Queensland publishes 101 measures about its councils. Not one is about a library.
Queensland publishes 101 measures about its 77 councils — and none of them cover libraries, child health, pools or resident satisfaction. What each state reports, and why it changes what can be scored.
Every year the Queensland Government publishes its Local Government Comparative Information: a set of workbooks covering all 77 councils in the state. The 2024-25 release runs to 101 distinct measures. Here is what those 101 measures are about.
| What the measures cover | Number of measures |
|---|---|
| Council finances — assets, liabilities, borrowings, income, expenses | 29 |
| Rate revenue, discounts and remissions | 20 |
| Water connections | 10 |
| Sewerage connections | 10 |
| Staff numbers, hours and workplace accidents | 13 |
| Waste — bins, tonnages and collection costs | 13 |
| Parks and gardens — area and maintenance cost | 4 |
| Rating levy and discount policy | 2 |
Victoria asks all of those questions
Victoria's Local Government Performance Reporting Framework publishes 59 indicators for its 79 councils, and the difference is not in the count — it is in the kind. Victorian councils report library loans, library visits and library membership per head of population. They report the share of infants enrolled in maternal and child health services, and participation in the four-week key age visit. They report utilisation of aquatic facilities and health inspections of them. They report how long they take to decide a planning application and what share is decided inside the statutory timeframe. They report animal management response times, food safety complaint response times, and the proportion of sealed local roads maintained to the council's own standard. They also publish something no other state does at this level: resident satisfaction. Victorians are surveyed on satisfaction with community consultation, with council decisions, and with sealed local roads, and every council's result is published. Victoria additionally reports councillor attendance at meetings and the proportion of council decisions made behind closed doors — a direct, comparable measure of how open a council is. New South Wales sits between the two. Its Office of Local Government time-series data supports 19 scored indicators, but it leans heavily on expenditure: community services spend per capita, library spend per capita, recreation and culture spend per capita. Spending tells you what a council prioritises. It does not tell you what residents got for it.What that means for a score
Council Scorer rates councils on four dimensions: financial sustainability, community services, lifestyle and amenity, and core operations. Every score is a percentile within a council's peer group, built only from indicators the state actually publishes. For Queensland, two of those four dimensions have no source at all. There is no community services data, and there is a single amenity measure. So Queensland council pages on this site now show "Not published by Queensland" where a number used to sit, and Queensland councils carry no overall score. Seven indicators support the two dimensions that can be built: five on financial sustainability, two on core operations. That is a smaller claim than the one this site made a month ago, and it is the honest one. A score assembled from data that does not exist is not a score.What Queensland's data does tell you, and tells you well
The financial picture is genuinely strong, because finance is what Queensland reports in depth. Brisbane City Council carries $3.2 billion in borrowings against $2.69 billion in annual operating income, and holds $390 million in current assets against $1.01 billion in current liabilities. On the balance-sheet measures it ranks last among Queensland's fourteen largest councils. At the other end, Burdekin Shire holds more than four dollars of current assets for every dollar of current liability, carries no debt at all, and ran a 10 per cent operating surplus. Twenty-four of Queensland's 77 councils report zero borrowings. On the operational side, Charters Towers Regional and Longreach Regional post the state's strongest core-operations results, built on low waste collection cost per property and low workplace accident time. None of that would be visible without the comparative information release. Queensland publishes a lot. It publishes the wrong half for anyone asking whether their council delivers good services.Four councils where the data runs out
Four Queensland councils — Barcoo Shire, Hope Vale Aboriginal Shire, Northern Peninsula Area Regional and Wujal Wujal Aboriginal Shire — reported too little in 2024-25 for either dimension to be calculated. Their pages say so, and show no score. Three of the four are small, remote Aboriginal Shire councils, and the gap is a reporting-capacity question rather than a performance one. A council of a few hundred people, several hours from the nearest regional centre, is completing the same return as Brisbane. Where the return is incomplete, the honest answer is that the data is not there — not a zero, and not an estimate.Why this is worth fixing
Comparable service reporting is not an administrative nicety. It is how a resident finds out whether the thing they pay rates for is working, and how a council with a good result gets credit for it. Victoria collects and publishes all of it, council by council, every year. Queensland councils deliver libraries, pools, parks, child health services and development assessment just as Victorian councils do — the state simply does not gather the results in one comparable place. Until it does, any Queensland council ranking that shows a community services score is showing you a number that came from somewhere other than Queensland.Frequently asked questions
Does Queensland publish any council performance data? Yes — 101 measures for all 77 councils in the 2024-25 Local Government Comparative Information release, covering finances, rates, water and sewerage connections, waste, personnel and parks. It is detailed, and it is published under an open licence. It simply does not cover community services or resident satisfaction. Why do Queensland councils have no overall score on Council Scorer? An overall score averages four dimensions. Two of the four have no Queensland source, so an average of four cannot be calculated without inventing two of them. Queensland councils are scored on financial sustainability and core operations, and ranked within their peer group on each. Which peer groups does Council Scorer use for Queensland? The Queensland Local Government Grants Commission segmentation, which is the state's own classification: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander councils (16), under 10,000 residents (22), 10,000 to 24,999 (11), 25,000 to 79,999 (14), and 80,000 and above (14). Where does the data come from? Queensland Local Government Comparative Information 2024-25, © State of Queensland, Department of Local Government, Water and Volunteers, published under CC BY 4.0 Australia. Victorian figures are from the Local Government Performance Reporting Framework 2024-25; New South Wales from the Office of Local Government time-series data 2023-24.Related Councils: brisbane · burdekin · charters-towers · longreach · barcoo · hope-vale · northern-peninsula-area · wujal-wujal