White Paper on the State of Marriage Celebrancy in Australia
Tony Gelme
August 2009
1. How are Marriage Celebrants Selected?
They’re not! They were at one time - back when Australia’s Marriage Celebrant Program commenced in 1973 the first celebrants were selected by the then Attorney-General, Lionel Murphy. From these earliest days until 2003 anybody wanting to be a marriage celebrant had to put their name on a waiting list and wait anywhere from 3 to 15 years before a vacancy opened up. As a result only the most determined and keen applied and awaited their appointment.
You might ask why was it like this? Well, appointments of marriage celebrants were deliberately limited to provide only sufficient celebrants to meet the needs of the marrying public.
The Hon Lionel Murphy held the view there should never be so many celebrants they could not develop the knowledge, experience and skills they and their clients needed. As numbers were strictly limited, celebrants, appointed up to 2003, did indeed develop high level skills and abilities assisted by their fellow celebrants. Not a formal training program, but a practical one that provided a great deal of practice and experience. The government provided each new celebrant with a copy of the Marriage Act 1961, a ‘Handbook for Marriage Celebrants’ and initial supplies of forms, registers, etc.
Having been “thrown in at the deep end” marriage celebrants later became vocal in their demands for an initial training program for all new celebrants in the future. They could readily appreciate the need for this even though the government had not previously seen the need.
2. Are Marriage Celebrants Properly and Fully Trained?
There’s a belief today that celebrants know what they are doing and are properly trained and thoroughly experienced. Therefore, clients need only check prices and even if they hire the cheapest celebrant they’ll be well looked after. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth!
Amongst marriage celebrants in 2009 there’s the Good, the Bland and the Dreadful! It’s like most other walks of life - made worse by the 2003 changes to Australia’s previously excellent civil marriage celebrant program (the first marriage celebrant program in the world).
Prior to 2003, as there was no training required for marriage celebrants, they learned “on the job” and from each other. This was surprisingly effective, although unconventional. There weren’t many celebrants. There wasn’t a great deal of concern amongst celebrants in respect to competing with each other and they happily helped their fellow celebrants whenever they needed it. The service quality and expertise amongst these marriage celebrants became very high. They did many more weddings (of every variety) and developed their presentation skills and abilities to a very high level.
In 2003 the government of the day decided this wasn’t good enough! It said there were many more people who may like to be marriage celebrants and they might be good at it. Having listened to existing celebrants over the years about the need for training the government also introduced a training scheme, for celebrants, known as “Plan Conduct & Review a Marriage Ceremony” designed to TAFE competency based training standards.
Sounds good in theory, but not so in practice. Along with making training available the government removed limits on the numbers of celebrants appointed. So, rather than appointing marriage celebrants based on the needs of the community, they changed the “needs based” scheme to appointing celebrants based on the needs or desires of those wanting to be celebrants. It also opened up an opportunity for training entrepreneurs having little or no knowledge of marriage celebrancy, but a desire to capitalise on this opportunity.
To an extent changes to Australia’s marriage celebrant program have been good. Some comprehensive training programs developed and talented celebrant trainers have worked with people well suited to the profession. As a result, numbers of new celebrants, who would not otherwise have been appointed, have brought a breath of fresh air to marriage celebrancy in Australia and to their clients.
However, there are now also thousands of poorly trained, marriage celebrants (more appointed every week!), well in excess of any need, and the majority of them do no weddings at all or very few! Practice, they say, makes perfect, but what if you don’t get any practice??? Probably end up like one nervous new celebrant, suffering stage fright, who wouldn’t come out of the toilet at the venue to do the wedding. They had to get an experienced celebrant to come at short notice to look after it.
