The New South Wales Farmers’ Association (“NSWFA”) and its related entities – the NSW Farmers (Industrial) Association (“NSWFIA”) and the NSW Farmers Natural Disaster Relief Fund (“NDRF”) – (collectively referred to as “NSW and its related entities”) recognise the importance of the Australian Privacy Principles (“APPs”) and the protection of the privacy of all personal information of individuals which it collects, holds and uses in the course of its activities. Personal information is information or an opinion about an identified individual or about an individual who is reasonably identifiable. The APP’s prescribed in the Privacy Act 1988 as amended (“the Act”) apply to the NSWFA and its related entities and this policy is intended to implement the APPs and the NSWFA and its related entities’ obligations under the APPs.
1 About Us
1.1 NSWFA is an industry Association and Australia’s largest State farmer organisation representing the interests of its farmer members – ranging from broad acre, livestock, wool and grain producers, to more specialised producers in the horticulture, dairy, egg, poultry, pork, oyster and goat industries.
1.2 NSWFIA is a registered Employer Association representing the industrial interests of agricultural industries in NSW and ACT.
1.3 NDRF is a Public Benevolent Institution established to support the social and economical needs of primary producers who are adversely affected by natural disasters.
1.4 NSWFA and its related entities may also, from time to time, assist non- members, in particular in the provision of government-funded programs.
2 Personal Information Collected
2.1 The NSWFA and its related entities only collects personal information necessary for the operation of the organisations. The personal information we collect includes the following:
2.2 In relation to members:
A. name;
B. date of birth (although this is optional);
C. address;
D. telephone numbers;
E. email and fax addresses;
F. information with respect to membership category criteria;
G. information specific to the member’s commodity group;
H. payment information (which may include banking or credit card information);
I. business information relevant to our members, including company details, employee numbers and other related information.
2.3 In some cases we may in addition collect video or photographic image of members for use in our publications.
2.4 In the normal course of the operation of the organisation we also collect from service providers and applicants for employment such personal information as is necessary for the day to day operations of the organisation.
2.5 In relation to non-members, we may collect:
A. name;
B. date of birth (although this is optional);
C. address;
D. telephone numbers;
E. email and fax addresses;
F. photographs, images, video or sound recordings of you;
G. information specific to the commodity group of a business;
H. relevant business information, including company details, employee numbers and other related information;
I. information you provide to us, including through feedback, customer surveys or otherwise;
J. details of products, services, information or advice we have provided to you and/or that you have enquired about and our response to you;
K. support or advisory requests submitted to us and our response to you;
L. information about your access and use of our program, including through the use of internet cookies, communications with our website, the type of browser you are using, the type of operating system you are using and the domain name of your internet service provider; and
M. any other personal information requested by us and/or provide by you or a third party.
2.6 Sensitive information is a sub-set of personal information that is given a higher level of protection. Sensitive information means information relating to your racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religion, trade union or other professional associations or memberships, philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation or practices, criminal records, health information or biometric information. The types of sensitive information we may collect about you include photographs, images, video or sound recordings of you. Unless otherwise permitted by law, we will not collect sensitive information about you without first obtaining your consent.
3 How Personal Information is Collected and Held
3.1 We collect personal information from you in a variety of ways, including in written form, when you interact with us electronically or in person (including by participation in any program), online or by telephone, when you access our website; and when we provide our services, or any program, to you. With respect to members, personal information is primarily collected from our member’s application for membership but may be collected via one of the modes described above. With respect to non- members, we may collect personal information which you directly provide to us (including when you request our assistance by phone or by email or at any event), indirectly (including where you download materials from our website) or from third parties (which may include analytics and cookie providers and marketing providers).
3.2 To ensure that members receive services through NSWFA that are or may be government funded or funded by outside parties, government departments and/or third parties, funded projects that the NSWFA are involved in, will, from time to time, collect details of members involved in the said project for the purpose of conducting surveys, as well as for assessment, monitoring of project delivery and to permit necessary database maintenance. This information is passed onto the NSWFA.
3.3 Personal information is held either in electronic or written form, but primarily in a secure data base, access as to which is limited to authorised and appropriately trained staff.
4 Security of your personal information
4.1 We take reasonable steps to protect your personal information, however we are not liable for any unauthorised access to this information.
4.2 We will also take reasonable steps to protect your personal information from misuse, loss and from unauthorised access, modification or disclosure in accordance with the requirements of our privacy policy and the National and/or Australian Privacy Principles.
