A dispute playing out in Nambour this week raises a question that has nothing to do with homelessness, parks or public safety, and everything to do with how local government works.
Helen Tagg, chair of community group Nambour Now, has spent seven months seeking clarity from Sunshine Coast Council on how it makes decisions about public safety in parks and other community spaces. Not challenging those decisions. Simply asking: what are the thresholds, what triggers action, and how is consistency maintained?
Council’s responses, by most accounts, have been technically thorough and practically elusive. Then, in late April, came a formal warning letter. It advised that if correspondence continued to repeat matters Council considered already addressed, future communication might be managed in accordance with Queensland Ombudsman guidelines on unreasonable complainant conduct, the interim framework Sunshine Coast Council currently follows while its own formal policy on the subject, proposed in its February 2025 Complaints Management Strategic Policy, remains under development.
The Nambour Now dispute, involving homelessness, rough sleeping and community safety in a town centre, is specific to Nambour and not something Range Community News proposes to wade into in this editorial. Those are genuinely complex issues, and the Sunshine Valley Gazette has covered them carefully. But the governance question the dispute has raised belongs to the whole Sunshine Coast, including the Blackall Range. And it is worth examining honestly, from both sides of the counter.
The right to ask
Queensland’s Right to Information Act provides a legal right to access information held by public sector agencies, unless disclosure would be contrary to the public interest. That formal mechanism exists, and it matters. But it is a last resort, a slow, sometimes costly, procedurally demanding process that most residents will never use.
In practice, residents engaging with council day to day have no legislated right to a direct, substantive answer to every question they pose. The Local Government Act 2009 requires councillors to represent the interests of residents and be accountable to the community, but that accountability is broadly framed. There is no statute that requires an officer to answer a specific question to a resident’s satisfaction, or within a set timeframe, or at a particular level of operational detail.
That is a genuine gap, and one that council corporate plans often attempt to fill through voluntary commitments to transparency, open communication and community engagement. When those commitments exist in writing, as they do in Sunshine Coast Council’s current corporate plan, residents are entitled to hold the organisation to them. But it remains a promise, not a law.
The reality of answering
It is also worth being honest about what answering actually involves, because the experience from the other side of the desk is not trivial.
Complex community questions rarely have simple answers. Where legal obligations intersect with policy discretion, human rights considerations and competing stakeholder interests, a genuinely responsible answer takes time to prepare. A question that looks straightforward on the page, “what criteria determine when you act?”, may require input from legal, planning, community services and executive staff before anyone can put words to paper. Done properly, that can take days.
Then there is the question of volume. Large councils receive thousands of pieces of correspondence. Staff managing those queues are not being obstructionist when responses are delayed or framed in general terms, they are often operating under genuine resource constraints. The Queensland Ombudsman’s guidelines on managing unreasonable complainant conduct, which councils across the state use while developing their own formal policies, exist for a reason: a small number of correspondents, sometimes with legitimate grievances and sometimes not, can absorb a disproportionate share of public resources. Under that framework, councils can warn correspondents, restrict communication to specific channels, or place limits on further contact subject to their own internal approval processes. Sunshine Coast Council has not yet finalised its own version of this policy.
And some questions, however sincerely posed, touch on areas that are politically sensitive, legally contested, or both. Councils are not always being evasive when they retreat to framework language. Sometimes they are managing genuine legal exposure, or avoiding statements that could be used against them in future disputes or litigation.
None of which applies specifically to the Nambour Now situation, which Range Community News is not in a position to assess independently. The point being made, is a general one.
Range Community News engages regularly with Sunshine Coast Council’s media team, who are responsive and professional in forwarding questions to the relevant departments. The responses that come back are another matter. Some are genuinely useful. Many are framed in terms general enough to sidestep the specific question asked. That is not an accusation, it is an observation shared by most journalists and community advocates who deal with large councils over time. It is also, perhaps, the most useful thing this publication can add to a debate that has so far been conducted almost entirely from Nambour.
The difference that matters
Where this becomes a genuine and recurring problem is when framework language becomes a substitute for engagement rather than a starting point for it. When a resident asks how a policy applies in practice and is told, repeatedly, that council follows a risk-based framework guided by legislation, without any further illumination, something has broken down. Not necessarily in bad faith. But broken down nonetheless.
The distinction that Nambour Now has drawn, a response is not the same as an answer, is one that will resonate with anyone who has tried to get operational clarity from a large organisation. It is also one that applies well beyond Nambour.
There is a practical test here. If a council cannot explain, in plain language, how a particular type of decision is made, what factors are weighed, what triggers action, what safeguards exist, then it faces one of two possibilities. Either the criteria exist and can be shared, in which case sharing them is the transparent thing to do. Or they do not exist in any codified form, in which case the honest answer is to say so, and explain how consistency is maintained in their absence.
Either answer is defensible. Neither requires a formal policy position. Both require a willingness to be direct. Councils that accept public questions have a corresponding responsibility to answer those they can, plainly, and in terms the person asking can actually use.
What this means for the Range
Sunshine Coast Council serves the entire region, from Caloundra to the Blackall Range hinterland. The same governance questions apply everywhere in that area: how decisions are made, how they are explained, and what recourse residents have when explanations fall short.
Range Community News has no view on the specifics of what has happened in Nambour. We do think the broader question, whether residents are genuinely entitled to understand how decisions affecting them are made, and what happens when they are not, is one worth asking. And worth continuing to ask, in whatever form that takes.
The Nambour Now dispute has been reported in detail by the Sunshine Valley Gazette.
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