Many of us conduct a significant part of our lives online paying bills, ordering groceries, booking travel, bidding on auctions, and catching up with long lost friends. The extent to which modern society has become reliant on online services influences the way in which people communicate with one another and the way we conduct our lives (Wellman and Haythornthwaite, 2002). The specific focus of this paper is web based communication for planning in local government. Despite communication with the community being an integral part of local government functions, the types of communication being used are rarely monitored or analysed. This paper provides a comparative snapshot of the types of web based communication being employed by local government in Sydney, New South Wales (NSW), Australia, and investigates some of the correlates of this communication process. We begin by reviewing the U.S. based studies that this paper seeks to make a comparison with and then move onto recent research that has a specific focus on emerging social networking tools such as Facebook. We then provide details of the study area and present a comparative study of web based communication by local government in the state of NSW with the U.S. based studies previously conducted by Evans-Cowley and Conroy (2010). After outlining the extent and types of electronic communication employed and their correlation with other easily accessible statistics, the paper also highlights a number of third party hosting techniques being employed to extend the use of web based communications locally.