Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains how the Australian Democrats handle personal information collected through this website (democrats.org.au and its subdomains). It was last updated on 19 September 2026.

As a registered political party, the Australian Democrats are exempt from the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). We publish this policy anyway, because the people who join us, donate to us and write to us are entitled to know what happens to their information.

What we collect

We collect personal information only when you give it to us. Browsing the site does not require you to identify yourself, and the site sets no cookies and runs no analytics or tracking scripts.

When you join, we collect your name, email address, phone number, date of birth, residential address (and a postal address if you are a silent elector), your electoral-roll status, whether you belong to another political party, how you heard about us, and the membership tier you chose.
When you donate, we collect your name, email address, residential address and the amount and frequency of your donation.
When you pay, you enter your card or bank details on a page hosted by Stripe. Those details go directly to Stripe and never pass through our systems.
When you use the contact form, you are filling in a form hosted by Qomon, our member-management provider. What you type goes straight to Qomon.
Automatically, our hosting provider Cloudflare processes your IP address and browser details to deliver the page and protect the site from bots and attacks.
From our social-media lead forms, if you register your interest through one of our Facebook or Instagram forms, the details you enter there are imported into our member system.

How we use it

We use your information to process your membership or donation, issue receipts, keep the records our Constitution and electoral law require, and keep in touch with you about the party, its news, fundraising, campaigns and volunteering. When you join or donate, we record you as consenting to hear from us by email, phone, SMS and post. You can opt out of any of these at any time by contacting us.

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with other organisations for their marketing.

We share personal information only with the providers that operate parts of this website for us, and only what each needs:

Stripe processes payments and receives your name, contact details, address and payment details.
Qomon is our member and supporter database and receives everything you enter on the join and donation forms, your payment history and your communication preferences. It also hosts our contact form.
Cloudflare hosts the site and processes your IP address and browser details to serve it and to run our bot check.
Geoscape provides address autocomplete. As you type an address, the partial text is sent to Geoscape to offer suggestions. Nothing else about you is sent, and you can always type your address manually.
Mailchimp sends the welcome email to new members. This is the only thing we use it for, and members are removed from that list automatically afterwards.

Under electoral law, donations above the disclosure threshold are reported to the Australian Electoral Commission, and we publish donations above the level set in our Donations Policy in our Donations Register.

Within the party, only the office-holders and volunteers who need it for the purposes above have access to your information. Several of our providers are based overseas, so some information may be stored outside Australia under their own privacy policies.

How it is shared

Information travels to our providers in one of two ways: over encrypted connections between our systems and theirs, or directly from your browser to a page they host (Stripe's payment page, Qomon's contact form). There is no other route, and no one outside the party is given access to our member system.

How we protect it

All traffic to and from this site, and between our systems and our providers, is encrypted.
Card and bank details are entered on Stripe's page and never touch our systems.
Our website keeps no database of members. Qomon is the system of record; our own systems hold only short-lived working copies, and lookup keys are one-way hashes rather than email addresses.
Administrative tools that can see member or payment information are protected by single sign-on, and every use of the financial tools is logged against the person who used it.
Our audit trail records what happened to a record by reference number, never by name or contact details.
Each provider connection uses the narrowest credential available, and the join and donation forms are protected by a bot check that is verified again on our servers.

No system is perfectly secure. If we become aware of a breach affecting your information, we will tell you and explain what we are doing about it.

Retention

Your membership and donation records are kept in Qomon and Stripe for as long as you are a member or donor, and afterwards for as long as electoral and financial law requires. Working copies held by our website are deleted automatically, in most cases within days and in every case within twelve months.

Your choices

You can ask us at any time to see the information we hold about you, to correct it, to stop contacting you, or to delete it, subject to any records we must keep by law. Use our contact page.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy when our systems or providers change. The current version, with its date, will always be on this page.