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 🙂