endomorphosis/ipfs_australia_laws

Australia In-Force Commonwealth Law (Federal Register of Legislation)

Research snapshot of in-force Commonwealth legislation from the Federal Register of Legislation, collected via the official OData API (https://api.prod.legislation.gov.au/v1/). Constitution and Acts first, then legislative instruments.

Not legal advice. The authorised Federal Register of Legislation text prevails over this corpus.

Snapshot

Field	Value
Snapshot date	2026-09-03
Source	Federal Register of Legislation (Office of Parliamentary Counsel) OData API
Collector	scrapers/collect_federal_register.py
Laws / instruments	29,084
Articles	309,135
Language	en
Jurisdiction	Australia (Commonwealth)
License	cc-by-4.0

Known gaps

• In-force Acts + Constitution are complete (4,765 titles vs API count 4,763 Acts + 1 Constitution; one extra Act vs live count is a timing/delta).
• In-force legislative instruments: 24,319 catalogued of 24,329 API in-force LIs. Year-null titles listed with $filter=... and year eq null&$orderby=id (unique sort; $top cap 100). Residual gap of 10 vs live $count is leftover $skip window holes after 99-row pages. Previous snapshot missed ~5,099 year-null LIs because unpartitioned $skip is not a unique sort.
• Notifiable instruments, gazettes, prerogative instruments, AAOs, repealed/historical titles, and as-made-only historical versions are out of scope.
• Stored text is the current compilation EPUB (else Word/PDF), not the authorised PDF. The Register text prevails.
• Live 429s are retried then replayed from Wayback of the same official legislation.gov.au / api.prod.legislation.gov.au URL. No AustLII/Westlaw. No WAF bypass.

Contents

• data/laws.parquet — one row per instrument (id, title, full text, dates, status, identifiers, article count, source URL).
• data/articles.parquet — one row per section (law_id, article number, title, text, source URL).
• scrapers/collect_federal_register.py — research collector used to build this snapshot.

License / reuse

Federal Register of Legislation content is CC BY 4.0 as stated at https://www.legislation.gov.au/terms-of-use (exception: the Commonwealth Coat of Arms and content otherwise noted). Attribute the Federal Register of Legislation, link to the licence, and indicate any changes.

This dataset is not legal advice. The official Register text prevails.

Source

• Portal: https://www.legislation.gov.au/
• API: https://api.prod.legislation.gov.au/v1/
• Swagger: https://api.prod.legislation.gov.au/swagger/index.html
• Terms: https://www.legislation.gov.au/terms-of-use
• Data share: https://www.legislation.gov.au/help-and-resources/using-the-legislation-register/data-share-and-reuse

State and territory legislation (subnational append)

Staged 2026-09-28 on top of hub tip c72ad1989fc8 (follow-up 2026-09-30: 12 mixed-case-id QLD/TAS items appended). Commonwealth rows are unchanged and come first; state/territory rows are appended with jurisdiction = AU-<STATE> and source_type = au_<state>_legislation. Totals: 36,214 laws (was 29,084), 680,077 articles (was 309,135).

Jurisdiction	Official source	Laws	Acts	Subordinate	Articles
AU-NSW	legislation.nsw.gov.au	1,435	877	558	85,799
AU-QLD	www.legislation.qld.gov.au	1,000	572	428	119,288
AU-TAS	www.legislation.tas.gov.au	2,431	688	1,743	49,250
AU-WA	www.legislation.wa.gov.au	1,575	810	765	78,661
AU-NT	legislation.nt.gov.au	689	385	304	37,944

Known limitations

• AU-VIC (www.legislation.vic.gov.au (texts on content.legislation.vic.gov.au)): BLOCKED (robots.txt). The law texts exist only as PDF/DOCX on a host that disallows all crawlers. Not collected.
• AU-SA (www.legislation.sa.gov.au): BLOCKED_SOURCE (403). 3 consecutive 403s, recorded as BLOCKED_SOURCE. No mirrors, no UA tricks, no contact.
• AU-ACT (www.legislation.act.gov.au): BLOCKED (robots.txt). The only listing endpoint (/results) and the HTML text views are robots-disallowed, and the order says to skip a site that forbids listing. A /DownloadFile PDF adapter would need an allowed enumeration source (none found) and a 10 s crawl delay, so NEEDS_SEPARATE_ADAPTER if CoS wants to pursue it.
• NSW environmental planning instruments (EPIs) are not included (not exposed by the in-force browse data source used).
• NSW/QLD/TAS text comes from the official "whole" HTML view of the current in-force version; history notes are stripped. WA text is the official consolidated HTML rendition (the PDF is the official version). NT text is extracted from the current consolidated PDF with pdftotext, so layout artefacts (running headers, hyphenation, tables) can remain.
• Articles are sections/clauses/rules/regulations plus whole schedules; numbering checks flag non-monotonic steps (mostly legitimate inserted-section conventions such as 5AA before 5A) and integer gaps (repealed/omitted provisions).
• Laws without numbered sections (many TAS proclamations/orders, a few rules) have full text in laws and 0 articles.
• Mixed-case official ids: 12 in-force items (QLD SL-1879-qcipa, SL-1879-qciwi; TAS act-1994-84A, act-1999-28A, act-2008-19A, act-2010-02A, act-2011-48A, act-2012-11A, act-2012-38A, act-2013-21A, act-2013-30A, act-2013-57A) were missed by a lowercase-only id filter in the first run and were fetched and appended on 2026-09-30. All 12 were added; none failed. The 10 TAS items are applied-law notices (e.g. Agvet Code of Tasmania, Heavy Vehicle National Law (Tasmania)) with 2 sections each (commencement, further information); the full text of each national law is in the host jurisdiction's Act and is not reproduced here. The 2 QLD items (1879 Coast Islands proclamation and letters patent) have no numbered sections, so they are full text only with 0 articles. Law ids are lower-cased (au-tas-act-1994-84a); official_identifier keeps the original case.
• WA rows have no date/date_issued (not in the in-force listing). NT date is the "As in force at" date from the PDF.
• NT legislation is used under the NT copyright policy (not CC BY): unofficial reproduction, not an official version, no NT arms.
• Not legal advice. The authorised texts on each state/territory legislation website prevail.