These documents have been developed under a City Engagement Charter adopted by the previous council, and in the long shadow of the Laman St fiasco and the identification of community engagement in council decision making as the number 1 priority identified by residents in the council's own Newcastle Voice survey.
Ironically, they also come at a time when the current council is closing doors on the community, and many are questioning whether the council has the ticker for genuine for community engagement.
The current council has significantly increased the use of secret sessions between councillors and council officers, which are closed to the public.
At one of these sessions, councillors and council staff were apparently briefed by a representative of Incitec Pivot, who were lobbying for their proposed ammonium nitrate plant on Kooragang Island.
More recently, senior council staff vetoed a request for the elected council to be briefed (in an open session) on the potential explosive danger of massive ammonium nitrate stockpiles in the Newcastle area by Tony Richards, an independent expert on industrial explosives who has featured previously in this column.
Mr Richards was willing to provide his expertise for free, but when the proposal to hear from him was brought to the elected council, the majority conservative bloc voted against even considering such a briefing.
Such an attitude to the community is hardly surprising from a council headed by a Lord Mayor who, on one occasion during last September's election campaign, stated that he would throw up if he heard me say the word "community" once more.
The elected council can play a key role in establishing the organisational culture of a council (for better or worse), and council staff - especially senior staff - understandably take their cues from the elected councillors.
The previous elected council was notoriously anti-community, so when council officers brought the draft City Engagement Charter to them, there was no recommendation to consult the community about it. Following community pressure, however, that document was placed on public exhibition.
However, it was deja vu for the community when the council officers' report on the draft Community Engagement Policy and Framework appeared in the council business papers without any consideration of placing them on public exhibition, and with a recommendation to simply adopt it.
These are key documents, that will play a major role in the way the council relates to the community.
The Policy is intended as "a reference for the delivery of all community engagement" and its stated purpose is "to embed an open, transparent and consistent approach to engaging with the community".
For an organisation with a culture of genuine commitment to community engagement, the idea of simply adopting the core organisational Policy to do with community engagement without even asking the community what they thought about it would be anathema.
The Policy and the Framework documents themselves raise a number of specific concerns, but the biggest worry is that the best Policy and Framework in the world are worthless without a council that is genuinely committed to developing and maintaining an organisational culture that understands, respects and values community engagement.
Without this, it's all just hollow verbiage.
To their credit (and again after public pressure), the elected council ignored the officers' recommendation to simply adopt these documents, and voted unanimously to put them on public exhibition.
Time will tell whether this is just a momentary flicker, or a genuine opening of closed doors.
If you want your say about these documents, you can find them on council's website, at: http://www.newcastle.nsw.gov.
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