Proud to Be Public

Updated 22/11/2024

We've Kept Births, Deaths and Marriages 100% in public hands.

Plan Hatched but Now Dispatched

"An early plan to give private investors access to parts of Victoria’s births, deaths and marriages registry has been abandoned by the state government after backlash from a key union and grassroots Labor members." AGE 13/9/2024

BDM has been recording significant life events since 1853.

More than 400 Victorians each day last month interacted with BDM and that was just for certificate registration and doesn’t include the change of identity or sex, family history, or proof of identity enquiries.

The office is critical to all our lives as it records and manages the most intimate personal details of all Victorians.


The workers there are super heroes.

It's time DGS argued for an increase in resources to re-open the public counter and boost services to Victorians.

Treasury needs to stop just costing and start valuing our public services.

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The office of Births, Deaths and Marriages is currently 100% Victorian Government owned.  That means we all own it, as we should, because of the detailed personal data about our lives that we have stored there, but the Government is considering selling it off to the private sector.

The office is critical to all our lives as it records and manages the most intimate personal details of all Victorians.

A potential sale is bad news for Victorians for a number of reasons:

  1. It will hand over the personal and private details of all Victorians to a private company with no guarantees on data protection. Just look at all the recent data breaches from formerly State Owned businesses.
  2. It will allow the private company to jack up the cost of obtaining Certificates or registering information.
  3. Our private information can potentially be sold to third parties for advertising as a way the buyer gets a return on the billions it spends to purchase BDM.

The purpose of our campaign is to generate community support to keep our private information fully in Government hands and to re-open BDM to the public.
https://campaignedge.digitalpigeon.com/msg/4nvCoGEPEe-beAJ-JeMueQ/RwiCZI5wvhuYN9oeZJkALw

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/victoria-s-births-deaths-and-marriages-plan-hatched-then-dispatched-20240912-p5ka03.html