Room 06 · Luke's Relevance

Four trays on a bench.
You do the sorting.

You have gathered your laws and read through them. Now each one gets picked up, turned over, and placed in a tray: serves, bites, broken or missing. This page gives you the trays and the questions. It does not give you the answers, because the same act lands in different trays for different lives.

Dials, not verdicts Quantities, not adjectives Your sort, written down

The four trays

Every act, regulation and piece of fine print that survived your read-through from Your relevance goes into exactly one tray. Not "good law" or "bad law"; those words are verdicts, and a verdict tends to end the conversation. A tray is a working position with a reason attached, and you can move a document later when the evidence moves.

TRAY 1

Serves

Works quietly for you. It protects something you value, at a cost you would knowingly pay again. You would not want it repealed.

TRAY 2

Bites

Lawful, valid, operating exactly as written, and it costs people like you: in dollars, in hours, or in risk. Not malfunctioning. Aimed.

TRAY 3

Broken

Fails its own stated aim. The section up the front says the act exists to do one thing; what you can observe and count says another.

TRAY 4

Missing

No law where one is needed. A gap you or your neighbours fall through, with nothing on any of the nine registers to catch you.

The line between Bites and Broken matters. A tax that stings but collects the tax it set out to collect belongs in Bites; you argue with its aim. An access scheme that grants little access belongs in Broken; you argue with its performance. Different trays lead to different moves on the reform ladder.

How to sort: four questions per document

The bench runs on questions, and the same four are asked of every document. Answer them with quantities wherever you can. "Unfair" is an adjective and carries little weight at a hearing; "42 days" is a measurement and travels.

Who does this protect?

Name the people, as specifically as you can. Renters or landlords? Employees or employers? Depositors or banks? Most acts protect someone real; the question is who, and whether you are in that group.
Who carries the cost?

Every protection is paid for somewhere: in fees, in waiting time, in paperwork hours, in risk shifted onto someone else. Follow the cost until it lands on a person, and note whether that person resembles you.
Does it do what its objects clause says?

Many modern acts open with an objects clause, the section where parliament states what the act is for. Read the promise, then ask what you can observe. The gap between the two is where Broken lives.
What would tell you it is working?

Pick a quantity you could actually check: a number of days, a dollar figure, a share of cases, a count of requests granted. If you cannot name a measurement that would settle it either way, your tray choice is a guess, and you write it down as one.

5 volumes hold the Social Security Act 1991 in the 2012 cabinet, about 16 MB of rules for one payment system. The act that takes tax out of a payslip, the PAYG act, fits in half a megabyte. The rules for paying money out weigh about thirty times more than the rule that takes it in. Weight is a measurement too; it tells you who the system expects to do the reading.

A worked pass, in questions only

Here is the bench applied to four documents from the 2012 cabinet. Deliberately, nothing below is an answer. These are the questions a sorter asks; the trays stay empty until you fill them from your own life.

A New Tax System (Pay As You Go) Act 1999

This is the act behind PAYG withholding, the reason tax leaves your pay before you ever see it. Who does collecting early protect: the person spared one large bill in July, or the revenue office that gets paid every payday instead of once a year? What does a fortnight of withheld pay cost someone whose hours swing week to week? If the aim is smooth and predictable tax, which quantity would show it: the share of people who finish the year square, owing nothing and owed nothing? And does the act land in the same tray for a salaried worker as for a freelancer juggling invoices?

Residential Tenancies and Rooming Accommodation Act 2008 (QLD)

The last file of the 2013 summer read, and the cleanest case that a tray is a dial. Read as a renter: how many days of notice does the act give you, and are they enough days to find another home in your town at today's vacancy rate? Read as a landlord: the same sections, the opposite pocket; which of them protect your property and which slow you down? What would tell you the act is working: how many bond disputes reach the tribunal each year, and how many resolve inside the timeframes the act itself sets? Two honest sorters can leave this act in two different trays, and both sorts can be sound.

Freedom of Information Act 1982

The FOI act's objects clause promises access to government-held information. So what does a request cost in fees, and how many days does it take? Of the pages you ask for, how many come back with parts blacked out under an exemption? If access is the stated aim, which measurement would you trust: requests granted in full, average days to decision, or something else you would rather count? "Serves on paper" and "Broken in practice" are both arguable here; the bench does not care which you pick, only that you write down the evidence that would move you.

Social Security Act 1991, volumes one to five

Five volumes, saved in one sitting two days after Christmas 2012. Who among the people this act covers can check their own entitlement across five volumes of rules? If a payment exists to keep people above a line, what quantity would show it doing that: the share of recipients who actually sit above the line? And does complexity itself belong on the bench: which tray holds an act that almost nobody it covers could read in a week? If your answer is "none of the four", perhaps what is missing is not a law but a readable one, and that thought goes in the Missing tray with a reason attached.