4.3 We do contract out our data storage and compilation of mailouts, but we take steps to protect the information including ensuring that third parties are subject to privacy obligations. We have internal policies and procedures in place to prevent unauthorised access, modification, disclosure or misuse of personal information.
5 Disclosure of your personal information overseas
5.1 We are likely to disclose your personal information to recipients in the following countries:
A. Australia;
5.2 It is not likely that we will disclose personal information to overseas recipients, but if such disclosure were to occur we recognise the obligation to take reasonable steps to ensure that the overseas recipient does not breach the APP’s in relation to the information.
6 Purposes of Collection of Personal Information
6.1 Our purposes for collecting and holding personal information are:
A. to enable applications for membership to be made and assessed and applicants to become members;
B. to enable us to offer products and services to members;
C. to enable us to keep members informed by means of various media about issues affecting industry sectors, policy initiatives, industrial awards and upcoming events;
D. to organise our conferences, functions, events, seminars, meetings and generally to manage the membership so as to fulfil our functions;
E. to enable us to comply with our constitutional obligations, such as notices of meetings, election of officers and voting processes, and renewal of memberships;
F. to ensure the NSWFIA complies with its obligations as a Registered Organisation under the provisions of the Fair Work Act 2009 (as amended from time to time);
G. to enable us to assess job applications and to employ staff;
H. to enable non- members to participate in programs which do not require membership, including to allow us to provide the program, which may include providing the program through our website, phone calls, email correspondence, events and other activities;
I. to allow us to undertake internal record keeping, and analytical and administrative activities, for the provision of any program, including to analyse the success of the program;
I. to enable us to contact a non- member about our products and services or the products and services of third parties (including to send you promotional information about our or third party’s products and services) which we may consider may be of interest to you;
J. to comply with our legal obligations and resolve any disputes we may have; or
K. if otherwise required or authorised by law.
6.2 For sensitive information, we only collect, hold, use and disclose sensitive information for any purposes you consent to and the primary purpose for which it is collected, being to record our provision of any program we provide to members and non-NSWFA members and for marketing and promotional purposes as well as any secondary purpose that are directly related to the primary purpose for which it was collected.
6.3 We may use personal information for the purpose of us offering products and services to members and non-members, including those products and services of third parties (but your personal information will not be disclosed to such third parties without your prior written consent). Members may elect to opt out of receiving such communications by sending an email or letter to the Privacy Officer and we must action the request within a reasonable period. We do not give personal information to third parties for the purpose of marketing unless we obtain your prior written consent to do so.
6.4 From time to time we disclose member’s personal information to:
A. NSWFA branch Chairs to assist in branch activities;
B. NSWFA branch delegates, regional delegates or committee’s;
C. companies with which we have partnership arrangements, to enable members to obtain discounted goods or services;
D. companies engaged in processing or dealing with commodities in connection with and for the purpose of calculating our membership fees or levies;
E. national councils or other peak commodity bodies in which we or our commodity groups participate;
F. banks or lending institutions with which the NSWFA has banking arrangements that relate to your membership of the NSWFA;
G. debt collection agencies with which the NSWFA has commercial arrangements that relate to your membership of the NSWFA and the payment of any membership fees;
H. government departments and/or third parties who are funding projects that the NSWFA and its related entities are involved in, including those programs which members and non- members may participate in;
I. NSWFA’s advisors;
J. third party service providers for the purpose of enabling them to provide their services to us, including suppliers of IT services and/or membership marketing and renewal services, professional advisors and payment system operators;
K. third parties engaged by the NSWFA to provide services to you for the purpose of, providing services requested by you or to protect any intellectual property rights in any materials displayed on or otherwise available from NSWFA’s website;
L. associated or subsidiary organisations which we administer;
M. media organisations, in circumstances where the personal information relates to an elected representative of the NSWFA or an agreed NSWFA spokesperson, and the media organisation is seeking comment on an issue of which that person has knowledge.
N. our employees, contractors and/or related entities;
O. our existing or potential agents or business partners;
P. anyone to whom our business or assets (or any part of them) are, or may (in good faith) be, transferred;
Q. courts, tribunals and regulatory authorities and law enforcement officers, as required or authorised by law, in connection with any actual or prospective legal proceedings, or in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights; and
R. third parties to collect and process data, such as Google Analytics or other relevant analytics business; and
S. any other third parties as required or permitted by law, such as where we receive a subpoena.
7 Anonymity and Pseudonymity
7.1 Under the APP’s individuals have the option of dealing with an organisation anonymously or by use of a pseudonym unless it is impractical for the organisation to deal with the individual on this basis. While an individual may deal with us anonymously or by use of a pseudonym for the purpose of telephone or general enquiries, where an individual is a member, that individual acknowledges that we are a membership based organisation and it is impractical for us to otherwise deal with individuals who do not identified themselves or who use a pseudonym and the member’s access to membership benefits may be impacted if it chooses to deal with us anonymously or if it uses a pseudonym.
