Mayor Anna Speedie and Libby Hall and Danny Lowe dropped their opposition, which had been largely on legal grounds, to support Kat Bennett and Tim Quilty.

Ron Mildren was the only councillor to vote against the motion to have meetings video recorded and then uploaded to the city’s website.

Former mayor John Watson was absent from Monday night’s council meeting on compassionate leave.

Cr Quilty said while the move would not mean meetings are live streamed, which he wants, it would bring the council into the 21^st century.

“My vision is that as well as the whole meeting being available for viewing is that each item on the agenda will be separately hot-linked, so somebody will go and download the minutes of the meeting and they will flick and see us talking about it,” he said.

Cr Bennett pointed to Albury Council’s streaming as reason to act and show greater transparency.

“They had an online meeting and it had 408 views, so 408 people could definitely not fit in this room to watch a meeting,” she said.

Councillors Hall and Lowe said there were “more comfortable” and “happy” to have meetings recorded now than they had been in March.

Cr Mildren said although more councils in Australia had adopted streaming, the legal risks remained with councillors not having the legal privilege granted to state and federal politicians.

“Live streaming simply does not improve transparency, it improves accessibility it makes it much more available to people,” he said.

Cr Mildren also flagged the possibility of material being edited between being recorded and uploaded and said that raised political, legal and ethical concerns.

Cr Speedie conceded councillors would continue to be exposed to legal concerns, but framed her decision as one which recognised new technology and methods of communication.

“We need to be able to adapt to the changing needs of our community, to me this is what this is actually about,” she said.

“It is another way of speaking and communicating to our community.”

A policy related to online recording will be presented to the council’s January meeting with the first videoing to coincide with meetings being shifted from the second floor to a new ground floor chamber next April.