Call Recording Compliance
in Australia: What the Law Requires

Most brokerages started recording calls for a practical reason: training, dispute resolution, or because a phone system came with the feature switched on. Few brokerages started that practice by first checking whether recording was lawful in every state they operate in.

That gap matters more than it used to. Recorded calls are frequently relied on as evidence in disputes where they exist, sometimes referenced in Australian Financial Complaints Authority determinations, and treated by ASIC as part of the advice record a licensee is expected to produce on request. A recording made without the right consent is not just a technical breach. It can be inadmissible in the very dispute it was meant to help resolve, and it can expose the person who made it to a separate offence under state law.

The law itself has not changed dramatically in recent years. What has changed is how much weight is placed on the recording once it exists. A brokerage that has never tested its recording practice against the actual legislation is relying on assumption, not compliance.

Two different legal questions sit inside "can we record this call." The first is whether recording it is lawful at all. The second is what a brokerage must do with the recording once it exists. Brokerages that treat these as one question tend to get the first half right and the second half wrong.

The right to record is a state and territory matter, not a federal one. Commonwealth law, through the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act, prohibits a third party from intercepting a call in transit without authorisation. That law is aimed at wiretapping, not at a business recording a conversation its own staff member is a party to. Whether a participant can record their own call is governed instead by each state and territory's surveillance or listening device legislation, and the answer is not uniform.

In New South Wales, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT, the default position under laws such as the Surveillance Devices Act in NSW is that every principal party to the conversation must consent before it can be recorded, with a narrow exception where recording is reasonably necessary to protect the recorder's own lawful interests.

In Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory, a person who is a party to the conversation, such as an adviser on the call, can record it without the other party's consent under Victoria's equivalent surveillance law, though publishing or sharing that recording still carries separate restrictions. A national call centre operating across all eight jurisdictions is, in practice, operating under the strictest rule that applies to any client on the line.

The obligation to keep records sits under the Corporations Act and ASIC's own instruments.

AFSL holders already carry general AFSL obligations to provide services efficiently, honestly and fairly, and to maintain adequate systems for meeting their legal obligations.

Those obligations sit in the Corporations Act itself, which is also where the general foundation for record-keeping expectations begins.

Layered on top of that, ASIC's record-keeping instrument requires personal advice records to be retained for at least seven years.

Where a call recording is genuinely part of that advice record, the same seven-year retention period applies to it, and that obligation continues even after a representative stops being authorised by the licensee.

Consent and retention are not the same requirement, and satisfying one does not satisfy the other. A recording obtained with valid consent still needs to be stored for the right period, in a retrievable format. A recording stored correctly for seven years is still an offence if it was never lawfully consented to in the first place.

Call recording compliance in Australia is not one rule with a single answer. It is a federal record-keeping obligation sitting on top of a state-by-state consent framework that genuinely differs depending on where the client is. Getting consent right in one state and applying it everywhere is one of the more common ways a well-intentioned recording programme becomes a liability rather than a safeguard.

The seven-year retention obligation and the state consent variations are genuine legal requirements. Whether recorded calls are actually reviewed is a separate, practical question that sits alongside them, and a brokerage needs a system that treats all three as distinct rather than assuming one covers the others. Callyx.ai was built around exactly that separation: correct consent handling, retrievable storage, and monitoring that actually keeps pace with call volume.