Your relevance · Luke's Relevance
Start from your own wallet, not from A.
Almost nobody reads the statute book front to back. You do not need to. The law that matters to you is already announcing itself: in your letterbox, on your payslip, inside your bank app. This room maps nine slices of an ordinary life to the acts behind them.
money tax super work home moving around health speech and data the ballot
The alphabet is the wrong index
Every register of legislation sorts its acts the same way: by name, A to Z, and by year. That is the right index for a library and the wrong index for a life. There are thousands of acts across nine parliaments, with no single official count published, and no person is governed by all of them at once. Opening the register at A and reading forward is how the job stays undone.
The right index is sitting in your house. The letterbox, the payslip, the lease, the bank app, the medicine cabinet: each one is a physical pointer to a specific act (a law passed by a parliament) or to the regulations under it (subordinate legislation, the detailed rules made under an act). Law you can see in your own paperwork is law you will actually read. Law you cannot connect to anything you own or sign stays theoretical, and theoretical reading rarely lasts long.
That is the whole principle of this room, and of the method it feeds: relevance first. Gather the laws behind your own objects, and an afternoon's gathering gives you a working reading list.
One life, nine domains
Draw yourself in the middle. Around you, nine domains cover most of what statute law does to an ordinary week. Each spoke on this wheel leads to acts that were sitting in the 2012 cabinet, so every example below is a real file with a save-date, not a guess.
From everyday object to act
Each card below starts with a thing you can hold or tap, then names the law behind it. Every act named here is a real file from the 2012 cabinet; the full ledger has the sizes and save-dates.
The bank app
Behind the login sits a product disclosure statement (PDS for short, the fine print booklet every account comes with), and behind the PDS sits the Banking Act 1959, which decides who may call themselves a bank and hold your deposits. The identity checks from the day you opened the account trace to the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006. The cabinet filed a Westpac PDS beside both.
The payslip
The tax that leaves your pay before you ever see it is PAYG withholding, set up by A New Tax System (Pay As You Go) Act 1999. The machinery of assessments, obligations and penalties is the Taxation Administration Act 1953, two volumes in the cabinet. Queensland runs its own parallel machinery under the Taxation Administration Act 2001 (QLD).
The super statement
The annual statement your fund posts you is shaped by the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Regulations 1994, the detailed rulebook every fund runs on, filed in two volumes on 28 December 2012, alongside the Superannuation Act 1976; the Superannuation Act 1990 had gone into the drawer three days earlier. The cabinet kept a QSuper PDS in the same drawer.
The job
The national workplace rulebook is the Fair Work Act 2009: minimum standards, awards (the industry-by-industry pay and conditions rulebooks), unfair dismissal. If you sit on the other side of the payroll, the Corporations Act 2001 governs the company itself; all five volumes went into the cabinet on Christmas Day 2012.
The lease
For a Queensland renter, the rights the agent does not read out loud are in the Residential Tenancies and Rooming Accommodation Act 2008 (QLD). It was the last file of the 2012 to 2013 summer read, saved 5 January 2013. Rent in another state and the same drawer exists on that state's register under a different name.
The licence and the go card
The driver licence in your wallet answers to the Transport Operations (Road Use Management) Act 1995 (QLD): licences, fines, everything between you and the road. The bus or ferry you tap onto runs under the Transport Operations (Passenger Transport) Act 1994 (QLD), and the go card's parent body was constituted by the Transport Operations (TransLink Transit Authority) Act 2008 (QLD), as it stood in 2012.
The medicine cabinet
Everything in it that calls itself a medicine or a medical device is there because the Therapeutic Goods Act 1989 and its Regulations allow it to be sold as one. Both joined the cabinet in November 2014, when the health ideas needed them.
The privacy notice
The privacy policy linked at the bottom of nearly every app points back to the Privacy Act 1988: what governments and companies may do with information about you. Its sibling in the cabinet is the Freedom of Information Act 1982, the right to see what the government holds about you. Both were read in 2012, well before the current wave of interest.
The ballot paper
The piece of paper you fill in every few years works the way it does because the Electoral Act 1992 (QLD) says so: how a Queensland election legally runs, start to finish. It is the entry point for anyone who wants to change the rules from inside. The federal version lives on the Federal Register of Legislation.
Where each act lives: the Commonwealth ones are on the Federal Register of Legislation, the Queensland ones on Queensland Legislation, and AustLII holds free copies across all nine jurisdictions. The full tour of the registers is in nine registers.
One person's map, worked
The 2012 cabinet is exactly this wheel, run once, by one person, on paper. Sixty-one documents, enough printed paper to fill a decent wheelie bin, and nearly every one of them entered the folder because some object in one Queensland life pointed at it. The save-dates show the pointing happening in real time.
| The everyday thing | What the cabinet filed | Saved | The law beside it |
|---|---|---|---|
| A two-page invoice question | Statement by a supplier form (ATO) | 19 Nov 2012 | The first file in the whole cabinet. The tax acts followed within a month. |
| Getting paid at all | Tax file number application form | 14 Dec 2012 | Taxation Administration Act 1953; A New Tax System (Pay As You Go) Act 1999 |
| An ordinary bank account | Westpac personal accounts PDS | 26 Dec 2012 | Banking Act 1959 |
| A super balance | QSuper accumulation account PDS | 27 Dec 2012 | Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Regulations 1994, volumes one and two |
| The rented place | The act itself, read cover to cover | 5 Jan 2013 | Residential Tenancies and Rooming Accommodation Act 2008 (QLD), the last file of the summer |
The cabinet's filing habit
Notice the pattern in the ledger: the fine print gets filed beside the act it answers to. The bank's PDS sits next to the Banking Act 1959. The super fund's PDS sits next to the regulations that shape it. Two sides of the same drawer: what they gave you to sign, and what parliament wrote that made them give it to you. Reading them together is where the method starts to bite.
Your map will not be this map. A tradie's wheel is heavier on tools, vehicles and licensing. A parent's is heavier on family and school. A shop owner's pulls in leases of a different kind, food rules, employment from the employer side. That is the point: relevance is personal, and only you can draw your own wheel. The nine domains above are a starting frame, not a fence.
If you want a structured way to draw it, the Legal Memory Workbench next door helps you map your life, work, property and obligations into plain files, in your browser, with nothing uploaded anywhere. The neighbouring rooms page explains how it fits alongside this site.
Now run it on your life
Two rooms carry this forward. The method shows how to gather the laws behind your own objects and chomp through them in days with an AI assistant doing the heavy lifting and you doing the judging. Then the sorting bench gives you a frame for what you find: what serves you, what bites you, what looks broken for people like you, and what is missing.
Everything in this room is legal information and method, never legal advice. For advice about your own situation, a qualified lawyer.