Nine registers · Luke's Relevance
Where the law actually lives
Australia does not keep its statute law, the written laws made by its parliaments, in one place. Nine parliaments each publish their own register, their own way. Beneath them sits your council. Alongside them sits everything Australia has signed with the rest of the world. This room maps the whole stack.
1 federal register 6 states 2 territories + your council + the treaty shelf
The nine registers, one ledger
A register is the official website where a parliament's laws are published and kept current. Each one is run by a drafting office, usually called Parliamentary Counsel: the public servants who actually write the words of the law. Nine parliaments, nine registers, nine front doors.
| Jurisdiction | Register | Managing body | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Commonwealth | Federal Register of Legislation | Office of Parliamentary Counsel | legislation.gov.au |
| New South Wales | NSW Legislation | Parliamentary Counsel's Office | legislation.nsw.gov.au |
| Victoria | Victorian Legislation | Office of the Chief Parliamentary Counsel | legislation.vic.gov.au |
| Queensland | Queensland Legislation | Office of the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel | legislation.qld.gov.au |
| Western Australia | Western Australian Legislation | Parliamentary Counsel's Office | legislation.wa.gov.au |
| South Australia | South Australian Legislation | Parliament of South Australia | legislation.sa.gov.au |
| Tasmania | Tasmanian Legislation | Office of Parliamentary Counsel | legislation.tas.gov.au |
| Australian Capital Territory | ACT Legislation Register | Parliamentary Counsel's Office | legislation.act.gov.au |
| Northern Territory | Northern Territory Legislation | Office of the Parliamentary Counsel | legislation.nt.gov.au |
Every link goes to the official government register, free to read, no account needed. AustLII also republishes most of this in one searchable place, alongside court decisions.
You will rarely need all nine. The 2012 cabinet drew on two doors, the Commonwealth register and the Queensland register, because that is where one Queensland life actually lived. Which doors matter for you depends on your address; your relevance maps that out domain by domain.
The stack, drawn once
Who writes what
Why nine? Because the Constitution splits the work. It hands the federal parliament a list of subjects it may legislate on: tax, corporations, banking, defence, external affairs and the rest of the list in the text. Everything not on the list stays with the states, which is why your tenancy, your driver licence and the police officer at your door are all state law, while your income tax and your super fund are federal.
Where a valid federal law and a state law collide, the Constitution says the federal law prevails to the extent of the inconsistency. The two territories sit differently again: their assemblies legislate under self-government acts passed by the federal parliament, which is why the diagram draws them dashed.
The practical consequence for a reader: no single register can absorb the others, because no single parliament owns the others' law. Anyone who wants the whole picture, whether one person with a folder or the engine the design describes, has to walk through all nine doors and keep the results straight by jurisdiction.
From the 2012 cabinet
The cabinet's copy of the Commonwealth Constitution was saved on 21 December 2012, a 0.2 MB file carrying the whole division of powers. The note it earned in the ledger: the rulebook for the rulebooks. Nine parliaments trace their power back to this one document.
The 2013 read-through started sorting by jurisdiction for exactly this reason: a Commonwealth act and a Queensland act about the same subject are different laws from different parliaments, and both can apply to you at once.
What actually counts as the law in force
Say you wanted everything on the nine registers that currently binds someone. The 2013 read-through drew this boundary by hand, act by act; the legal engine design would need to draw the same boundary mechanically. Either way, the boundary is the same, and it is worth knowing even if you only ever read one act.
In: every act that has been passed and signed off. That means principal acts (the original rulebooks) and amending acts (the edits), once they have received assent. It also means acts that have been made but not yet commenced: passed, signed, sitting in the register with a start date still to come. They count, because they are already law, just not switched on yet.
Out: bills, because a proposal is not a law. And repealed acts, because a cancelled rule no longer binds anyone.
The second layer: under the acts sits subordinate legislation: the regulations, rules and instruments made under an act's authority. This is the detail that actually bites day to day: the fee schedules, the forms, the technical standards. The 2012 cabinet holds a clean example: the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Regulations, two volumes of the detailed rules every super fund runs on, made under an act rather than being one. A collection that stopped at acts would miss half of what touches you.
- Act
- A law made by a parliament: passed by both houses (or the single house, in Queensland and the territories) and, in most jurisdictions, signed off by the Crown's representative.
