Privacy policy

Melbourne Diwali is managed by SarasCare. SarasCare is the trading name of Saraswati Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Ltd, an Australian public company and a charity registered with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission.

• ABN 56 621 087 394
• ACN 621 087 394
• 2 Wharf Street, Docklands VIC 3008

In this policy, "we", "us" and "our" mean SarasCare, as the manager of Melbourne Diwali. The policy covers this website, the forms linked from it, our newsletters and the festival itself, including The Launch.

Although we may not be required to, we choose to handle personal information in line with the Australian Privacy Principles in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).

For anything on this page, email info@melbournediwali.com.au.

What we hold about you depends on how you deal with us.

Forms on this website

• Contact form. Your first name, last name, email address and message.
• Partnership enquiry form. Your organisation, first name, last name and email address, a phone number if you give one, what you are interested in, and your message.
• Newsletter signup. Your email address, and which signup box on the site you used.

There are no accounts or logins on this website, and it never asks you for a password or payment details.

Our application forms

Several forms linked from this website are hosted by monday.com rather than on the website itself. What you send through them goes into our monday.com account, where we manage it. These forms use a spam check (reCAPTCHA) provided through monday.com.

• Performer entry. The act name and how to say it; the group leader's name, phone number and email address; the suburb the group is based in; a description of the group; the piece, style, running time and stage requirements; a video link; a group photo, social media handles and a website if you give them; how many performers there are, whether any are under 18 and their age range; the lead adult on the day, the number of supervising adults and whether the lead adult holds a Working with Children Check; confirmation of parent or guardian permission; and your choice about photography and promotion.
• Performer profile. Your full name, the group you perform with and your role in it; whether you have performed with us before; an age bracket (under 16, 16 or 17, or 18 and over); your email address if you are 16 or over; how you want to appear on the website and whether your name may be read out on stage; and, if you choose a profile, the name to show, a photo, a few lines about you and a link. Your email address and age bracket are never published.
• Crew application. Your full name, email address and mobile number; whether you will be 18 or over on the day, and a parent or guardian's name and contact details if you will not; your month and year of birth if you choose to give it; any course that needs an industry placement; the stations you would take and why; your live event experience and any CV, portfolio or social links; your Working with Children Clearance status; your availability; whether you need paid work; how you heard about us; anything else you choose to tell us; and your choices about future updates and keeping your application on file.
• Stall application. Your business name, a contact person, email address and phone number; whether and when you have traded with us before; the type of business and what you will offer; an estimated budget if you give one; your payment preference; and anything you would like to offer the people who make the festival happen.
• Launch RSVP. Your full name, whether you will attend, your email address and mobile number, your organisation and role, the capacity you are joining in, who invited you, and any access, mobility or dietary requirements you tell us about. Parliament House admits guests from the list we give it, so confirmed guests' names are shared with Parliament House.

Registering for the festival

Entry to the festival is free, and registration is through Eventbrite. When you register, you give your details to Eventbrite, and Eventbrite passes the details you give to us as the event organiser. Eventbrite's own privacy policy covers what it does with them.

When you email or message us

We keep the message and the contact details it comes from, so that we can reply and follow up.

When you visit this website

Like any website, ours receives technical information with every request, such as your IP address, browser and the page asked for. We also measure how the site is used. Both are explained under cookies and website analytics.

At the festival

The festival is photographed and filmed. See photography and filming.

• to answer you when you contact us
• to assess and manage performer entries, crew applications, stall applications and partnership enquiries, and to plan the running order, the market and the day
• to confirm guests for The Launch
• to publish performer profiles, act listings and stall listings in the way the people concerned have agreed to
• to meet our child safety responsibilities, including checking Working with Children status for crew and for the adults who lead groups with performers under 18
• to plan for the right number of people, and to send festival announcements and newsletters to people who register or subscribe
• to promote the festival, including with photos and film
• to understand how this website is used and to fix what does not work

Many of our performers are under 18, and children come to the festival with their families. This part of the policy is set out plainly for that reason.

• Performer names and photos are published as they are supplied to us by the performer, their school, teacher, group leader, parent or guardian. Anyone, or a parent or guardian on a young performer's behalf, can ask for a profile to be changed or removed by emailing info@melbournediwali.com.au.
• We do not ask performers under 16 for a social media link.
• Details about performers under 18 come to us from a parent or guardian, or from the teacher or group leader who enters the group. Entries that include performers under 18 must be made with the knowledge and permission of a parent or guardian, and the group leader confirms that on the entry form.
• If a crew applicant will be under 18, they give us a parent or guardian's contact details, and we speak to that parent or guardian before anything is confirmed.

A parent or guardian can ask to see, correct or remove information we hold about their child, including a performer profile. Email info@melbournediwali.com.au and say the request is about a child.

Melbourne Diwali is photographed and filmed. We use the photos and film to promote the festival, including on this website, in our newsletters and on our social media channels. If you come to the festival, you may appear in them.

Performing groups tell us on the entry form whether we may use photos and video of their act in promotion, and we follow that choice.

If you would like an image of you, or of your child, removed from our own website or social media channels, email info@melbournediwali.com.au with the image or a link to it. We will consider every request. We cannot control photos or film taken by other people, such as media or other visitors, or copies that others have made.