7.2 Where we collect your personal information as part of government funded programs that we provide, we may use data obtained from the government funded program to report to the government and/or any other relevant third party on an aggregate and anonymous basis, unless we obtain your express written consent that we may share your personal information to the relevant government department and/or third party.
8 Government Identification
8.1 Unless otherwise authorised under the provisions of this Policy, we will not adopt, use or disclose a government related identifier of an individual, unless this is required or authorised under an Australian law or by an order of a court or tribunal or unless appropriate in accordance with.
9 Access
9.1 As an individual for whom we hold personal information you may request access to the personal information. We will endeavour to respond to the request within 30 days, but in any event will respond within a reasonable period from when the request is received. We will provide you with access to the personal information unless one of the several reasons for refusal set out in the APPs applies. These reasons include such matters as that access would be unlawful or would unreasonably impact on the privacy of other individuals.
9.2 A request for access should be made by email or letter to our Privacy Officer.
9.3 We will impose the following charges as reasonable reimbursement of the costs we incur in providing access.
A. Retrieval of information Charge after request made - $50.00
B. Photocopying (B & W) of Information – 20c per page;
C. Faxing information to individual - $1.00 per page;
D. Mailing Costs – At Cost
9.4 You may at any time directly access and update your membership details online by logging in with your membership number and password on our website.
10 Correction
10.1 We must take reasonable steps to correct personal information about you, which is inaccurate, out of date, incomplete, irrelevant or misleading, and you may request us to do this by contacting the Privacy Officer. We must respond to a request within a reasonable time and if we have disclosed the personal information to any other organisation we must notify that other organisation of the correction.
10.2 If we decline to make the correction we must give you written reasons and you may require us to hold with the relevant personal information a statement recording your request.
11 Website
11.1 When you visit our website
A. When you come on to our website we may collect certain information such as browser type, operating system, website visited immediately before coming to our site, etc. This information is used in an aggregated manner to analyse how people use our site, such that we can improve our service.
11.2 Cookies
A. As is very common for companies, we use cookies on our website. Cookies are very small files which a website uses to identify you when you come back to the site and to store details about your use of the site. Cookies are not malicious programs that access or damage your computer. We use cookies to improve the experience of people using our website.
11.3 Third party sites
A. Our site has links to other websites not owned or controlled by us. We are not responsible for these sites or the consequences of you going on to those sites. Please note these other websites are not subject to the NSWFA Privacy Policy. Please review the privacy policy of each individual website you access via hyperlinks from our website, and assess whether the policy of each website is satisfactory to you before you use the other websites.
12 Complaints
12.1 You should contact the Privacy Officer if you, as an individual for whom we hold personal information, wish to make a complaint that we have breached the APP’s in some way, for example in relation to how personal information is collected, how it is stored, or how it is used or disclosed.
12.2 All complaints will be logged on a database/complaints register and it is our aim to resolve any such complaint in a timely manner. Your initial complaint may be oral or in writing but you may be required to provide additional information (which may be written information) so that the complaint can be properly investigated.
12.3 If the complaint cannot be resolved by discussion at the level of initial contact, it will be referred to our CEO for consideration. You will be informed of the decision of the CEO and the reasons for the decision.
12.4 If you remain dissatisfied you may refer your complaint to the Board of the NSWFA or alternatively, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.
13 Contact Details
You can contact or advise our Privacy Officer of any request for access or to correct your information, or to request your information be removed. Our Privacy Officer can be contacted through our Member Service Centre in the following ways:
- Telephone: during business hours on 1300 794 000 at a local call cost.
- Email:
[email protected]
- Fax: to the attention of The Privacy Officer c/o The Industrial Relations Team on 02 8282 4500.
- Mail: The Privacy Officer c/o The Workplace Relations Team NSW Farmers’ Association Level 4, 154 Pacific Highway St Leonards NSW 2065
14 Privacy Officer
The Privacy Officer is the Director of Workplace Relations.
15 Availability of this Policy
This policy is available on our website. We may, at any time and at our discretion, vary this policy by publishing the amended policy on our website. We recommend you check our website regularly to ensure you are aware of our current policy. A hard copy can be obtained by contacting the Privacy Officer.
Last update: January 2022.