Court Records in Victoria: RedCrest, CITEC Confirm and How to Access a File

In Victoria, the Supreme Court's RedCrest and the County Court's CITEC Confirm are two different e-filing platforms, not one shared system, and a non-party's right to inspect a civil file now runs through a 2021-tightened version of rule 28.05.

Victoria sits alongside seven other states and territories in our Australia Court Records hub, which covers the pattern shared across every jurisdiction, and the criminal history handoff to Australia Background Checks. This page covers how Victoria's own courts, platforms and access rules work.

Which Court Holds What

Victoria's ordinary court hierarchy runs, from lowest to highest, Magistrates' Court, County Court, then Supreme Court, with the Supreme Court's Court of Appeal sitting above the Trial Division for appeals. The Magistrates' Court is the busiest, handling roughly 90 percent of all Victorian matters across 52 locations statewide: summary criminal matters, some indictable offences triable summarily, and civil disputes up to $100,000. The County Court is the intermediate trial court, hearing serious criminal matters and civil claims above $100,000, and it is where most Magistrates' Court appeals go. The Supreme Court's Trial Division hears the most serious criminal matters, such as murder, and civil claims of $200,000 or more, while its Court of Appeal hears appeals from the County Court and from the Trial Division itself.

Two standalone specialist courts sit alongside this line: the Children's Court, which hears criminal charges against people aged 10 to under 18 (except murder and attempted murder) and child protection matters, and the Coroners Court, which investigates certain deaths and fires. The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) is a separate tribunal, not formally a court, covering civil, administrative, human rights, planning and tenancy matters. All of these, plus the Judicial College and the Judicial Commission, are administered under the shared umbrella of Court Services Victoria, though each keeps its own registry function.

Searching Online: Two Different Platforms

Victoria does not run one shared e-filing or search platform across its courts, and assuming it does is a genuine, common mistake.

RedCrest is the Supreme Court of Victoria's own secure e-filing system, covering the Court of Appeal, Common Law Division, Criminal Division, Costs Court and Commercial Court matters. Within that brand there are two separate functions: RedCrest-Probate for probate matters only, and RedCrest-Search, the mechanism for lodging a litigation or court-file search request, which needs a registered account rather than being a public, unregistered lookup. Whether a specific proceeding's file can be viewed electronically inside RedCrest by the parties themselves depends on the proceeding number: a number containing an "E" indicates enhanced electronic access is available to the parties.

The County Court's civil e-filing, by contrast, runs through CITEC Confirm, a separate government-panel provider entirely distinct from the Supreme Court's in-house RedCrest platform. A reader dealing with a County Court civil matter needs to use CITEC Confirm, not RedCrest, and the two should not be assumed interchangeable.

Judgment text follows a similar split from case management. The Supreme Court's own current pages state plainly that full judgments are found on AustLII, not on the Court's own site: "Recent judgments and sentences are published on the AustLII website." The Court's own site hosts judgment summaries and, for some criminal matters, sentencing-remarks audio or video through its Multimedia On Demand service, but not the full text itself.

Access Rules and Fees

The Supreme Court's current non-party file-inspection rule is rule 28.05 of the Supreme Court (General Civil Procedure) Rules 2025 (the 2015 Rules were replaced wholesale on 8 September 2025; rule 28.05 carried forward unchanged in number and substance, and the Court's own guidance now cites the 2025 Rules), sitting in Order 28 ("File Inspections"), applied through Practice Note SC GEN 20, "Inspection of civil court files by non-parties," which commenced 1 October 2021. A 2021 amendment to rule 28.05 tightened access to evidentiary material specifically: affidavits, exhibits to affidavits, witness statements, expert reports, written submissions and outlines of argument may not be inspected by a non-party without the court's leave until the document has actually been read or relied on in open court, or relied on in an application determined without a hearing. Non-evidentiary documents, such as the writ, statement of claim and court orders, remain searchable without that restriction. A non-party file-search or inspection request is lodged through RedCrest-Search.

