How much did my council pay each consultant last year?
An aggregate figure usually appears in the annual report. Which firms, for what, and how much each, generally does not.
Why it matters
Consultant spending is where a great deal of council money goes and where the least scrutiny falls. A ratepayer can see that their council spent some millions on consultants; they cannot see whether that was one firm or forty, whether the same firm keeps winning work, or whether the reports were ever used.
Councillors are frequently in the same position. Several have told inquiries they could not obtain the breakdown either, which makes this a question about whether elected representatives can oversee their own administration -- not merely a question about public curiosity.
Can it be answered?
What stands in the way
| Obstruction | What it means here |
|---|---|
| not published | The body holds this and does not release it. Nothing new would have to be collected. |
| aggregated | Published only at a level too coarse to answer the question asked. |
| format | Published in a form that cannot practically be queried — typically PDF or a portal with no export. |
Every obstruction above is a decision about how to publish, not a fact about what exists or a limit on what may lawfully be released. This question could be answered without collecting anything new.
Data that bears on this
| Dataset | Publisher | Availability | Format | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brisbane City Council annual report and financial statements
Whole-of-council, annual |
Brisbane City Council | published | 49 | |
| Council consultant and contractor expenditure, itemised
Not published at any granularity |
Brisbane City Council | unpublished | none | 0 |
How people get at it anyway
The aggregate appears in the annual financial statements. Beyond that, the practical routes are a formal access application, or a councillor asking through the chamber -- both of which produce an answer for one council, once, in a form nobody can compare with anywhere else.
The formal request route
Formal access application under the applicable state regime. See Queensland RTI for Queensland.
General description only. It is not legal advice, and the applicable regime and its time limits are set out on the relevant FOI regime page.
Notes
The federal comparison is what makes this entry sharp: the Commonwealth publishes contract-level detail on AusTender as a matter of routine, across thousands of contracts a year. Whatever the objection to councils doing the same, it cannot be that transaction-level publication is impossible.
Marked verified on 2026-09-03. The report was downloaded and its text searched:
"Contractor and consultancy costs" appears at 45,486 against 48,191 the prior
year, in thousands, as one line among aggregate categories.
Checked on 2026-09-02 by opening the annual report, and confirmed. The expense note carries a single line -- "Contractor and consultancy costs", $45.486 million against $48.191 million the prior year -- sitting among other aggregate categories such as agency staff costs and services and contract costs. There is no firm-level breakdown anywhere in the document.
This entry survived a verification pass in which most did not, and the reason is worth noting: it was written from the structure of council financial reporting, which genuinely does stop at the aggregate, rather than from an assumption about what a body would prefer to hide.
Sources
- Brisbane City Council Annual Report 2023-24, notes to the financial statements, opened and searched 2026-09-02
Know better?
If this data is published somewhere and we have missed it, saying so
improves the register more than adding a new question would — a false gap is
worse than no entry. Edit data/questions/council-consultant-spend.toml, or
send the correction.