Another example, heard recently, of bad advice, from an inexperienced or poorly trained celebrant, was a couple of Australians living overseas were told they had to return to Australia to sign and lodge their Notice of Intended Marriage for their upcoming planned Australian wedding. At great expense they made a special trip from Europe to do this and found, upon arrival, they could have done it while overseas! Thousands of dollars down the drain! There’s also frequent reports of celebrants sending registration papers to the Attorney-General’s Dept. when they need to go to local Registries of Births, Deaths & Marriages - and some who aren’t sending in papers for registration at all! Registry Offices around Australia have noted ever increasing numbers of problems and errors with celebrant documentation,
Seeing the appalling training situation, the Attorney-General has approved a new Certificate IV in Celebrancy coming into effect in February 2010. After that time all new celebrants will have to complete this new qualification. Again, sounds good. However, before that, hundreds & thousands of new celebrants will already have been appointed under the 2003 scheme and there’s no guarantee the quality of the new 2010 celebrant training, conducted by the same training entrepreneurs, will be any better.
Some trainers are getting very rich while hundreds and thousands of celebrants are getting very poor - and desperate! There’s a tongue in cheek suggestion celebrants should encourage people to marry early and marry often! Additional weddings are urgently needed to allow the thousands of underemployed celebrants a chance to practice. The facts of the matter are Australia just does not have sufficient weddings to justify the thousands of marriage celebrants appointed.
Surely, as some celebrant training schools say, there are plenty of weddings to go around! No, there’s not! In Australia there’s around 120,000 weddings per year (numbers haven’t changed markedly in donkey’s years). To handle these numbers we now have nearly 9,000 marriage celebrants appointed by the Attorney-General’s Dept. (and increasing daily), around 20,000 religious celebrants and very busy State and Territory Registry and Court House legal officers/celebrants. With these numbers you arrive at an average figure of around 4 or 5 weddings per year per celebrant! Some good celebrants do more, but most do fewer - or none whatsoever. These numbers highlight the inconsistency of government policy in continuing to appoint limitless numbers of (often badly trained) marriage celebrants.
What does this mean to someone looking for a marriage celebrant? The marrying public are finding it increasingly difficult to identify a professional, knowledgeable and experienced marriage celebrant able to look after their wedding the way they want. There are now, quite frankly, far too many inexperienced, poorly trained marriage celebrants, who have not been subjected to any effective selection processes, offering doubtful services and bringing Australia’s marriage celebrant program into disrepute.
3. Surely Increased Competition Brings Benefits to the Marrying Public?
If people enquire widely enough, they’ll find celebrant prices for a wedding anywhere from zero (nothing) to $1500. There are celebrants making no charge whatsoever?? Yes, there are desperate celebrants subsidising their clients’ weddings!
As you might imagine with such an oversupply many celebrants believe they will only get bookings by being cheap. This, sounds too good to be true, for couples planning their wedding. Celebrants are competing against each other for the very few weddings. But, - hang on - are they any good? That’s a very important question.
Most couples, knowing nothing of celebrant abilities, training or lack thereof, simply ask “How much do you charge?” The perception is all celebrants must be OK, so you might as well look for the cheapest. As you’re probably gathering by now - it’s just not so!
Do people want their wedding conducted by someone who may have done very few, if any, weddings, has an imperfect idea of legal requirements, is a poor public speaker (may suffer from stage fright) and doesn’t really know what can and should be done within a wedding? Well, that’s now the situation in too many cases.
People need to know to ask - NOT how much do you charge, but
(1) How can the celebrant make my wedding wonderful?
(2) How can I include special things in the ceremony important to me and my family?
(3) What celebrant experience and qualifications does the celebrant have?
(4) How can the celebrant ensure we, and everybody present, will enjoy the ceremony and that it will provide wonderful lifetime memories to look back on?
I’m sure marrying couples want to remember their wedding for the right reasons - not the wrong ones!
In any event, whether they decide to hire one of the top professionals or the newest, least experienced celebrant the fee they pay will be amongst the least expensive items for their wedding. Even the wedding cake can cost more than a celebrant!
