A celebrant asks:
Hey there.. a question – I’ve just registered to submit ceremonies online in NSW (I am in Vic). In reading the manual, I discovered you can scan/lodge all official documents ONLINE once the ceremony is over and that’s that. I emailed them to ask if that was for real – we don’t need to mail the official docs in? They emailed back that is correct and we just file the documents.
Now – that’s not what the Act says. Hmmmmm. I don’t want to be responsible for holding the originals. I asked a few celebrants who all say they send the docs in as well. One celebrant said he rocked up to NSW BDM to hand the documents in and they flatly refused to take them from him, saying once they are uploaded online there is no need for the BDM to have them.
So I guess they are binning / destroying all the original docs people are sending them, if those same docs have been uploaded online.
I am dying to know: what do you two do when registering a marriage in NSW then uploading the documents? Do you send/destroy/keep the originals?
I don’t marry people in NSW, but Victoria will has a similar system now. I will just keep all the originals along with my copy of the Official Certificate of Marriage, but you could also destroy them securely if you didn’t want to have the originals on hand.
The Marriage Act doesn’t actually say anything about posting the documents to BDM. It says we must “forward” the documents to the appropriate BDM – forward in this case can mean electronically 🙂
When I queried this in Victoria I was referenced to an Act called something like the “Elctronic / Digital Record Keeping Act” which is a piece of legislation that is meant to be read alongside older legislation to cover digital record keeping. So, if you overlay this newer Act over the Marriage Act you can toss the paperwork once the marriage has been registered and keep the digital record. But it is at the discretion of the BDM in your state. Hoping Vic will follow NSW and ditch the hard copies. Then I’ll be able to get peeps to sign with a fancy new ipad, like Josh! ????
It’s the Electronic Transactions Act.
VIC will be ditching hard copies when the new system comes in, but they’re also giving the advice that they are not accepting digitally signed documents, which is kind of stupid given they’ve been accepting Josh’s digitally signed documents for ages, and because the Apple Pen is so good that you can’t tell the document has been digitally signed anyway!
Josh and I are also very amused because the AGD’s own website talks about the Electronic Transactions Act allowing people to sight documents such as passports etc electronically rather than in hard copy, yet they refuse to let us do that for marriages. He even sent them the link to their own website, asking why we couldn’t sight documents via Skype or Facetime etc, and they never responded… I swear they have a giant klaxon that goes off whenever they receive an email from one of us!
I really appreciate any advice given on this subject at the moment. It seems to be a very grey area as all States aren’t quite in alignment yet.
Electronic/Digital Record Keeping would be a very welcome OPD subject as it wasn’t part of the Cert IV training I completed in 2018.
Thank you to both you & Josh for the Celebrant Institute!!!
You’re absolutely right, the states are all different in this respect, and they will never come into line, to be honest. You should definitely write to the RTOs who conduct OPD and ask for electronic submission to be included as an OPD topic in future years, although it is likely they would only offer individual state-based courses, not anything that would provide an overview of the rules across the country.
I really appreciate any advice given on this subject. It seems to be a very grey area as all States aren’t quite in alignment yet.
Electronic/Digital Record Keeping would be a very welcome OPD subject as it wasn’t part of the Cert IV training I completed in 2018.
Thank you to both you & Josh for the wealth of knowledge you are so happy to share.
Sorry for the duplicate! The system wouldn’t allow the first upload. I amended and then the rest is history!!
oops