Council Meetings Hub

Golden Plains Shire Council has Governance Rules which provide procedures for decision making and the conduct of Council meetings, including for public participation and election of a Mayor and Deputy Mayor. 

Governance Rules

A copy of the unconfirmed minutes will be made available online by the Friday following the meeting at the link below. The minutes are confirmed at the following Council meeting and the confirmed version is published.

Previous meetings from recent years are also available at the link below. For minutes from meetings prior to 2016, please call 5220 7111 or email [email protected].

Meeting Minutes

A copy of the agenda for the next Council Meeting will be made available here the Friday prior to the meeting. Previous Meeting Agendas are also available at this link.

All council meetings are open to the public to either attend in person or view via livestream. Council may need to close the meeting to the public in certain circumstances, for example when considering confidential items. 

While council meetings are an opportunity to observe the Council at work, they are not the place for members of the public to informally address councillors. Opportunities to engage with your Councillors, Council projects and strategies can be found here. 

Council invites members of the public to ask questions on any Council related matters and 30 minutes is set aside at each Council meeting to ask questions of the Council. If you have a question to ask at a council meeting, it must be submitted in writing by 10am of the day of the meeting. A maximum of two questions may be asked by each person.

If your question relates to Council services or operations, please consider instead submitting your request by contacting Council’s Customer Experience team via phone on 03 5220 7111, by email to [email protected], or by visiting one of Council's Customer Hubs. 

The person who submitted the question, or their representative, must be present at the meeting or when possible and arranged in advance, join the meeting online via Microsoft Teams to ask their question. 

Options for submitting a question include:

• Complete an online form;
• Submit a form by email to [email protected]; or 
• Deliver a form to the Council Offices

Complete Online Form

Download Form

Where a person wishes to be heard in respect of their submission to Council under:

• Section 223 of the Local Government Act 1989;
• The Planning and Environment Act 1987; 
• Any other legislation; or
• A Council policy (e.g. the Council budget).

Council will provide an opportunity for the person or their representative to make a presentation at a Council meeting where the matter is listed on the agenda or, if necessary, at a prior meeting held for the purposes of hearing submissions. 

No time will be allocated for presentations on any other agenda items, although written submissions received before 3:00pm on the day of the Council meeting will be provided electronically to all Councillors. 

Register to make a presentation

Petitions are a form of community engagement and allow community members to demonstrate community support for a request or views on a matter and for that request or view to be presented directly to Council. 

Every petition submitted to Council must comply with the Governance Rules which can be accessed above. Importantly, every petition must:

• be in writing
• contain at least five signatures
• have the full name, address and signature of all individual signatories
• include the whole request of the petitioners on each page
• not be defamatory, indecent, abusive, objectionable or aimed at embarrassing a Councillor or member of Council staff in language or content
• not relate to matters beyond the power of Council or matters that are likely to be confidential.

To submit your petition to Council for consideration at a Council meeting, please send the petition and list of signatories to [email protected] or submit in person at one of Council’s Customer Hubs. 

Petitions submitted to Council will be dealt with in accordance with the Governance Rules. 

Any member of the public addressing the Council must extend due courtesy and respect to the Council and the processes under which it operates and must take direction from the Chairperson whenever called upon to do so.

Members of the public present at Council meetings must not interject during the meeting and may be removed from the meeting if they do so after being asked to stop.

Further information, including guidance on behaviour expectations and display of placards and posters at Council meetings, may be found in the Public Participation in Meetings section of the Governance Rules, provided above.

Opening declaration and acknowledgement of Country

Apologies and leave of absence requests

Confirmation of minutes from the previous Council meeting

Declaration of conflicts of interest

• The Chair requests Councillors to nominate if they have any conflict of interest in relation to any of the agenda items. 
• Conflicts of interest for Councils are defined in sections 126 to 131 of the Local Government Act 2020. A Councillor who declares a conflict of interest must declare the type of conflict (defined under the Act) and the reason for the conflict.  
• When the item is discussed by Council, the Councillor with a conflict of interest will leave the chamber so that they are not involved in any consideration of the matter. The Councillor will be advised when the matter has been resolved so that they can re-enter the chamber. Their conflict of interest and the period of absence will be noted in the minutes.

Public questions

• For more information on public question time or to submit a question, refer to the Public Participation in Council Meetings section above.

This section forms the main part of the agenda and contains reports that the Council needs to decide on. To assist Councillors, the reports contain recommendations from Council officers, which are suggestions about how the matter be decided. The Council may adopt the recommendation, determine a different course of action, or it may choose not to take any action.

When items are provided for Council to note or receive information about something that has already taken place, Council might consider those matters ‘en bloc’ (which means in a block). In that case, the Councillors vote once and the recommendations in each of those items is adopted as the resolution. This saves time and lets the Councillors spend more time considering reports where they need to decide how the Council should act.

An example of an item that might be considered en bloc is a finance report for the quarter that has already finished.
For some items, Council might hear submissions from members of the public, in accordance with the Public Presentations and Submissions section above.

A notice of motion can be submitted by a Councillor to be considered as part of the agenda. The requirements for a notice of motion to be submitted are provided in the Governance Rules, which can be accessed above. 

For more information on Petitions or to submit a petition, refer to the Public Participation in Council Meetings section above.

Sometimes, urgent matters arise after the Agenda for a Council meeting is created. This section allows for those matters to be considered by Council. As no prior notice has been given for relevant issue, Council must first vote on whether the issue will be considered. Once an item has been admitted as urgent business, it is decided in the same way as business reports for decision, explained above.

Some Council meetings include information or matters for decision that needs to be kept confidential.  Confidential information is defined under section 3(1) of the Local Government Act 2020. Examples include personal information that would be unreasonable to release to the public or information that would harm the Council’s position in commercial negotiations if released too early. 

When confidential information is considered at Council meetings, members of the public are asked to leave the gallery and the livestream is turned off. 

The confidential part of the meeting is at the end of the meeting so that members of the public do not have to wait to come back into the gallery. This does not stop the Council from deciding to move into confidential at any stage during the meeting.