What we do with your information

Who we are

South West Goulburn Landcare Network Inc. is an incorporated association registered in Victoria, number A0053125F, ABN 16 096 892 211, and a charity registered with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission. Our postal address is 113 High St, Broadford VIC 3658 and our email is [email protected]. The network committee is responsible for what happens to the information described on this page, and the facilitator handles it day to day.

Does the Privacy Act apply to us?

Probably not, strictly speaking. The Privacy Act 1988 covers organisations with an annual turnover above three million dollars, and a volunteer Landcare network with around 170 members sits a long way under that line. We would rather not lean on the exemption. We have used the Australian Privacy Principles as our guide in writing this page, and we intend to handle your information the way it describes whether or not the Act obliges us to. Some obligations apply to everyone regardless of size, and we follow those too: the Spam Act 2003 governs the newsletter, and general law governs the rest.

What we collect

Only what people hand us. Nothing is bought in, and there is no tracking that follows you around other websites.

• Membership sign-up: your name, email address, a password, your phone number if you give one, the address of the property your Landcare work relates to, and the group you are joining.
• Event RSVPs: name, email, phone if you give one, how many people are coming, and any note you add.
• Equipment booking requests: name, email, phone, your group, the dates you want the gear, and what you plan to use it for.
• Newsletter sign-up: your email address, and a name if you give one.
• Contact form: your name, your town, your email, the topic and your message.
• Photographs you send for the gallery, along with your name, email and any caption or event you attach to them.
• Membership, hire and donation records held against your account, including the amount, the date and an invoice number. While payments on this site are simulated, no card or bank details are asked for and none are held.
• Ordinary technical records the site keeps to work at all: a sign-in cookie while you are logged in, and short-lived records of the network address a form was submitted from, which is how we stop the forms being flooded.

Why we collect it

To run the things this website runs. Memberships and renewals, event RSVPs and headcounts for catering and safety, equipment bookings and the clash-checking that goes with them, the newsletter, donations and the receipts that go back out, and the photo gallery. We use it to get back to you about the thing you asked about, to keep the member register our rules require us to keep, and to hand over the gear at the right time to the right person.

Beyond that we use it for the ordinary business of running a Landcare network: planning where the next planting or fencing job goes, applying for grants and reporting back to the funders who paid for the work, meeting the record-keeping the association rules and charity regulation require, and telling people what the network has been up to. Reporting to funders and government partners is done in numbers, how many people came, how many trees went in, not in named lists, unless you have agreed to be named.

Photographs

Photographs get treated more carefully than anything else here, because a photo can give away where somebody lives. When you lodge one, the original is stored in a private area that is not reachable from the internet and can only be opened by an administrator who is signed in. Nothing appears on the site until a person has looked at it and approved it. The copy we publish is a resized version with the camera metadata, including any GPS coordinates, stripped out. The original keeps its metadata, but the original never goes public.

If you appear in a photograph on this site and would rather not, email us and we will take it down. You do not have to explain why.

Who else sees it

The people who need it, and the services that make the website work. In practice that is:

• The facilitator and the committee members who administer memberships, bookings and the gallery.
• Your own group’s committee, for administering your membership, since that is where memberships actually sit.
• The service providers that run this site for us: the company that hosts the site and its database, the service that delivers our email, the service that stores photographs, and the service that passes contact-form messages through to our inbox. Several of these are overseas, mainly in the United States, so information you give us is stored and handled outside Australia. They handle it to provide the service to us and for no other purpose.
• Our insurer and the state Landcare bodies we are affiliated with, where insurance cover or affiliation depends on a record of who our members are.
• Anyone else the law requires us to tell, or anyone you have asked us to tell.

That is the whole list. If a use comes up that is not on it, we will ask you first.

We do not sell your information

We do not sell, rent or trade personal information. We do not pass our member list or our newsletter list to anybody for their own marketing, and we do not run advertising on this site.

Email from us

There are two sorts. The first is the email the site has to send to work: the link that verifies your address, a confirmation of an RSVP or a booking, an invoice, a reply to something you sent us. That comes with the service you asked for. The second is the newsletter, which goes out a few times a year to people who signed up for it and to members, and carries events, grant deadlines and what the groups have been doing.

Every newsletter says who it is from. If you want off the list, reply to it or email [email protected] and we will take you off, within five working days at the outside and usually the same week. You do not have to give a reason and you do not have to log in to anything. Coming off the newsletter does not cancel your membership, and we will still send you the email that belongs to your membership itself.

Keeping it safe

Passwords are stored hashed, which means the database holds a one-way scramble rather than the password. Nobody here can read yours, and if you forget it we can only reset it. The members area sits behind a sign-in, the committee and administration pages sit behind a further check, and photo originals sit in private storage that is not served to the public. Access is limited to the people who need it to do the job.

No system is beyond a breach, and we would be wrong to tell you otherwise. If information about you were lost or exposed in a way likely to cause you harm, we would tell you what happened, what we were doing about it and what you might want to do, and we would report it where the law required us to.

How long we keep it

While it is still relevant to running the network. Membership records are kept while you are a member and for a reasonable period afterwards, partly because people rejoin and partly because a member register is something an incorporated association has to keep. Financial records, including invoices and donation receipts, are kept for at least seven years, which is what the charity and tax rules require of us. RSVPs and booking records are kept for the season and then held for reference so we can plan the next one. Newsletter addresses are kept until you ask to come off. Ask us to remove your details and we will remove what we are not required to keep, and tell you what we have had to keep and why.

Seeing or correcting what we hold

Email [email protected] and ask. If you are a member you can see and change most of your own details by signing in. We will normally get back to you inside a fortnight, though we are volunteers and a busy planting season can slow that down. There is no charge. If we cannot do what you have asked, we will tell you why.

If you are unhappy with any of this

Tell us first, at [email protected] or by post to 113 High St, Broadford VIC 3658. It goes to the facilitator and, if it is not sorted out there, to the committee. If you are still not satisfied you can take a privacy complaint to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au, and a complaint about unwanted email to the Australian Communications and Media Authority at acma.gov.au.

Changes to this page

We update this page when what we do changes, and the version here is the one that applies. Last updated 10 August 2026. The terms of use cover the rest of using this site.