Skill or chance — the first question that decides everything
Australian law splits competitions into two families, and everything downstream hangs on which one you’re running. A game of skill — winners chosen on merit by judges — generally doesn’t need a trade promotion permit anywhere in Australia. A game of chance — winners drawn at random, or partly at random — is a trade promotion lottery, and several states and territories regulate those, with permits or licences required above certain prize thresholds.
A judged photo competition sits naturally on the skill side, which is one reason the format is so popular with Australian brands. But add a random-draw element — an entry prize, a voter incentive, a “people’s choice drawn from all voters” — and you’ve created a game of chance riding alongside your game of skill, with its own permit questions.
The paperwork a compliant competition carries
- Terms and conditions — eligibility, entry window, judging criteria, prize details and delivery, and what rights you take in the photographs. Publish them before the first entry arrives, and never change them mid-flight.
- Permit details where required — if any element is a game of chance, the relevant permit numbers belong in your terms and promotional material.
- A winner record — who won, how they were chosen, when they were notified. If a regulator or a sponsor asks in six months, you want a record, not a recollection.
Privacy: the part photo competitions get wrong most
A photo competition collects more personal information than almost any other campaign format — names, emails, and photographs that can contain faces, children, number plates and precise locations. Under the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles, you’re accountable for all of it.
- Strip location metadata before publishing. Phone cameras embed GPS coordinates in every shot. Publishing an entrant’s photo of their backyard with the coordinates still attached publishes their home address.
- Collect model releases for identifiable people. A signed release for recognisable faces — especially children — protects the entrant, the subject and you. Store releases privately, never alongside the public gallery.
- Offer a real deletion path. Entrants are entitled to ask what you hold and to have it removed. “Email us and we’ll see” isn’t a process.
- Mind the Spam Act. Entering a competition is not consent to marketing. Transactional emails about the entry are fine; the newsletter needs its own opt-in checkbox, unticked.
Voting that survives an angry runner-up
If the public votes, someone will try to game it — and the second-placed entrant will ask questions. Require sign-in to vote, enforce one vote per person at the database rather than in a cookie, rate-limit by address, and review the leaderboard before announcing anything. A result you can defend line by line is worth more than a bigger number you can’t.
The launch checklist
- Decide skill, chance, or both — then check permit obligations
- Publish terms, privacy notice and judging criteria up front
- Set the entry window and stick to it
- Strip photo metadata from everything public
- Capture releases for identifiable faces before judging
- Moderate every entry before it goes live
- Lock the vote: sign-in, one-per-person, rate limits
- Keep the audit trail — decisions, winners, notifications
Every item on that list is built into the EntryWorks platform — see how it held up across three thousand entries in the photo competition case study.