We covered the disallowance itself when Wollongong put its redrafted code on exhibition. The short version: the 2025 update brought in mandatory livestreaming, new limits on councillors attending online, and changes to briefings. A disallowance motion removed it, the 2021 Model Code snapped back into force under the Local Government Act, and every council has to realign its own code to the older rules.
The clause that matters for anyone who watches from home is clause 5.36. Recording is not optional: clause 5.34 says each meeting is to be recorded. But 5.36 says the recording goes on the council’s website either at the same time as the meeting is taking place or as soon as practicable afterwards. That or is the whole story. A council that quietly stopped streaming and posted a video the next week would be following the rules.
So the question is not what the code permits. It is what each council chose, and whether you can actually watch.
What each council says and shows
| Council | Says it streams | Most recent meeting on its webcast page | Next meeting listed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wollongong | Yes, streaming since December 2012; resolved in June to keep livestreaming | 27 July 2026 | 24 August 2026 |
| Kiama | Yes, streaming since May 2014 | 21 July 2026 | 17 August 2026 |
| Shellharbour | Yes, meetings “are live streamed and recorded” | 23 September 2025 | Not listed on the webcast page |
Wollongong and Kiama are straightforward. Both webcast portals carry a next-meeting notice and a run of 2026 recordings with a playable link for each one. Wollongong resolved in June to keep livestreaming even though it is no longer required, which is the choice we reported at the time. Kiama has been streaming since 2014 and its portal lists six meetings between 27 May and 21 July this year.
Shellharbour is the one worth explaining carefully, because the answer is not the obvious one.
The Shellharbour gap, and what it is not
Shellharbour City Council’s own meetings page states plainly that meetings
“are live streamed and recorded” and that minutes and the webcast recording
are published as soon as practical after the meeting
. It lists the next ordinary
meeting for 25 August 2026. There is no suggestion anywhere on it that streaming has stopped.
But the council’s webcast site tells a different story about what is findable. Its front page lists six meetings, the most recent being 23 September 2025. Its archive page lists thirty, spanning 2023 to 2025, and again nothing later than 23 September 2025. We checked the council’s meetings page as well: its own list of previous meetings, with business papers, minutes and “view webcast” links, runs through 2021. We loaded that page in a real browser in case the current entries were being drawn in by script, and the rendered page showed the same thing.
The video itself is served from a separate platform, civicclerk.com.au, which the webcast page deep-links into per meeting. That platform does not publish a browsable list we could reach, so a recording can exist there without appearing on any page we found.
We are not saying Shellharbour has stopped streaming, and we are not saying it has breached the code. We do not know either of those things. The council says it streams, and we have no evidence to the contrary. What we can report is narrower and still worth knowing: on the routes a resident would actually use, the most recent Shellharbour meeting video we could find is from September last year, while its two neighbours publish theirs within weeks.
Update, 27 August 2026. Two of the three councils have met since this was
published, which lets us test the claim above rather than repeat it. Wollongong met on
24 August and a recording for that meeting was on its archive page when we
checked on 27 August, three days later. Kiama’s archive carries
18 August. So within weeks
was if anything generous to the two
neighbours: on this pass it was within days. Shellharbour’s archive still ends at
23 September 2025, unchanged on a fourth check, which is now eleven months. Nothing in
the finding below changes, and we still are not saying the council has stopped streaming; the
gap remains a gap in what a resident can find.
Our view, labelled as such
The disallowance was argued partly on cost and partly on councils’ freedom to decide their own arrangements, and there is a reasonable case there. Small councils were being asked to fund broadcast infrastructure by regulation. But the practical effect deserves saying plainly: the one guarantee a resident had that they could watch their council decide things, live, was removed, and replaced with a choice.
On the evidence above, all three Illawarra councils have made the right choice on paper. That is genuinely good, and it suggests the guarantee was doing less work here than the debate implied, because these councils were streaming years before anyone required it.
What the Shellharbour case shows is that the choice to stream and the ability to watch are not the same thing. A code obligation to publish a recording is worth exactly as much as the page that lists it. Nothing in clause 5.36 says the recording has to be easy to find, and a webcast archive that stops eleven months ago is the kind of thing that goes unnoticed precisely because the council has done nothing wrong in the eyes of the code.
How we sourced this
The effect of the disallowance and the text of clauses 5.34 and 5.36 come from the reinstated 2021 Model Code of Meeting Practice published by the Office of Local Government, which we read first-hand for our earlier story on Wollongong’s redraft. Wollongong’s decision to keep livestreaming comes from that same reporting.
Everything in the table is a reading of each council’s own published pages on 16 August 2026: the three webcast sites, Shellharbour’s archive page, and Shellharbour’s council meetings page. Copies of each are kept on file. Dates are as listed by the councils, not as verified against minutes.
The limits of the Shellharbour finding. An absence on a listing page is weak evidence and we have treated it as such. We checked four routes, three by plain fetch and one in a real browser, and the video platform the council uses does not expose a list we could read, so a published recording could exist without being visible to us. We have not contacted Shellharbour City Council, and we would publish its response. Nothing here should be read as a finding that the council has failed to comply with the code.
What we have not done. We have not read Shellharbour’s or Kiama’s current Code of Meeting Practice against the reinstated model. We downloaded Shellharbour’s policy document, but its text layer uses a subset font with no character map, so extraction returns unreadable output and we are not prepared to quote a document we cannot read reliably. So this piece reports what the councils publish about streaming, not what their adopted codes say about it. Kiama and Shellharbour realigning their codes is the follow-up, and it is not written yet.