Run the bench with an assistant

The four questions are easy to ask and slow to research by hand. This is where an AI assistant earns its seat at the bench: it can pull the objects clause, list who the act names, and suggest quantities to check, while the tray decision stays with you. The prompt below keeps that split explicit. Paste it into any general AI assistant, one act at a time, with the authorised source open beside it.

I am sorting the laws that apply to my own life into four trays:
Serves (works for me), Bites (lawful but costs people like me),
Broken (fails its own stated aim), Missing (a gap with no law).

For the act I name below, help me answer four questions:
1. Who does this act protect? List the groups of people it names.
2. Who carries the cost? Follow fees, time and risk to a person.
3. What does its objects clause say the act is for? Quote it with
   the section number, or say "no objects clause found".
4. What two quantities could I actually check to see whether it is
   doing that job?

Rules: cite every claim to an act name and section number. If you
cannot find a section, say "not found" rather than guessing. Do not
tell me which tray to choose; that decision is mine. This is legal
information for my own sorting, not legal advice.

The act: [PASTE THE ACT NAME AND JURISDICTION HERE]

The same split, machine fetches and cites while the person decides, is the spine of the legal engine design; the design calls for answers grounded in retrieved sections, never from memory. Until anything like that exists, this prompt plus the official registers is the working version.

Your sort is yours

Two honest sorters can take the same act and fill different trays. The renter and the landlord above are not one right and one wrong; they are two lives reading one document, and the act genuinely serves one while it bites the other. That is not a flaw in the method. It is the finding.

What makes a sort useful is not agreement, it is the writing down. A tray choice with a reason and a named piece of evidence can be compared, challenged, updated and counted. Ten thousand private opinions about tenancy law are weather; ten thousand written sorts, each with its reason, would start to look like data about where the law sits differently on different shoulders. That written trail is exactly what the next room needs.

The bench sorts legal information into positions you can argue for. It never tells you what the law means for your situation; for that, a qualified lawyer.

The output: a sorted ledger

A finished pass over the bench leaves you with a ledger: one line per document, four columns. This is the shape of a line; the trays here are left for you on purpose.

Act or document	Tray	Reason, one sentence	Evidence you would need
(short title of the act)	(one of the four)	(your words, your life, one sentence)	(a quantity you could actually check)
A New Tax System (Pay As You Go) Act 1999	yours to fill	Does collecting early serve your July or cost your fortnight?	Your own payslips beside your last two notices of assessment (the tax office's end-of-year statement of what you owed or were owed).
Residential Tenancies and Rooming Accommodation Act 2008 (QLD)	yours to fill	Do the notice periods fit the rental market where you actually live?	The act's notice periods beside how long your last house-hunt took.
Freedom of Information Act 1982	yours to fill	Does what a request returns match what the objects clause promises?	One request of your own: its fee, its days, its exempted pages.

Sources for the reading itself: every act above is free to read on the Federal Register of Legislation or the Queensland legislation site, and AustLII carries all nine jurisdictions in one place.

The bench in one picture: the pile you gathered feeds four trays, the trays feed one ledger, and the ledger is the input the reform ladder runs on.

A finished sort is the start of a plan. A Bites entry points you at a submission arguing the cost; a Broken entry points you at an inquiry armed with the act's own objects clause; a Missing entry points you at a petition for a law that does not exist yet. Each tray has its own first move, and the next room walks the whole ladder: forms, submissions, committees, members, and at the far end a ballot.

Words used on this bench

Objects clause: The section near the front of many modern acts where parliament states what the act is for. On this bench it is the yardstick for the Broken tray: the act's own promise, measured against what you can observe.
PAYG withholding: Pay as you go: the system under which an employer takes tax out of each pay and sends it to the tax office before the money reaches you. Set up by A New Tax System (Pay As You Go) Act 1999.
FOI: Freedom of information: the legal right to ask for documents a government holds, given federally by the Freedom of Information Act 1982, with state equivalents on each register.
Bond: The deposit a renter pays at the start of a tenancy, held by a state authority until the tenancy ends. Disputes over who gets it back are one countable measure of how tenancy law performs.
Sorted ledger: The output of this room: one line per document, four columns. Act, tray, reason in one sentence, and the evidence that would change your mind.

Before you leave this room

Three checks on your own sort before you leave this room:

1. Every tray choice has a reason written next to it, even the obvious ones. 2. Every reason names at least one quantity that could change your mind. 3. At least one document sits in Serves. A sort with nothing in the Serves tray usually means the questions were skipped, not that nothing serves you.

If the bench feels heavy to run by hand, the method room shows how an AI assistant can help you draft the questions per act while you keep the tray decisions, and the engine design describes how the same frame would run over the full nine registers, if it gets built.

Take the ledger next door

A sorted ledger is not the end of the method; it is the input to the last rung. Change the law takes each tray and matches it to the system's own tools, from a form filled properly to a question put to the whole country. And if you want the bench itself made playable, Gamify democracy asks what happens when the rulebook and the score are finally public. The rules this site holds itself to, including why no page here hands down verdicts, live in the limits page.

Four trays on a bench.You do the sorting.