- Compilation
- The act with all its amendments folded in, shown as one readable document "as at" a stated date. What you almost always want to read.
- Subordinate legislation
- Regulations, rules and other instruments made under an act by a minister or agency. Parliament sets the frame; the detail arrives later, and changes more often.
- In force
- Currently operating as law, or made and waiting on its commencement date. The registers let you filter for it; it is the working boundary of "the law that binds people today".
The tenth tier: your council
The nine registers are not the bottom of the stack. Beneath them, every local council makes local laws and administers a planning scheme: the rules about your bin, your dog, your parking, and what may be built on the block next door.
A worked example from the same island this site is written on: the Redland City Plan 2018 is the planning scheme for Redland City, which includes Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island). It is made under the Queensland Planning Act 2016: a state act delegating the map-level detail down to the council. The plan and the local laws live on the Redland City Council website, mostly as PDFs rather than in anything like a register. That is typical: the closer law gets to your letterbox, the less machine-readable it becomes.
If you run the method on your own life, your council's documents belong in your folder alongside the acts. They are where the state's planning and local government legislation actually lands on your street.
The treaty shelf
Alongside the domestic stack sits everything Australia signs internationally: treaties, conventions, agreements. Signing one does not, by itself, change the law that binds you; as a general rule a treaty only gets domestic teeth once a parliament passes an act to implement it. But the shelf shapes what parliaments do, and any full map of the whole system has to include it.
In the 2012 cabinet, this layer is seeded by a single file: a spreadsheet of UN treaties with Australia as signatory, saved on 21 December 2012, a few days before the Christmas read of the Corporations Act began. It sits in the filing cabinet under "The world stage", and it is the seed of the treaty layer the cyber republic map would eventually need.
Craft notes for anyone who goes to the source
The registers are free and public, and they reward knowing a few habits of the trade.
Read the authorised version
Most registers mark certain documents as authorised: the version the register formally stands behind. If a PDF and a web page disagree, the authorised one wins. When it matters, download that one.
Check the "as at" date
What you usually read is a compilation or reprint: the act with its amendments folded in, current "as at" a stated date. Laws change constantly across nine jurisdictions, so the currency date is the first thing to check, not the last. A confident answer from a stale text is worse than no answer.
Expect doors, not pipes
Most registers publish no public API; they are built for a person with a browser, not for software. NSW is the standout exception, offering its legislation as XML export, and bulk download arrangements vary register by register. Reprints also carry Crown copyright, which is why the engine design calls for asking each Parliamentary Counsel's office for sanctioned access, rather than scraping against the terms of use.
The count
How many acts are in force across the whole country? There is no exact answer to give, because no single official count is published. The straight answer is: thousands of acts across nine parliaments, plus their subordinate legislation, plus the council tier, plus the treaty shelf.
Take it with you
If you want to see your own stack laid out, this prompt hands the map on this page to any capable AI assistant. The assistant is the guide; the registers above stay the source. Check anything that matters against them.
I live in [suburb, state or territory], Australia. Build my personal jurisdiction stack as a short table: 1. Name the three layers of government that legislate for me: the Commonwealth, my state or territory, and my local council. 2. Give me the official legislation register link for the Commonwealth and for my state or territory. 3. Find my council's local laws page and the name of its current planning scheme, and note whether they are published as PDFs. 4. List five acts from each parliament most likely to touch my daily life, with a one-line plain-English reason for each. 5. For every act you name, say which register it lives on, and remind me to check the "as at" currency date before relying on it. Treat all of this as legal information, not legal advice.
If you only carry three things out of this room, carry these.
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Nine doors, not one
There is no single national statute book. Every jurisdiction's law lives on its own register, and its own register is where the authorised current text lives.
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Date before content
Read the "as at" currency date before you read a single section. The words only mean something once you know when they were true.
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Acts are half the story
The regulations and rules underneath the acts carry the fees, forms and standards that reach your daily life first. A folder without them is a frame without the picture.
Where to next
You now know where the law lives and what counts. Two rooms build directly on this one. The legal engine is the design for reading all nine registers mechanically: what it would take to keep thousands of acts current, chunked and citable. The method is what you can do today with a browser and any capable AI assistant: gather the handful of acts that touch your own life from these same registers, and read them the way the 2013 summer did, only faster. For advice about your own situation, a qualified lawyer; for the text of the law itself, the nine doors above are open to everyone.