Our mission
Witnessing a document should take ten minutes, not half a day.
Millions of documents need witnessing every year and nearly all of them still involve a trip. The signing takes a minute. Getting to someone who can watch you do it takes the rest of the morning.
It started with the same post, over and over
Any building group chat or suburb page has the same post in it. Is anyone here a JP. Is there a solicitor in the building. The form is due tomorrow and the library session finished at four.
Sometimes a neighbour answers. Usually someone names a chemist two suburbs over that used to have a JP on Thursdays.
What is being asked for is small. A signature, a look at some identification, two minutes. Getting it is the hard part, and it is hardest for whoever has the least slack in their day.
The Commonwealth, and every state and territory except Western Australia and Tasmania, now allow this over an audio-visual link. The law changed. The habit did not.
This is not a small problem
When statutory declarations went digital in 2023, the Commonwealth published what the paper version was costing.
- 3.8m
- Commonwealth statutory declarations a year
- 9m
- Hours a year executing and processing them
- $156m
- A year the Commonwealth expected to save
About 10,400 every day
Roughly 2 hours 22 minutes per declaration
About $41 a declaration
Figures from the Minister for Finance, 9 November 2023. The per-day, per-declaration and per-hour numbers are those figures divided out. The nine million hours cover everyone who touches a declaration, not only the person signing it.
What the trip actually involves
Print it
A statutory declaration witnessed on paper has to exist on paper.
Get there
A library, a court house, a police station or a shopping centre, at whatever hour that particular volunteer sits.
Wait
One volunteer, everyone who turned up that afternoon, and no way to know in advance how many that is.
Sign it
The only part that was ever supposed to take a few minutes.
Get back
The same trip again.
Scan it
Because whoever asked for it wants a PDF, and now your only record is whatever came out of the scanner.
In a city, with a JP sitting nearby at a convenient hour, that is three quarters of an hour if nothing goes wrong. More often it is an hour and a half. Outside a city it can be most of a morning, and it can mean waiting for the one session that runs that week. The Commonwealth's own figure works out at about 2 hours 22 minutes per declaration once you count everyone who handles it.
For a business, the sum is unkind
If you send an employee out to get a document witnessed, you are paying them for the errand. Our fee is $39 a document. So the question is simply how much that person's hour has to be worth before the trip costs you more than we do.
The rate at which sending someone costs more in wages alone than paying us. Our fee divided by the length of the errand.
The National Minimum Wage is $26.44 an hour. So once the errand runs to an hour and a half, sending the lowest-paid person in the building costs more in wages than paying us would have, before anyone has printed or driven anything.
National Minimum Wage as at 1 July 2026, Fair Work Ombudsman. Wages only: it ignores superannuation, the printing and the car.
There is a second way to look at it. The Commonwealth put the saving from moving statutory declarations off paper at $156 million a year across 3.8 million declarations, or about $41 each. We charge $39, less than the government reckons the paper version was costing you anyway.
Distance should not decide whether this is easy
The further you are from a city the worse this gets. Fewer volunteers, sessions once a week instead of daily, a drive measured in hours. It costs most for the people with the fewest alternatives.
A video call does not care where you are. Four hours from the nearest court house is the same service at the same price as the middle of Brisbane.
What we will not do
We do not witness wills or codicils, enduring powers of attorney, advance health or care directives, or land title and property transfer documents online. For those, see a solicitor or JP in person.
Documents made under Western Australian or Tasmanian law are not covered, because those states do not allow them to be witnessed by audio-visual link.
We witness your signature. We do not advise you on what you have written.