Built to

The standards behind administering legislation

Rules as code, authoritative registers, commencement and retrospectivity, delegations, statements of reasons and traceability, hierarchy of instruments, statutory interpretation, reassessment on change of law, machine-readable formats, records.

Standard	Source	Requirement	Where it shows up here
Rules as code	OECD OPSI Cracking the Code; Better Rules (NZ); OpenFisca; NSW rules-as-code pilots	Legislation expressed in a form systems can run, kept in step with the authoritative text and its versions.	Every provision with a testable parameter is encoded as a rule with its instrument, provision, version and source; the services compute under it (GL-AL-04).
Authoritative legislation registers	Federal Register of Legislation (legislation.gov.au); state legislation websites; legislation.gov.uk; New Zealand Legislation; Government Gazettes	Take instruments and amendments from the register, on the day they are made.	Gazette feeds polled live; items matched to instruments; amendments recorded with gazettal and commencement dates (GL-AL-05).
Commencement and retrospectivity	Interpretation Acts (commencement on the day after assent unless stated; presumption against retrospectivity); Legislation Act 2003 (Cth) s 12	Apply an amendment from commencement; do not reach back unless the instrument says so.	An amendment is re-tested at once but applied only from its commencement date; earlier communicated decisions are re-decided by a person only where allowed (GL-AL-05, 07).
Delegations	Interpretation Acts on delegation and sub-delegation; Local Government Act delegations to the general manager; instruments of delegation with monetary limits; Carltona	Only the delegate decides, within the limit, and the register is the source of truth.	One central check every service's effects call; limits by role and decision kind; every attempt logged, allowed or refused (GL-AL-03).
Statements of reasons and traceability	ADJR Act s 13; tribunal Acts; audit standards	Every decision states the provision it was made under.	Every decision table cites provisions; traceability counts how many resolve to an encoded rule (GL-AL-06).
Inconsistency and hierarchy of instruments	Constitution s 109 (Cth and state); regulations within the power of their Act; policy cannot fetter or narrow a statutory discretion	Where two provisions disagree, the higher governs, and a policy cannot alter a statutory test.	The encoding agent detects a conflict on the same parameter and refers it to legal; nothing decides under either until resolved (GL-AL-02).
Statutory interpretation	Acts Interpretation Act s 15AA (purposive); Project Blue Sky	Ambiguity is a question of law for a lawyer, not an agent.	Ambiguities and conflicts are legal referrals with the provisions and the question (GL-AL-02).
Reassessment on change of law	Ombudsman guidance on systemic correction; Robodebt Royal Commission on lawfulness of automated rules	When the rule changes, find every matter it touches and correct what must be corrected.	The re-test agent runs the amended rule on every open matter; communicated decisions are held for a delegated officer (GL-AL-01).
Machine-readable legislation formats	Akoma Ntoso / LegalDocML (OASIS); European Legislation Identifier (ELI); legislation.gov.uk data feeds	Identify and reference provisions in a stable, machine-readable way.	Instruments and provisions carry stable references and sources; feeds consumed in Atom, RSS and OData JSON.
Records	ISO 15489; public records legislation	Versions of provisions and every enforcement decision are records.	Provision versions never overwritten; amendments, re-tests, referrals and attempts on the evidence chain.
Accessibility and plain language	WCAG 2.2 AA; ISO 24495-1	Every screen usable with assistive technology; the law a person can read.	Interfaces designed against WCAG 2.2 AA with conformance evidenced per deployment; the public page shows the provisions in force in plain text.