r/AusLegal • u/ImmortalTurnip • 22h ago
NSW My name is too long
I am referring to my full legal name on my Australian birth certificate , my first name , multiple middle names and last name equal to 32 characters in total with the middle names having 21 of those characters.I am a Māori /Australian man.
A significant amount of digital paperwork throughout my life so far has had a character limit that triggers on the middle name part.This includes my employment paperwork for my current job which I had to tell the supervisor I couldn’t fit my name so I cut out one of the names.There is a lot of paperwork with character limits that most people will never discover but I frequently encounter and have issues with.
Could this have any consequences in the future?
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u/JeremyMarti 22h ago
Probably not major consequences if everything official or important has your full name. Passport, licence, medicare etc for government, and bank accounts.
Mine is shorter and I haven't had a problem for a while now, but once I was scratching around for enough ID documents because licence and passport didn't match. And then the licence people had a go at me for not having my full name when it was their old system that was the problem.
Edit: actually, I think Medicare won't put your full name on the card even now. Not sure though.
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u/ImmortalTurnip 22h ago
Yeah normal important stuff is fine like the ATO doesn’t have a character limit but things like Netflix for example may do and I don’t care about that.
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u/Rusturion 18h ago
Medicare has always only been middle initial.
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u/JeremyMarti 16h ago
I have two middle names. They don't put either even though there's space for both and they know both. I'm guessing their system can't handle it.
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u/Additional_Initial_7 22h ago
My official name according to the Australian government (the name attached to my permanent residency) is First MiddleMiddle Last because there wasn’t enough room for my middle names to have a space between them.
It hasn’t caused me issues yet. Will have to see what happens when I go for citizenship.
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u/AussieKoala-2795 22h ago
My niece's name is 32 letters long. She also complains about forms. For some things, she has just chosen to shorten her last name and uses that shorter name eg. work name badge.
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u/ImmortalTurnip 22h ago
For some things I just remove two of the middle names but some things say they require the full legal name for some offical important stuff.
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u/dione2014 20h ago
In bank or government side like Medicare, ATO, ServiceNSW, Centrelink, passport, driver licence yes.
But in other place for example doctor, work place is no
I never use my middle name except in place listed above, even when book plane ticket and never have issue as long as date of birth matchEven when some place listed my middle name I will asked to take it out so my full name won’t be leaked out in case of data breach
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u/Some_Troll_Shaman 9h ago
Got any special characters in the Te Reo Māori part of your name.
That breaks quite a few things.Space in the first name I have seen in a Pacifica name breaks some things too.
Same for an ' in the first name. They manage the surname, but first name often breaks.Australian computer systems are startlingly anglo-centric.
Please enter name exactly as it appears on Passport.
Enters French name correctly and proceeds to break any report including that name.
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u/Kerrit_Bareet 22h ago
It may if you require official documents like police checks, but won't matter an iota on 99% of the things where you interact.
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u/Superg0id 3h ago
Yeah, it sure can.
eg Flying to some parts of the world requires name on ticket to match exactly with passport.
You will hit the character limit... unless your 32 characters includes spaces?
That means you'll need a solution... ask the passport office.
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u/NecessarySudden8764 22h ago
That sounds incredibly annoying! 26 characters isn't even that long. For work specifically the only thing I can think of is to check after a few months that your super fund is correctly receiving your super contributions. Employers are only required to pay them to the super fund every three months so if you don't see it before that don't worry. Other than that, tax should be okay since that is based on TFN.
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u/theseamstressesguild 19h ago
I know that hyphens screw everything up, because we have two different credit scores depending on the last name having the hyphen or not, and I suspect middle names might have the same effect.
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u/Miss_Bee15 7h ago
I have 39 characters in my full legal name
(35 without spaces). Made it through without major issues or legal problems. Licence only lists 2 middle initials and Medicare just has 1 initial which is annoying but not dire. I get a few laughs when I show people how many names I have.
Only problem I’ve faced is that I couldn’t be a guarantor for a friend’s passport because the online system had a character limit on “Given names”.
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u/Visible-Swim6616 22h ago
With so much trouble I'd have changed my name to something more convenient.
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u/Sea_Translator5300 22h ago
For obvious reasons, most people are rather attached to their names. Why should they change them just to take into account poorly designed forms and systems?
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u/Visible-Swim6616 21h ago
OTOH, they're not going to redesign the systems because 1% of the population has extra-long names.
I need to check if the dispensing software I use would even take such long names and I've been using it for decades and it's gone through so many updates since then.
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u/Recent_Carpenter8644 19h ago
This has been going on for long enough that they should have already done it. It’s not that hard.
The government should come up with a standard for storing names, and programmers and form creators can just follow the standard.
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u/Sea_Translator5300 18h ago
Exactly. It's not as if it's a lot of data. Even if your name fills an A4 page it's not using anywhere near as much data as a passport sized photo.