On fees, the Supreme Court's Prothonotary's Office schedule for 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027 lists searching a court file or record, and searching or accessing a subpoenaed record, at the same rate: $84.60 per request at the corporate rate, $41.40 standard and $20.70 concession (the 2025-26 schedule's $82.40 corporate figure is superseded). County Court and Magistrates' Court fee schedules, and whether either mirrors the Supreme Court's 2021 rule 28.05 tightening, were not independently confirmed for this page either.

Suppression and Non-Publication Orders

The Open Courts Act 2013 is Victoria's general suppression and closed-court order regime, confirmed current and referenced directly in the Supreme Court Act 1986 itself. The offence for contravening a suppression order sits at section 23, "Contravention of suppression order." The penalty is recorded consistently, across a Court Services Victoria fees and fines schedule, a Victorian Law Reform Commission publication, the Judicial College of Victoria's Open Courts Bench Book, and a Supreme Court judgment quoting the provision directly, as up to 5 years' imprisonment or 600 penalty units, or both, for an individual, and 3,000 penalty units for a body corporate. The bare current statute text of section 23 itself was not directly reviewed for this page, so treat the penalty as corroborated by multiple official sources rather than confirmed against the primary text.

Victoria's penalty unit is indexed annually every 1 July and currently sits at $209.10, for the period 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027, per the Department of Justice and Community Safety and the Department of Treasury and Finance. Applied illustratively, 600 penalty units works out to roughly $125,460, and 3,000 penalty units to roughly $627,300, alongside the individual's alternative or cumulative 5-year imprisonment term. These are illustrative multiplications, not a figure separately stated as a dollar amount in the sources reviewed.

Records Closed by Default

Several categories of Victorian proceeding are restricted as a matter of course.

Children's Court proceedings default to open court but closed identity. Under the Children, Youth and Families Act 2005, section 523 requires Children's Court proceedings to be conducted in open court unless the court decides otherwise, while section 534 makes it an offence, except in very limited circumstances, to publish anything identifying a child or any other person involved in the case, including a witness, or even the specific venue the matter was heard in; the same restriction extends to related proceedings in any other court. Access to documents in the Criminal Division of the Children's Court needs a specific Application for Access form.

Sexual-offence complainant identification is restricted under the Judicial Proceedings Reports Act 1958, section 4(1A), which remains in force despite a Victorian Law Reform Commission recommendation that it be repealed, a recommendation not enacted as of this page. The Magistrates', County and Supreme Courts each maintain their own application-for-permission-to-publish process and form for this material.

Family law matters, including divorce, parenting and property proceedings, are heard by the federal Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia, entirely separate from the Victorian court hierarchy described above. See Family Court Process in Australia for how that federal process works.

Adoption records carry their own confidentiality rules under Victorian adoption legislation; this page does not cover the detail of that separate access process.

Freedom of Information

Section 6 of the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Vic), "Act not to apply to courts etc.," removes a court and the holder of a judicial office from the Act's coverage entirely in relation to their judicial functions, and does the same for a court registry and its staff in relation to matters connected with those judicial functions. The Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner, the Act's own regulator, is explicit that the Act still applies to a court's non-judicial functions, such as administrative matters or employee records, but not to anything connected with hearing and deciding cases. The route to an actual case file is the Court's own access process described above, RedCrest-Search or the relevant court's own application form, not an FOI request.

What a Court Record Is Not

A court file is not the same thing as a criminal history check. A criminal history or police check is a summary of a person's conviction record, held and issued by police, and subject to the Spent Convictions Act 2021 (Vic) once a conviction becomes spent, a scheme that has only existed in Victoria since December 2021. A conviction becoming spent governs what a person must or can disclose about their own record; it does not remove the original matter from a court file or a published judgment. For a police check or spent-convictions question, see National Police Checks in Australia, Police Check in VIC and Spent Convictions in VIC rather than this page.

A court record is also not a birth, death or marriage certificate. Those are civil registration documents, covered on Vital Records in Australia, not by any court.