelled from that meeting. Nothing in the regulation as in force limits councillors meeting staff before a meeting. The government says it is preparing a new Model Meeting Code for prescription.

Upper Hunter objected first

Upper Hunter Shire Council considered the regulation at its meeting on 27 July. Its own published recap records that Council is expressing concern regarding the prohibition on Councillors meeting with council staff prior to meetings to discuss matters that are or may become agenda items, and that it will be issuing a seperate media release in response to this item and would seek amendment. The spelling is the council’s.

We have not seen that media release. Our October survey of nine Hunter councils found Newcastle took a similar position in August.

Our view, labelled as such

The livestreaming requirement was the clear public gain, and it is the one residents would actually have used. Most Hunter councils stream anyway, but the rule now in force lets a council post a recording afterwards instead. The contact restriction is harder, and reasonable people will land differently on it. Requiring answers in writing and published before the meeting is a genuine transparency improvement over a corridor conversation nobody else hears. It also removes the informal channel by which a councillor gets across a complex report, and a councillor who cannot ask a question quickly is a councillor more dependent on the report as written.

What was harder to be relaxed about was the route. A regulation the upper house rejected was substantially reinstated, in part, by a different instrument, during the very months the law says a replacement code cannot be prescribed. That may have been entirely lawful, and the circular was candid about the intent. The upper house has since disallowed the second instrument too. Whatever the government prescribes next will be its third attempt, and the staff-contact rule is the part to read first.

Updated 10 October 2026. The four-month bar ended on 26 September, and OLG’s circulars index, read 10 October, lists no new model meeting code since. It does list Circular 26-21 of 9 October: the Local Government (General) Regulation 2021, the regulation this year’s meetings amendment changed, is automatically repealed on 1 September 2027 unless remade, and OLG proposes to split it. Its Regulatory Impact Statement moves Part 10 – Meetings including the model code of meeting practice into a new Local Government (Council Governance and Operations) Regulation, and describes the changes as regrouping, renumbering and language modernisation. Its 27 pages do not mention livestreaming, the limit on councillors meeting staff, or the disallowance. Submissions close at 5pm on Friday 6 November 2026, through OLG’s policy and legislation page. For a council that wants the staff-contact rule changed, as Upper Hunter said in July it would seek, this is an open consultation on the regulation it sits in. (Corrected 17 October: the rule is not in that regulation; see the correction at the top.) We have since read nine Hunter councils’ meeting papers side by side: who undid the 2025 code, who livestreams, and who objects to the staff-contact rule.

Sit on a council, or read this differently? Tell us and we will check it against the circular and log the outcome here.