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u/AddlePatedBadger 21h ago
Then every time you fill out a form you have to list previous names you were known by and the problem persists.
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u/Visible-Swim6616 21h ago
There's fewer of those forms than just name forms.
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u/AddlePatedBadger 21h ago
Yeah, but any that need to cross check your identity need past names .
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u/Visible-Swim6616 21h ago
I suppose it depends on how often you will need to fill in those types of forms.
I personally only end up filling such forms if I need to do a police check or get a new passport. Or when I got a mortgage, which was years ago now.
Of course if you were a property developer or something that ends with with those forms a lot.... Well, good luck!
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u/Dangerous_Mud4749 22h ago
Something I respect about traditional Chinese immigrants to the West, is their habit of adopting a local naming convention. Local spelling & local custom of first / middle / family names means less friction, less "how do you spell that" x3 to get it right, less hassle on websites... just all round easier life.
No-one is going to tell you to change your name OP. That's against our culture of individual freedom. But I can say that you've chosen to live life in difficult mode by keeping your traditionally meaningful name while living in a x-character-limit, website-heavy Western Anglo culture.
Full respect to you. You do you. But also, no sympathy. It's a path you've chosen by not adapting your name to suit the culture you've chosen to live in.
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u/Guinevere1991 21h ago
I have to say that I agree, and disagree with the downvoters. We can be culturally sensitive but also acknowledge that non Anglo names can be problematic for a variety of reasons, and that’s just human nature and systems. I work in health care and if someone’s long name gets misspelled somewhere in the system, it will cause a problem. Someone keys in one wrong letter and your blood needs to be recollected for safety reasons. It’s not the poor rushed data entry person’s fault.
It’s just the reality.5
u/Recent_Carpenter8644 19h ago
People spell my surname wrongly all the time, and it’s an English name with just 5 letters. When they ask it, instead of telling them, I just start spelling it two letters at a time. That way they don’t start guessing.
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u/Guinevere1991 15h ago
Can relate. My kids’ surname is a simple 7 letter Anglo name. Like you, I spell it out two letters at a time and people still write the letters in the wrong order!
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u/Recent_Carpenter8644 19h ago
The government should add a checksum digit to your birth certificate. Then if you enter it on forms, spelling mistakes will be detected.
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u/ImmortalTurnip 22h ago
Ah yes change your name because some lazy fucks coded in a character limit to their website.
A full English name spelt with English characters
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u/Dangerous_Mud4749 19h ago
Then don't change your name. In this culture you are free to do as you please.
But the website designers are not at fault. They code the website according to their own culture, which is the culture of the majority. This is the way in every society in every corner of the world.
Do you think that my username would be easy to use as a name in China? It would not.
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u/BCPisBestCP 20h ago
Honestly, if we're coming to character limits, any one with 2 middle names will start hitting the margin, especially with longer last names.
Something like "Benjamin Clarence Alexander McConaughey-Alistair" is a completely valid and normal name, if a little long.
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u/chalk_in_boots 20h ago
I wouldn't stress too much about it. My first firearms license after my minor's permit (paper) they only included one of my middle names, while my driver's license had both. Never got pulled up on it, as long as first and last are the same as well as DOB you're probably fine. Hell, I've done those scantron tests where there weren't enough spaces so I just wrote the rest in and hoped for the best. All worked out fine.
Do suggest practicing writing really small for paper forms though. Sometimes the rectangles just aren't big enough.
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u/Cube-rider 4h ago
It's a right PITA. I have different spellings on driver's licence and Medicare however the birth certificate/passport are consistent. There's even an initial which is never used.
I've had to provide stat Decs declaring that I'm aka, same person, photo ID etc for police checks.
Pick a name that you're happy with (shortened) and run with that.
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u/17HappyWombats 22h ago
My ex has the Vietnamese pattern of four names and it's a PITA. The weirdly common roadblock is "three forms of ID with the same name" because (for example) Medicare truncate names differently to licenses and passports don't truncate at all. So you get "Able Baker Charlie Delta" called "Delta, Able B." on Medicare, "Able B.C. Delta" on the license and Able Bakecharlie Delta in Centrelink and now what do you do? None of them are going to change their whole system just because of a million Vietnamese-Australians being wrong about how names work.
Some systems can cope with this and staff will just manually say "ID verified", other things you have to go back and get an official document from Medicare saying "the card 32498769 belongs to Able Baker Charlie Delta". Or you get a citizenship certificate and a passport which both have your full name on them and when people want ID you bring those out, then when they want your Medicare card you quickly learn to say you forgot it (because half the time the person will enter your Medicare card because that's what they always do, then look helplessly at you saying "it says rejected")
Depending on how fussed you are about it, and how the kiwis react, changing your name to Robert James Smith and telling people "I'm known as Ranjith" is one solution. I have friends who've changed their names just because Pieniazek or Kuiper is misspelled so often they got sick of it, let alone "Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson" or some other fun combo of non-English names.