I’ve written before about the recent changes allowing us to manage a lot of our legal obligations electronically, but I seem to have missed specifically addressing record keeping:

I read the latest Marriage Celebrant Matters Newsletter and it states that “Hard copies of the Notice, DNLI or any supporting documents (divorce orders, parental consents etc) do not need to be kept once lodged electronically with the registry of births, deaths and marriages (BDM). Celebrants may wish to retain these documents until the marriage is registered”

Does this include all the previous hard copies we kept and lodged electronically? Because previously we were suppose to keep the hard copies for X years from what I remember. I think it was 5 years from memory.

We still need to keep our copy of the official certificate of marriage – it might be in the red register book, or it might be in another format (I keep mine in lever arch folders with a copy of the ceremony script because I’m a nerd). We must keep those for six years; that hasn’t changed.
This bit in the newsletter is about the second copy of the official certificate of marriage (the one we would have posted to BDM previously), the NOIM and the DONLIM; we don’t need to keep any of those if they’ve been uploaded to an onlineĀ registration system.