The Electronic Transactions Act in Australia

The three conditions in section 10

A signature requirement under a Commonwealth law is met if a method is used to identify the person and indicate their intention about the information, if that method was either as reliable as appropriate for the purpose or proven in fact to have identified the person and indicated their intention, and if the recipient consents to the use of the method. Reading them in order is useful. Identification and intention are about the process, reliability is judged against the stakes of the document, and consent is about the other party rather than the signer.

Why reliability is relative

The Act deliberately declines to name a technology. A method that is plainly good enough for a purchase order for stationery may be thin for a guarantee, because the appropriateness is measured against the circumstances, including the value and the likelihood of dispute. The second limb helps in practice: even where reliability is questioned, a signature stands if it is proven in fact to have identified the person and shown intention. That is an invitation to keep records, since proof after the event is exactly what an audit trail supplies.

Company execution and the assumption

Section 127 of the Corporations Act lets a company execute a document without a common seal if it is signed by two directors, a director and a company secretary, or the sole director of a proprietary company. Amendments confirmed that this can be done electronically and that officers may sign separate copies. The value of executing this way is section 129, which lets the other party assume the document was duly executed. A signature block that records each officer's name and role is what makes that assumption available on the face of the document.

What the acts leave out

Exclusions live in regulations rather than in the acts, and each jurisdiction keeps its own list. The recurring items are wills and codicils, powers of attorney in several states, statutory declarations and affidavits, and documents lodged with land titles offices, along with some court and migration paperwork. Statutory declarations were relaxed federally with an online option under a separate regime, and state rules differ. Treat any document requiring a witness, a justice of the peace or registration as one to check in its own jurisdiction.

Building the record the second limb rewards

Because the fallback is proof that the method actually identified the signer, the useful investment is in the record. Each recipient is invited at a named address, with an optional access code of at least four characters or an emailed six digit code that lasts ten minutes. Every event, eighteen types in all, is chained with sha256 so the log cannot be quietly edited, and the certificate of completion prints the verification method, the signing time, the address and the consent version for each signer.

Originals, retention and producing a document later

The Act does more than validate signatures. It sets out when giving information in electronic form satisfies a requirement to produce a document in paper form, and the test turns on the reliability of the way the integrity of the information has been maintained, judged from when it was first generated in its final form. It also addresses retention: keeping an electronic record satisfies a requirement to keep a written document where the information remains accessible and usable later, and where any information about origin, destination and timing is kept as well. Read together, those provisions mean an Australian business relying on electronic documents should be able to show two things about any file it produces: that the content has not changed since it was finalised, and that the surrounding metadata about who sent it and when has been preserved. A completed PDF sealed against modification, kept alongside the log of the signing events, satisfies both without any extra process, provided the stored copy is the one that was produced at completion.

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