According to the telecoms industry, Australia’s biggest local authority is among more than 100 bodies making thousands of requests for details of numbers called by phone users, their location, the length of calls, email addresses and other information telcos are obliged to keep for two years under national security laws passed in 2015.

The bodies making requests include the Queensland Office of Fair Trading and Queensland Transport as well as a range of state departments across Australia and the Bankstown, Fairfield and Rockdale councils in Sydney.

They appear on a list provided to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security this week by industry peak body the Communications Alliance.

Brisbane City Council is the only Queensland council on the list.

The telecoms industry is not required by law to collect or publish details of such requests and provided the list to the committee voluntarily after it surveyed member companies.

BCC did not appear on a similar, but much shorter, list provided by the federal government under Freedom of Information in 2016.

A spokesman for lord mayor Graham Quirk said, "at the request of the Queensland Police Service", the council had "facilitated requests for information from telecommunications companies to assist police investigations involving other parties".

"A telecommunications company was contacted about phone calls made to and from council’s contact centre from an individual that were the subject of an ongoing legal matter," he said.

Council opposition leader Peter Cumming said he did not recall any discussion or debate about the use of metadata laws in council.

Cr Cumming said it was akin to "Big Brother" behaviour on the part of the council, "which is not what it's set up for".

Other councils have used the laws to pursue unpaid fines and other minor legal infringements.

Fairfield City Council told Fairfax Media its requests for metadata were in relation to illegal dumping. Canterbury Bankstown Council said the former Bankstown council had made 10 metadata requests and they were only ever to place somebody at the scene of an illegal dumping site after they had denied involvement.

“We’ve had extreme examples in the past where metadata has been sought in an attempt to catch a litterbug,” Communications Alliance spokesman John Stanton said.

“It was a council that had sought information about the mobile location of a resident who was linked to a piece of litter that had been dropped.

“But it can relate to parking fines, there’s really no cap on the reasons your metadata can be sought.”

The Queensland Office of Fair Trading said it used information from metadata to track down itinerant traders about whom complaints had been made or in response to complaints about shoddy goods where the only contact information was a phone number.

It was unable to say how many times it had sought metadata but it said telcos had “responded” to its requests. “However, the information itself is not always fruitful,” a spokesperson said.

Under the laws, about 20 law enforcement agencies, including police services and intelligence agencies, have automatic access to metadata and telcos make regular reports to government on its interactions with these organisations.

According to the Communications Alliance, this accounts for the bulk of requests - about 300,000 so far - but other agencies account for a “significant” additional number.

Under an amendment to the legislation, the other organisations can claim they have the legal right to the same information and request it from telcos.

But unlike with the 20 law enforcement bodies, telcos are not obliged to record who makes such requests or how often they are successful.

Mr Stanton said telcos “don’t particularly enjoy being in a position where they’ve got to try and make a judgment about whether it’s a legitimate request or not”.

“They assert that they’ve got a legal right, so what’s the poor telco going to do, are they going to retain a lawyer every time to try and verify that?”

Mr Stanton said: "You’ve got a very large number of organisations that are seeking access to metadata and I think the public’s not terribly aware of that.”

“In an ideal world the legislation would have put some fences around who can access metadata because it was promoted as a good thing that this was being restricted to a few agencies - and the opposite has happened," he said.

“It looks to us like an unintended consequence and unintended consequences of national security acts are what make us nervous at times about new legislation.

“When national security legislation comes in you’d like to know what its effect is going to be, and when its effect turns out to be something quite different then that’s an issue for everybody.”

This story has been updated to include the response from lord mayor Graham Quirk's office.