Recording a session in Australia.

The statute the state and territory surveillance devices acts, and the Privacy Act 1988

There is no single Australian rule. New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory each have a surveillance devices or listening devices act, and most of them make it an offence for a party to a private conversation to record it without the consent of the other parties. Queensland is the notable exception and permits a participant to record. A practitioner working across state lines, which a video practice always is, cannot sensibly track which act applies to a given session.

Ask, everywhere in Australia, and do not try to work out which state the client was sitting in. One sentence covers the seven strict jurisdictions and the one permissive one at the same time, which is the argument for a script rather than a table.

The Privacy Act binds organisations with an annual turnover above three million Australian dollars, which leaves most single practitioners outside it, and it binds any business of any size that provides a health service and holds health information. A nutrition or wellbeing practice should assume it applies. Australian Privacy Principle 3 restricts collecting sensitive information without consent, and a recording about somebody's health is sensitive information.