The Privacy Act is legislation to which we as your conveyancer are subject, which governs the manner in which we collect and what we can do with your personal information.

 

In the course of acting on your behalf in your conveyancing transaction, we of course obtain a significant amount of personal information. This includes information such as names, addresses, dates of birth, banking details and other items by which you may be identified. As a firm, we subscribe to and abide by the National Privacy Principles. That sets out that we must keep your information confidential and only use it for the purposes required of us in carrying out our work.

 

As you may be aware, recent instances of identity theft have occurred, which have resulted in transaction being registered at Landgate when the owners of the property had not authorised those transactions. As a result of that, Landgate has introduced a range of measures, designed to improve the identification of parties to transactions and ensure as far as is possible, that transaction do not take place fraudulently.

 

As a result of this, we may be required to provide a great deal more information to Landgate than had traditionally been the case.

 

You may therefore be asked to provide us with copies of documents such as passports, driver’s licences, credit cards, water rates bills or other identification documents so that we can comply with Landgate’s requirements. Landgate may also require us to provide copies of these documents to them, or to provide them with further information in our possession, such as bank account details, the destination of funds paid to you at settlement or other information they require to confirm the transaction to be genuine. It is also possible that as a result of Landgate’s requirements, information may need to be handed over at settlement which meets these requirements, and if may also be that we need to deliver this information to other people for it to be lodged at Landgate to enable your transaction to occur.

 

We may also share your information with third parties who provide services to you or us, including the Office Of State Revenue, Electronic Lodgment Network Operator (ELNO), Australia Post, our software provider C Solutions, your real estate agent or the conveyancer acting for the person you are buying or selling land to and other organisations, agents, partners and contractors that assist us with providing our services.

 

We may also disclose your information to your authorised representatives or advisers, third parties when you ask us to do so, our business or commercial partners and other businesses we work with law enforcement and national security agencies, and other government and regulatory authorities as required or authorised by law, third parties who assist us in managing or developing our business and corporate strategies and functions and government agencies for purposes associated with land administration.

 

The purpose of this notice is to advise you that this is a potential requirement and that by complying with the same we will not be breaching the Privacy Act or the National Privacy Principles.

 

We wish to reiterate our commitment to keeping your information private in accordance with the National Privacy Principles, and to advise you of the use to which your information may well be put, in accordance with the requirements of the Privacy Act.