Noosa Shire Council Annual Report 2023 - 2024

Brian Stockwell37:18

Would anyone else like to talk to motion? If you'd like to close, I'd put the motion. Those in favour? That's unanimous. Thank you. We now move on to the Noosa Shire Council annual report for the financial year 2023/24, and we welcome Diana, manager of governance. Would you like to give us an overview, please, Diana? Thank you.

Brian Stockwell46:54

I'll take a bit of a different tact. It. Showcases a great number a great volume of really good work that's been done. What we don't get is a feeling of what was the impact of that on our community. And whether it's in the annual report or another specific report, we as an organisation should be using each, my view is, this annual report each year should be, how are we tracking about achieving the goals of the Corporate Plan? What is the impact of all these activities we're doing? Now if the activity is a service delivering the service is all that's needed, but if it's a project that's designed to have an outcome, it'd be good to know it did. So we've heard about trail 5. Building trail 5, an award winning trail would mean absolutely nothing, unless it actually achieved the aim of getting more people out riding, walking, going on their bikes. And we've got parents, so we actually know through other processes that the impact of that project is a lot more people are using it. It's really important when we look at evaluating the work of this Council as Councillors that we not only invest in doing the projects but we ensure that the organisation has as part of its global operations a monitoring evaluation culture to say what was the impact we made. So to me by this time next year I'd really like a whole section on how do we go about achieving the key targets that are in our strategy and in our Corporate Plan. And I thought just to highlight some of the things if you could put up that graphic. This is what the community told us that they thought we should focus on when over a thousand of them answered a survey-related the existing Corporate Plan. You can see the focus area at the top there, traffic management and transport. And we see in this report that several of the actions relating to that high priority are the ones that are in major disruption. So Noosa parking plan, Noosa Woods jetty investigation, investigating revenue system for visitors to contribute to our transport system, scope to review, scope of the review of the transport policy. Now there is a real reason and Councillor Wilkie identified it. He said there's labour shortages. In that particular case we had great difficulty in filling in a vacant position and in a small Council sometimes just one spare position can have great ripple effects and so we need to understand are we heading to where the community want us to go? If not, why not? And is there something we need to do about it? I look I'll look at the bottom one there. In terms of the natural environment, and if we look at in the future section, we find that things like in major disruption is the Noosa River and catchment management plan. It's about updating the Noosa Plan 2020 to incorporate the strategy. And if we look at the next one up, see that focus on environmental sustainability, which is all what the, you know, big part of why we're doing Destination Management Plan. And that's another strategy that's in major disruption. So as Councillors, we're really responsible for the strategic direction of the Shire and then checking that it's on the right way. Now, this term of Council, we only had three months in this financial year but I suppose why I'm raising it is that should be looking at this year trying to address those areas. And there is another outstanding major disruption item in there and it's about developing a performance management framework. And that's where we need to invest in to make sure that by this time next year we have an organisation that is more looking at its impact rather than just doing the job and moving on. We have to get to that monitoring evaluation culture so that then we can then work out what needs to change, where we need to innovate to achieve those impacts that graph tells us is important to our community.