One of the effects of massive oversupply with celebrant numbers exceeding saturation levels, is many, if not most, celebrants are not able to charge enough to cover costs. This brings about a further unfortunate side effect. Most celebrants need to have other employment in order to have enough income to survive - and they are often subsidising their celebrant business from their other income.
A resulting feature of this need for other employment or income is now the majority of marriage celebrants have become part time. Longer appointed marriage celebrants developed a more professional attitude to their mostly full-time responsibilities in stark contrast to the current multitude of part time amateur operators. It’s not to say all new marriage celebrants are inadequate, poorly trained or not professional in their activities. However, the current system of limitless appointments into a tiny market reduces the opportunities for practice and improvement and encourages people who may not be ideal as marriage celebrants to seek authorisation and to perhaps undertake a few weddings for family and friends only, which they may conduct poorly, but still decrease the overall number of weddings available to other celebrants.
4. What Help Can Marrying Couples Expect From their Celebrant?
Considering they may know little or nothing about wedding ceremonies, couples really need a lot of help from their celebrant. This is evident by most people saying they “just want something short and simple”. This might be true in some cases, but it is often an indication they have no idea what they can do, or have, within their wedding and just don’t know what to suggest. Another concerning aspect is couples may have attended one of the now many badly conducted weddings and have the desire to get it over and done with as quickly as possible to reduce the embarrassment.
A wedding can be a wonderful and rewarding experience and a good celebrant will help couples with everything to do with their ceremony. Ideas for ceremony content. Ways to personalise it. Information on readings, music, traditional and cultural elements. Help with the vows they make to each other and every other part of the ceremony. The problem now arises with so many new appointees, only a few celebrants have the knowledge and experience to offer reliable assistance. As a result the quality of wedding ceremonies is deteriorating. Venues, photographers and others in the wedding industry provide anecdotal evidence supporting these remarks.
Weddings should be enjoyed not endured. A wedding is a celebration providing wonderful memories for the rest of a couples’ life. A good, experienced celebrant will ensure this happens. Couples have enough to worry about on the day. They shouldn’t find their celebrant to be an additional worry.
5. How Accommodating or Flexible are Celebrants?
A professional celebrant is usually very accommodating when couples want something special for their wedding such as certain rituals, or traditional or cultural content. Others, often newer celebrants, are not so helpful - feeling threatened by the unexpected or unknown - things not within their knowledge or control.
6. How Can Couples Check on a Celebrants’ Current Authorisation and Ability?
Authorisation is easy. Every Commonwealth appointed marriage celebrant is listed on the Attorney-General’s website. However, couples can’t tell how long the longer term celebrants have been appointed. When the changes to the celebrant program were implemented in 2003, existing celebrants were listed on the Attorney-General’s website as being appointed in 2003! Even though they’d been celebrants for years - some since 1973 when the first celebrants were appointed.
Ability is a whole different area. Assuming every celebrant is equally informed, experienced and a good performer is far from the truth. Considering some of the training is totally inadequate, some barely sufficient and new celebrant selection processes are just about non existent, the chances of engaging a first class, experienced, knowledgeable celebrant with outstanding public speaking skills are not good.
Most couples rely on advertising to select their celebrant. Now, while most advertisements are often glowing in their promises, couples still don’t genuinely know how able a celebrant is. Recommendations can be useful, but again, will that celebrant suit them? Length of time as a celebrant is usually, but not always, a good guide. Greater experience stands everybody in good stead. This is based on the theory the more you do of anything the better you get. And, it’s not a bad theory. On the other hand inexperience is where we all start. “Victim based” learning may be good for the celebrant practitioner, but not so good for the victim - their wedding clients.
As new celebrants gain more experience (through making more mistakes), they undoubtedly improve. However, here’s where we strike another horrendous problem. With no limits on the appointment of marriage celebrants since 2003, the Australian wedding market has already exceeded saturation levels. Where 1500 or 2000 marriage celebrants would have been quite sufficient to service the needs of the Australian marrying public, we now have nearly 9,000 marriage celebrants appointed by the Attorney-General’s Department and the training of new celebrants continues unabated - more and more continue to be appointed. At the time of writing this paper the average number of weddings per celebrant in Australia was no more than 6 per celebrant per year!