We use other organisations to run this website, our forms and our email. They handle personal information for us, to provide their service:

• Vercel. Hosts this website, so it handles every request made to it, and provides our page view counting.
• Supabase. The database that stores contact messages, partnership enquiries and newsletter signups made on this website.
• Resend. Sends us an email the moment a form on this website is submitted. That email contains what you submitted.
• Google Workspace. Our email, including the inbox those notifications go to, and a Google Sheet the team uses to keep track of replies to website enquiries. The sheet holds your name, email address and the first 200 characters of your message.
• GitHub. A daily summary of new website submissions, kept in a private project so that nothing goes unanswered. It lists names and the kind of enquiry only, not email addresses or message text.
• monday.com. Hosts our application forms (performer entry, performer profile, crew, stalls and the Launch RSVP) and the boards we manage them on.
• Sanity. The content system behind this website. It holds what we publish, including performer profiles, stall listings and festival photos.
• Microsoft Clarity. Shows us how pages on this website are used. See cookies and website analytics.
• Sendy, running on Amazon Web Services. Holds our newsletter list and sends the newsletter.
• Eventbrite. Festival registration.
• YouTube. Plays the videos embedded in some blog posts.

We also give Parliament House the names of confirmed Launch guests, and we may disclose information where the law requires or authorises it.

What we never do

• We never sell personal information.
• We never give our attendee, performer, crew or vendor information to sponsors or partners. Where a newsletter carries a partner's message, we send it ourselves and the list stays with us.

Some of what we hold stays in Australia, and some does not.

• In Australia. The database behind the forms on this website (Supabase) is in Sydney. Our newsletter system (Sendy) and the Amazon Web Services region that sends it are also in Sydney.
• In the United States. Our monday.com account is hosted in monday.com's United States region, so everything sent through our application forms is held there.
• Possibly elsewhere. Vercel, Sanity, Resend, Google, GitHub, Microsoft, Eventbrite and YouTube may store or process information in other countries, including the United States.

We use established providers, but information held overseas is subject to the laws of the country where it is held.

This website does not use advertising or tracking cookies, and the two analytics tools below are set up to work without cookies. That is why there is no cookie banner.

• Vercel Web Analytics. Counts page views. For each one it records the page, the site you came from, your approximate location, your device type and operating system, and your browser. It uses no cookies: Vercel tells visits apart with a code made from the request, which it discards after 24 hours. We only ever see totals.
• Microsoft Clarity. Shows us how people use our pages: where they click, how far they scroll, and a replay of a visit to a page, so that we can find the parts of the site that are hard to use. It loads on every page of this website. We run it in Clarity's no-consent mode, which Microsoft describes as setting no cookies. Each page view is treated separately, so Clarity cannot recognise you when you move to another page or come back later. Text typed into form fields is masked and not sent to Microsoft, and our contact and newsletter forms are masked in full. We have not connected Clarity to any advertising. Microsoft handles this data under the Microsoft Privacy Statement. There is a short note about Clarity at the foot of every page.
• YouTube videos. Some blog posts open with a YouTube video, which starts automatically and muted. It loads from YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode (youtube-nocookie.com), but YouTube still receives information about your visit and may store information on your device. Google's privacy policy applies to it.
• Fonts. Served from this website rather than from Google, so loading a page does not tell Google that you did.

Links on this website to other sites, including Eventbrite, our monday.com forms, maps and social media, take you to services with their own cookies and privacy policies.

If you sign up for the newsletter on this website, we store your email address in our database in Sydney. Registering for the festival on Eventbrite also puts you on our list for festival announcements.

Our newsletter is sent using Sendy, running on Amazon Web Services in Sydney. It records whether an email was opened and which links in it were clicked, which tells us what is useful to people.

Newsletters can include messages from our partners. We send them ourselves, and we never give the list to a partner.

Every newsletter has an unsubscribe link. You can also email info@melbournediwali.com.au and ask to be taken off the list.

Submissions from the forms on this website go straight into our database. The database is set up so that the public can add a submission but cannot read anyone else's back; only our team can. Our daily summary of new submissions deliberately leaves out email addresses and message text.

We use established providers and take reasonable steps to protect what we hold. No system is completely secure, so we cannot promise that information will never be accessed without permission.

We would rather tell you plainly than promise more than we do.

• Website enquiries and newsletter signups. Kept in our database and, for enquiries, in the team's Google Sheet. Neither is cleared on a schedule at the moment, so they are kept until we delete them or you ask us to.
• Notification emails. Kept in our mailbox until they are deleted.
• Daily summaries. Kept indefinitely. They hold names and the kind of enquiry only.
• Crew applications. If you joined the crew, we keep your application in full. If you ticked "keep my application on file", we keep it in full for two years. Otherwise, after the festival we remove the identifying parts (your name, contact details, guardian contact, birth month and year, links and everything you wrote) and keep only anonymous information, such as which station you asked for. If you ticked "keep me updated", we keep your name and email address for that purpose until you tell us to stop.
• Performer profiles. Stay on the website after the festival as part of its record, in a section marked with the year, until you or your parent or guardian ask us to take them down.
• Newsletter list. Until you unsubscribe or ask us to remove you.
• Photos and film. Kept in our archive, and past festival photos continue to be published on this website.
• Other form responses and registrations. Performer entries, stall applications, Launch replies and Eventbrite registrations are not currently deleted on a fixed schedule. We keep them while they help us run and plan the festival, and you can ask us to delete yours.

You can ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Email info@melbournediwali.com.au and tell us what you would like. We may need to check who you are first. A parent or guardian can ask on behalf of a child.

If you ask us to remove a performer profile, we will take it down. If there is a reason we cannot do what you ask, for example because we need to keep a record for child safety reasons, we will tell you why.

If you think we have mishandled your personal information, please tell us first. Email info@melbournediwali.com.auwith "Privacy complaint" in the subject line, so that it is treated as a complaint rather than a general enquiry. We will look into what happened and reply to you in writing.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you can contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.

When we change how we handle personal information, we will update this page and the date below. The version on this page is the one that applies now. Our terms and conditions cover use of this website and entry to the festival.

Last updated 28 September 2026.