Serving Australian clients from the UK

Australian privacy law runs on the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles, enforced by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. The APPs cover collection, use, disclosure, security, access and correction, and the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme has required notification since February 2018.

The 2024 amendments to the Act are the part worth planning around. They move away from the APPs toward a statutory privacy framework, raise maximum civil penalties substantially, and introduce a statutory tort for serious interference with privacy with a transitional start in December 2026. Small and mid-sized businesses are in scope, not just large organisations.

None of that changes what we build, but it changes how seriously a client treats a data-handling mistake, and it means 'we did not know' is a much weaker answer than it used to be.

GST is 10% and is charged on invoices. If your business is registered for GST and turnover is under the threshold, you may be eligible to issue us a GST-free invoice as a recipient - which means we need your ABN before we can send a compliant one.

The ABN is the single piece of information that unblocks Australian invoicing, so we ask for it during scoping. It is also publicly checkable, which is the Australian equivalent of the reassurance a UK company number gives.

Australia spans UTC+8 to UTC+11, so Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne are not interchangeable. We work to your local morning rather than assuming Sydney, and we say which zone we have scheduled against so there is never a 2am surprise.

In practice this means written updates and sprint demos are asynchronous by default, live calls are booked in the overlap, and anything genuinely time-critical gets agreed in advance rather than discovered when one of us is asleep.

The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 and state equivalents are the legal frame, and the practical technical target is WCAG 2.1/2.2 AA as adopted in EN 301 549. Australian public and large private sector procurement commonly requires a conformance statement and an accessibility plan.

We test with a keyboard and screen reader during delivery and hand over the documentation, so the conformance statement reflects something that was actually verified.