7. What Freedom Do Couples Have to Create their Unique Wedding Ceremony?
This is an interesting question. Many people want to have something uniquely theirs. A ceremony of their choosing at a venue of their selection. Some, of course, are not that bothered. This is where Registry Offices provide a useful “no frills” alternative. Registry Offices provide basic ceremonies delivered, not by trained celebrants, but by legal officers, in government premises. If couples choose their own celebrant they want additional choices and, quite rightly, expect a wonderful experience - not a disappointment. Otherwise, they might as well make do with the Registry Office experience (often subsidised by State and Federal governments as fees charged don’t cover costs).
Australia’s Marriage Act is a generous piece of legislation. It requires every couple being married to include within their ceremony the words from Section 46 of the Act. This describes what marriage is, according to law, in Australia. Celebrants frequently refer to this section as The Monitum. The Act also requires the couple to exchange vows, again in accordance with specific requirements in wording calling on all to witness, that each takes the other as husband, wife or spouse. These two items - Section 46 and vows in accordance with Section 45(2) are sufficient for the wedding ceremony to be legally binding.
Of course there’s documentary requirements and a need for two official witnesses. However, the great thing is, people marrying have freedom to include whatever else they would like to make their wedding special in the way that’s most meaningful to them.
A knowledgeable celebrant can provide a great deal of information on choices, traditions and information. Here the celebrant’s experience in knowing what works and what works best can be invaluable. Often it’s the celebrant’s performance ability that makes apparently difficult or unusual segments and items work perfectly. A less experienced person can make a complete hash of it! Again, experience is essential and with huge numbers of inexperienced celebrants being appointed, experience is in short supply.
8. How can Celebrants Personalise Wedding Ceremonies?
Some celebrants use a standard ceremony - perhaps several standard ceremonies, others put together a ceremony derived from what clients tell them. Others have standard wording which they vary to include their clients’ story and modify in ways the clients wish.
It’s important for couples to work with their celebrant to design the ceremony they want. Some celebrants are excellent when it comes to creative writing and describing their story - some are not at all creative and may be dreadful writers. Writing skills are something all celebrants require, but, like public speaking skills, they have NOT been a required part of any celebrant training courses.
9. Are Celebrants Professional in working with Other Wedding Service Providers?
This is important. One photographer in Melbourne has a sign in his office saying - “If (name) is your celebrant, get another photographer!” Most celebrants are good working with other wedding service professionals and it’s very important that they are. However, there are some, often the less experienced, who seem to think each wedding is “theirs” and they strictly control what photographers, videographers, etc., do and when they will allow them to do it!
This is both unfortunate and totally unnecessary. Other wedding service providers are usually skilled at what they do and they certainly don’t need an interfering celebrant getting in their way.
10. Does the Celebrant Provide Onsite Rehearsals?
Just about every wedding benefits from an onsite rehearsal. However, couples find many celebrants don’t like rehearsals, or charge extra to attend them, or only conduct ‘rehearsals’ in their office or home.
Particularly where there’s a wedding party (bridesmaids, groomsmen, flower girls, page boys, etc.), they all want to know what their role is at the wedding. They also need to know everybody else’s role so they work in conjunction with them. Additionally, there are often readers who really benefit from seeing the location, knowing just where they’ll stand and practising their delivery.
Once everyone has been to the location, practised their roles - the wedding procession, where they stand, what happens during the ceremony, how it finishes and how they walk out (the recessional) - on the day they feel much more relaxed and confident. A good wedding is usually the result of a good rehearsal. However, there are celebrants who don’t like to provide an onsite wedding rehearsal (despite it being a condition of the Celebrant’s Code of Practice) and as a result those weddings run the risk of all sorts of mistakes and people involved feeling that much less confident.
