Hunter councils closed their doors on 15 items in September. Only Port Stephens’ minutes say, in their own words, why the public interest required it

A council can shut the public out of part of a meeting, but only for the reasons the Local Government Act lists, and it has to say which one. This is the first of a monthly count: every item the region’s councils took behind closed doors, the ground they gave, and what the minutes do and do not record. It is not a story about any one decision. It is a story about the habit, measured.

The rule, as the councils’ own code puts it

City of Newcastle’s Code of Meeting Practice restates the Act. A meeting may close for nine kinds of matter, labelled (a) to (i): personnel matters about particular people, a resident’s personal hardship, information that would give someone the council does business with a commercial advantage, confidential commercial information, legal advice, and a few rarer cases. For anything other than personnel, hardship or a trade secret, the meeting should stay open unless discussing the matter publicly would, on balance, be contrary to the public interest. It is expressly irrelevant that discussion might embarrass the council or its staff.

Then the part this count tests. The grounds for closing must be stated in the decision to close and recorded in the minutes, and for a commercial matter they must include an explanation of the way in which discussion of the matter in an open Meeting would be, on balance, contrary to the public interest.

What the minutes actually say

We searched every set of September minutes for that explanation, and for the words a council would use to give it. One council’s minutes carry it. Port Stephens closed its meeting for a waste services tender on ground (d), and the resolution to close, as minuted, says that on balance discussing the matter in open Council would be contrary to the public interest, as disclosure of the confidential commercial information could compromise the commercial position of the tenderers, and could hurt the council’s ability to attract competitive tenders. That is the explanation the code asks for, in the record of the meeting. In the other six councils’ minutes it is not there. What they record instead is a closing motion that points elsewhere, and a ground letter that sits beside the item.

Newcastle’s council moved into confidential session for the reasons outlined in the business papers. Maitland’s moved into closed session for the reasons specified in the Agenda. Muswellbrook’s closing resolution says the items come within the provisions outlined in Section 17, and the minutes contain no section 17; the ground letter, (c), appears only in the agenda. Upper Hunter’s closing resolution cites section 10A(2) without a letter, and prints the letter under each item heading. Singleton’s states the ground in a separate open resolution before each closed item, reciting all three limbs of ground (d).

The agendas are where the reasoning lives, when it lives anywhere. Newcastle’s business paper, on an open item accepting a tender for offsite storage with the pricing kept in a confidential attachment, says plainly that It is contrary to the public interest to discuss tenders in an open meeting because tenderers give the council their information as commercial-in-confidence. That is a reason. It is in the agenda, not the minutes.

In our view this matters more than it sounds. An agenda is a proposal written by staff before the meeting; the minutes are the council’s own record of what it decided and why. A reader who wants to know why a door was shut should be able to find the answer in the record of the meeting itself, and the code says they should. We are not suggesting any of these items was wrongly closed: most are land purchases, tenders and property sales, which is exactly what the commercial grounds exist for.

The 15 items

Every one of these decisions was printed in the published minutes, as the code requires once a closed session ends. Some are worth knowing on their own. Singleton’s council split five votes to five on the pool enclosure contract, and the Mayor’s casting vote carried a recommendation to award it to Kingston Building Pty Ltd for $6,360,825.17 excluding GST. Muswellbrook accepted a tender from KONE Elevators Pty Ltd for a new lift at the Marketplace. Maitland approved acquiring about 13,207 square metres of land, by agreement or compulsorily, for a shared pathway, and the compulsory acquisition of land at Rosebrook to widen Maitland Vale Road. Port Stephens, by eight votes to one, awarded nine-year waste collection contracts from July 2027 to Solo Resource Recovery and a recycling processing contract to IQ Renew.

Two items sit oddly in the table, and we flag them rather than judge them. Singleton closed a report that only responded to councillors’ questions about the confidential paper, on the commercial ground. Upper Hunter used the personnel ground (a) for appointing an outside internal audit provider, a firm rather than a particular individual.

Who we could not count, and why

A count is only as good as the record it can read. Three gaps this month:

• Cessnock met on 16 September. Its agenda listed no confidential items, but its minutes were not on its website when we looked on 11 October, so a closure decided on the night would not show here.
• Lake Macquarie met again on 28 September with no confidential items on the agenda. Its minutes are published inside the next meeting’s agenda, due for 26 October.
• Dungog met on 2 and 16 September. Its meetings page carried neither an agenda nor minutes for either meeting on 11 October, only the councillors’ written questions on the agenda.

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