Victoria, Australia, Petty Sessions Registers 1854-1985 - findmypast

[kiterunner]

http://search.findmypast.co.uk/search-world-Records/victoria-petty-sessions-registers

[kiterunner]

The information in "Findmypast Fridays" didn't show the date range of this database, but it is 1854 to 1985! I have checked, and it does include records from as recently as 1985. I find it hard to believe that they are allowed to give out information on living people's minor criminal convictions from over 30 years ago?

https://www.gotocourt.com.au/criminal-law/vic/no-conviction/
This link says that "Victoria does not have its own spent convictions scheme... However, the Victoria Police do have an information release policy which operates similarly to a spent convictions scheme." Which I would have thought would mean that this information should not be easily available online? Anyone can look at these and see that someone was charged with possession of a small amount of cannabis in 1985, for instance. I'm not even sure whether all the people listed were actually convicted? I'm looking at one which says "entered in error" next to it, for instance. And another which says "dismissed". I wonder whether civil liberties people in Victoria are aware of this?

Edit - I have found contact details for an organisation called Liberty Victoria, and emailed them, but I suppose they might not see it until Monday by which time the info will have been online for days, and the index could have been trawled by search bots etc.

[kiterunner]

The FamilySearch Wiki has an entry for the Petty Sessions Registers which says they are scheduled to become available on FamilySearch, up to 1937, which seems a lot more reasonable.

Because FMP does not have anti-bot protection, the records can be trawled by search bots such as Google and will then come up in results if you Google for the name of one of the people included in the database. So someone applying for a job could find that potential employers have details of a minor charge from over 30 years ago. This wouldn't be allowed in the UK and I thought that Australia generally had tougher privacy laws than the UK does?

[Kit]

Anything that goes through the court system is deemed to be on the public record unless it is a closed court.

I have no idea how you would access the information though as I have never tried.

[kiterunner]

There are still privacy rules relating to public records, though, Toni. For instance, BMD records are public records but there are strict rules about those in Australia, even the indexes. Many public records are closed for 100 years. I don't know what the access rules are for the court records at the Victoria Public Record Office but even if the recent records are open there for anyone turning up to view them, that is very different from them being available online. Victoria doesn't have "spent convictions" at the moment, but it is supposed to be up to the Victoria police to decide whether to release information on old convictions, and this database will bypass that rule in some cases.

I contacted Liberty Victoria (the Victoria civil liberties group) about this but had no reply. I have also contacted Civil Liberties Australia and they have passed it on to the Australian Privacy Foundation.

Even if the authorities rule that this is o.k., I feel that people who are affected by this should at least be aware that their data has been made available online, and I don't see any such announcements online to the wider community, only to family history researchers - and I would dispute that such recent court records are necessary for family history research.