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Methodology

How we maintain the corpus

A reference index is only as good as its sourcing and update cadence. Here's exactly how Rules Mate's corpus is built and kept current.

1. Sourcing

Every entry in Rules Mate originates from a primary regulator source: legislation and instruments from legislation.gov.au (Cwlth) and state legislation portals; enforcement actions from each regulator's media-release feed or court RSS (e.g. Federal Court, FCFCOA); regulatory guides direct from ASIC, OAIC, AUSTRAC, APRA, ACMA, eSafety, Safe Work Australia and others.

We never scrape AustLII — their published terms of service prohibit bulk querying, mirroring, crawling, and AI-related republication. Where AustLII is the only host for an older case, we cite without copying.

2. Summarisation

Each obligation is hand-modelled into a fixed schema covering: who must comply, what triggers it, when it's due, what evidence you need, maximum penalty, and an authoritative source URL. Wording is plain-English and Australian. We summarise — we never republish full statutory text or full decision text. Statutory text is Crown copyright.

Where AI assistance is used to draft initial summaries, every entry passes through human review before being marked published. Draft and review-status entries are not visible to the public site.

3. Verification

Before publication, every obligation summary is verified against the source URL by a human reviewer. Penalty amounts are cross-referenced against the legislation and the regulator's current penalty unit table. Citations on enforcement actions are confirmed against the regulator's own media release or court judgment.

4. Update cadence

  • Weekly: federal Acts via legislation.gov.au OData; ASIC, ACCC, AUSTRAC, OAIC, APRA media-release ingest.
  • Weekly: Federal Court / FCFCOA judgment feeds.
  • Quarterly: State legislation portals (NSW OData, VIC HTML, QLD JWT API).
  • Event-driven: material regulatory changes (Royal Assent, commencement, FWC Annual Wage Review, ASIC RG updates) trigger same-week corpus refresh.

5. What we do not do

  • Provide legal advice. We are not a law firm.
  • Republish statutory text or full court decisions.
  • Scrape AustLII.
  • Use AI to publish unreviewed content.
  • Sell or repackage AUSTRAC SMR/TTR submissions, ATO STP lodgements, ASIC filings, or other privileged regulator-facing submissions on your behalf — those remain your responsibility (and will be the subject of separate, gated products in future).

6. Corrections

If you spot an error, please email hello@rulesmate.com.au with the URL and the correction. We review same-day and republish within 24 hours where the correction is verified against the source.