yes, apparently so. Once upon a time a wife needed her husband's permission to go under the knife .... but if she was single, she could sign the authority all by herself.
So, if the restrictions were lifted, ie anyone could buy a certified copy of a NSW BDM marriage registration for any marriage in NSW (give the clergy/celebrant say one month to get the paperwork uploaded etc and matched up to the Intention to Marry papers) ... ) then what will happen from an administrative position .... well perhaps very little will change initially. But the information on the m.c. will no longer be 'secure' or 'sensitive' or 'private' and so cannot be relied on as part of any proof of identity.
This lack of security has a flow on, for NSW BDM marriages include information that is found on birth certificates and other secure documentation.... That puts at risk those other secure systems.
Back in the 19th Century, after the commencement of civil registration, if you wanted to obtain info about a marriage, you basically needed to know where it was recorded - so which deputy registrar had received the paperwork from the clergyman or had conducted a marriage directly... There was a 40 plus years dispute between the Churches and the Colonial Government, and not much information was actually sent through to the Registrar General's Office in Sydney .... so the law was 'obeyed' in principle, but not in content ... summary info only sent through (so about as scant as say English certs were, sometimes not even that much/little).
Just before WWI, the government provided extra funding and the Reg Gen's staff started to 'reconcile' the church registers with their own humble set of records.... and they got through many of the Sydney registers for most of the denominations.... BUT the clerks in the BDM were also needed once WWI commenced. They were able to handle the paperwork for Base Records and thus allow the trained Army Officers to train others for front line overseas work.... So the reconcilation process on NSW marriage registers has NOT EVER been completed. (Several attempts at securing funding have occurred, but only minor reconciliations have occurred).
But until around 2005, the family history buffs who moved over from manual record charting to using CDS and some new software etc systems, needed to rely on indexes that had not been prepared until the mid 1930s, by teams of volunteers (SAG etc) who basically gave the NSW BDM actual INDEX systems ... cross matched, etc. Until then, they were working with by hand thumbing through each volume until they found what they wanted, where they remembered it may well be.... (yes, I kid you not)....
So until around 2005 we family history buffs had graduated from pen and paper to CD look ups and handwriting our results and then putting info into software thingys....
Now the Digger CDs etc are obsolete .... the domestic Reader and microfishe are long gone, and we can look up the Ryerson index and the SMH or other newspapers online and proceed ....
But the restrictions on members of the general public to the BDMs at NSW BDM continue .... once upon a time, marriages were on 60 years restrictions, but now it is 50 years. It was only 60 years because no one had updated the indexes for general publication purposes ...
I know that there's many an overseas government that considers the New Zealand and the Australian passport systems as being among the most reliable for security of the information bases upon which they rely. I know that there's a huge difference between how Australian government agencies view securing the privacy of the individual and how perhaps some of the European governments handle those responsibilities covered under the United Nations treaties.
I see no reason to snip/copy/download and thus perhaps encroach or infringe the T&C of websites where there may be copies of Australian documentation that is likely still within restricted access time frames... Just because someone else is infringing a privacy law/regulation (or any law) doesn't mean I should follow suit.
But it also doesn't mean I need to 'dob'.
For those who don't like reading long posts, ... well, you have reached the end of this one.
JM