Price and Gatton Shire Council

Price and Gatton Shire Council
(2006 F0057, 5 June 2007) 

Sufficiency of search 

The applicant sought access to all documents held by Gatton Shire Council (GSC) that related to him, his family or his property. In light of the fact that the applicant had made this request to GSC a number of times before, this application was limited as applying to all documents created or received by GSC from the date of his last application for the same documents to the date of the access application relevant to this external review. 

After the release of a number of documents to the applicant during the course of this external review, he was advised that no further documents responsive to his access application existed within the possession or under the control of GSC. While the applicant did not accept this, he provided no information as to additional documents he believed should exist or further searches and inquiries GSC should reasonably be required to undertake. GSC provided detailed information as to the searches it had undertaken in an attempt to locate all responsive documents.  

Assistant Commissioner Corby found that there were no reasonable grounds to believe that any further documents responsive to the applicant’s access application existed in the possession or under the control of GSC, and that in such circumstances the searches undertaken by GSC had been reasonable.