An AVO is not a criminal charge, it produces no conviction, and it can be made by consent in a morning without anything being proved against you. It can still cost you your firearms licence for a decade, your security work, your home and your position in a parenting dispute. Almost everyone who consents at the first mention does so without knowing the full list.
What follows is that list. None of it depends on a conviction, and none of it is softened by the order having been made by consent or without admissions.
Firearms
Your firearms licence and your firearms
- An interim order suspends the licence. Automatically, on the making of the order, and the suspension runs until the order is confirmed or revoked.
- A final order revokes it. Also automatic. There is no decision to argue with and no right of review, because nobody made a decision.
- Firearms and the licence card must be surrendered immediately. Police can also seize them. Failing to surrender is an offence carrying a substantial fine, imprisonment, or both.
- No new licence for ten years. A licence must not be issued to anyone who has been subject to an AVO at any time in the ten years before the application, unless that order has been revoked. The period is counted backwards from the day you apply, so in practice it runs from the day the order ended.
- Revocation is the only exit. A revoked order is carved out of the ten year rule entirely. Serving the order out does not help, and an expired order cannot be revoked.
- Prohibited weapons permits work the same way. Suspended on an interim order, revoked on a final one.
Even once the bar is lifted, a fresh application follows and the Commissioner still has to be satisfied you are a fit and proper person. See AVOs and firearms licences for the full position, including what has to happen before you can hold a licence again.
Work
Your job and your licences
Security industry
A security licence turns on whether you are a fit and proper person, and an AVO is squarely relevant to that assessment. Where the role requires you to carry a firearm, the firearms position decides it outright, because the authority to carry is gone regardless of what the security regulator thinks.
Police, corrections and defence
These employers ask about AVOs directly, and many of the roles cannot be performed without a firearms authority. An order that looks containable at home can end a career.
Working with children
A final police initiated order protecting a child, made against an adult, triggers a risk assessment by the Office of the Children’s Guardian, which can end in refusal of a clearance or cancellation of one you hold. Orders that do not protect a child generally do not trigger one, which is why who is named as a protected person matters so much.
Primary producers and rural work
Where the licence is held for stock management or vermin control, losing it affects how the property runs. It is a genuine consideration to put before a court, although it will not decide an application on its own.
Home and family
Where you live and the children
- Exclusion from the home. Where the order prohibits you from the premises, you leave, with no notice period and nothing arranged. It is the single most disruptive condition in an order and the one most worth arguing about before it is made.
- Your tenancy. Where a final order excludes a tenant from rented premises, that person’s tenancy can be terminated.
- Parenting proceedings. A court considering a parenting order must take into account any AVO, the circumstances in which it was made, the evidence admitted and any findings. An order made by consent without admissions carries no findings, which is one of the few respects in which the distinction matters.
- Contact with your children. Conditions can be drafted to permit contact for the purposes of arrangements for children or as permitted by parenting orders. If nobody asks for that carve-out, it is generally not there.
- Conflicting orders. A Local Court making or varying an AVO can vary, suspend or discharge a parenting order to the extent it would require contact the AVO prohibits.
Records
What shows up, and where
An AVO is not a conviction and does not appear on a standard criminal history check as one. That is not the same as saying it is invisible.
- Police systems. The application and the order are recorded, and are likely to be disclosed while the order is in force.
- Employment screening. Checks tailored for child-related work, security licensing and some government roles can surface material a standard check would not.
- Breach convictions. A conviction for contravening an order is a criminal conviction and appears on a standard check like any other.
- Jury service. You are excluded while an order is in force against you.
- Visas and immigration. An AVO is not a conviction and does not of itself fail a character test, but it can be relevant where a decision turns on character.
- Compliance checks. Police conduct AVO compliance checks on people subject to final orders. These were traditionally reserved for higher risk matters and are becoming more common.
Breach
What happens if you breach it
This is where a civil order becomes a criminal one. Knowingly contravening a condition carries a fine and up to two years imprisonment, and where the act constituting the offence was an act of violence the court must impose a sentence of imprisonment unless it orders otherwise.
- The protected person cannot authorise a breach. If the order says no contact, an invitation to make contact does not make it lawful, and their consent is not a defence.
- You must have known of the order. You cannot be convicted unless you were present in court when it was made or were served with a copy.
- Unworkable conditions are the usual cause. Not defiance. A condition that cannot be complied with given where you live, work or collect children is a condition that will eventually be breached.
See contravening an AVO.
What the order will say
The conditions, and which ones are negotiable
Three conditions are in every AVO whether or not anyone asks for them. You must not assault, threaten, stalk, harass or intimidate the protected person; you must not intentionally or recklessly destroy or damage their property; and you must not intentionally or recklessly harm an animal belonging to or in the possession of the protected person or someone they have a domestic relationship with.
Everything beyond that has to be sought, and can therefore be resisted or narrowed. Commonly sought conditions include:
- No contact at all, or no contact except through a lawyer or as permitted by parenting orders.
- Not to reside at a stated address.
- Not to approach or enter within a set distance of a residence, workplace, school or childcare centre.
- Not to approach the protected person within a stated number of hours of drinking or using drugs.
- Not to possess firearms or prohibited weapons, and to surrender any licence.
- Not to attempt to locate the protected person.
The court can only impose what is necessary for the safety and protection of the protected person and any child affected, so conditions that reach further than the situation requires are properly the subject of argument. The duration is negotiable too: the court sets the period as long as is necessary, and the two year figure people quote is only the default that applies where nothing is specified.
What you can do
Your options
Before an order is made
The application can be resisted, and the conditions and duration can be negotiated. This is where the consequences above are actually controlled, and it is the point at which most people give the argument away without knowing they had one.
After an order is made
Conditions can be varied and an order can be revoked, but only while it is still in force. If the firearms consequences matter to you, the expiry date is a deadline.
Consenting without admissions does not avoid any of this
It is the most common outcome at a first mention, and often the right one. It admits nothing and proves nothing. But the order that results carries every consequence set out above, exactly as a contested order would. Those words protect you from the allegations, not from the order.
Before you agree to anything
How we can help
Our lawyers include former prosecutors and former police, so we know how these applications are put together and where they are vulnerable. Send us the application and any order already served, and tell us what you stand to lose: a licence, a job, your home, time with your children. We will tell you whether the application can be resisted, what conditions are worth negotiating, and what the order will actually mean day to day.
Alicia Catron 0407 171 626 or Michelle Simmons 0407 534 594. We act in AVO matters in Local Courts across New South Wales.