It's... complicated.

On a very basic level it is a local council that details with local council issues (just in this case the local council is several dozen islands and a tiny segment of the mainland, with an overwhelming indigenous population). So like all local councils it has some control of various issues like, roads, parks et cetera, but still a local council.

It can be a little confusing as the Islands have a couple of bodies that cover it. Torres Shire Council and Torres Strait Regional Authority. The latter is a merger of all islands that where anonymous prior to series of council mergers about 15 years ago and the former is the remainder of the area.

The Regional Authority comes from a something called the Deed of Grant in Trust, which was set up in 1985 to help a number of regional and remote Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Communities govern themselves - separate from previous overlaying local councils. The DoGiT is unique to Queensland and not found in any other state.

So back in the 1985, about 17 Islands separated via DoGiT (from The Shire of Torres) to form their own Island Councils until their merger into a singular regional authority 15 years ago (Back in 2007 the state did a massive consultation of local councils across the state).

There is actually two Regional Authorities to be fair (and just to clarify) - the previously mentioned Torres Straight Regional Authority which covers most of the previously anonymous islands in the Torres Straight and another called Northern Peninsula Regional Council - which includes a couple of islands, but mainly a small area of the mainland at the tippy-top of Cape York.