11. How Reliable are Celebrants?
There have been recent cases where a celebrant calls up the day before a wedding and says they have something else on the next day and won’t be able to make it! Sadly, this isn’t the worst of it. There have also been cases where everybody is waiting at the wedding venue and the celebrant fails to attend! In one reported case a new celebrant suffering from stage fright just couldn’t conduct the wedding ceremony. In these cases the couple, their friends or venue staff have to rush around to find another celebrant who can attend - completely unprepared and conduct a wedding which is not the one they planned or expected.
So, the question - how reliable and professional is the celebrant is a very important one. Most experienced celebrants would never let these scenarios occur. Of course, there may be the occasional case where something happens - beyond the control of the celebrant. A good, professional celebrant will have contingency plans in place to reduce the impact on their clients. However, not all wedding service providers, including celebrants, actually have contingency plans.
Couples now need to check far more carefully to ensure they won’t be the victim of an unprofessional, unprepared and uncaring celebrant. However, most probably do not. Many of these problems are the result of a celebrant not having enough experience and/or not being a good public presenter. Presentation skills - or public speaking - are amongst peoples’ major fears. According to a US survey most people would rather die than speak in public. Accordingly, good public speaking skills along with self confidence are extremely important for celebrants. These skills are rarely taught in marriage celebrant courses, or are not taught well, and people applying to become celebrants are not necessarily good public speakers or particularly self confident.
12. In Summary
Australia’s marriage celebrant program was an innovative and much appreciated service for marrying couples. Previously the choice of religious or Registry Office was a form of separating ’good’ from ‘bad’, with no allowance for those wanting a nice personal wedding at a venue of their choosing despite their lack of religious affiliation..
It has been so successful that over 60% of all marriages are now conducted by civil marriage celebrants appointed by the Attorney-General’s Department. It is the preferred manner of marrying for the approx. 120,000 weddings (total) each year in Australia.
The changes introduced in 2003 had high hopes - allow additional talented people to become celebrants, increase competition to benefit the marrying public, raise standards of service and training, provide an open market to give practitioners a “level playing field”.
However, enormous numbers of applicants encouraged by entrepreneurial and opportunistic training services, with little or no basic selection processes, combined with poor training standards has so far delivered:
- Not simply additional talented celebrants, but floods of people of differing abilities, education resulting in numerous new celebrants offering ceremonies of varying quality - some reported not even observing requirements of the Marriage Act,
- An increase in competition that has produced instability in the market place with cheap and cheaper competing with genuinely wonderful services,
- Standards of training and performance from outstanding to abysmal,
- Not simply an open market, but a buyers nightmare, offering opportunities for recruiting gullible people into celebrancy for a very basic training program conducted in some cases by totally unqualified people.
The Government’s and the industry’s answer after nearly six years of chaos is to upgrade the entry criteria to a newly designed Certificate IV in Celebrancy to be introduced in February 2010. While this may slow entry into marriage celebrancy (and there’s a good chance it won’t), there are now already nearly 9,000 marriage celebrants in Australia with an unknown additional quantity to compete training under the current ‘doubtful’ standard before February 2010.
This is an enormous increase from around 1500 to 2000 in 2003 (a reasonable number considering the relatively few weddings in Australia). There is still no sign of better or any genuine suitability selection processes for new celebrants.
The strain put on resources and administration by the Marriage Celebrant Section of the Attorney-General’s Department is enormous. This is not made easier by the reduced number of people in that section not having any first hand marriage celebrant experience.
Already, there is concern the Fit and Proper Person Criteria imposed by the Attorney-General’s Department may not be sufficiently stringent or enforced sufficiently - and along with people well suited to marriage celebrancy, there must be a great many who are not - even if there were a demand for additional marriage celebrants which there is not. Limitless appointments, resulting in the majority of marriage celebrants being forced to become part time operators conducting few, if any, weddings, is not a recipe for success for this important program.
© Tony Gelme - Celebrant