australian-law-mcp

MCP server for the Federal Register of Legislation. Ask what Australian law said on any date, and check citations against the official register before you rely on them. No API key, nothing to sign up for.

Everything is served live from the Commonwealth's own legislation API: 130,000+ acts and legislative instruments, every compilation of each one, back to 1901. That register is the authorised source of Commonwealth law, and it publishes point-in-time versions natively — so get_law_as_at returns the text that was actually in force on the date you name, not a reconstruction.

Quick start

Claude Code:

claude mcp add australian-law -- npx -y australian-law-mcp

Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any other stdio MCP client:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "australian-law": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "australian-law-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Requires Node 20 or newer. Nothing else to install — npx fetches the package on first run.

There is a Dockerfile if you would rather not have Node on the host. The server speaks stdio, so the container needs -i:

docker build -t australian-law-mcp .
docker run -i --rm australian-law-mcp

Related MCP server: canlii-mcp

Tools

docs/tools.md has the parameters and a worked example of each, including what every tool does when it cannot answer.

Why point-in-time matters

Tax disputes, visa decisions, contracts and court matters turn on the law as it stood on a past day, and models reliably answer with today's law instead. The register keeps every compilation with exact in-force windows:

get_law_as_at titleId=C2004A03348 date=2017-01-05 section=3A
→ As at 2017-01-05: Income Tax Rates Act 1986, Compilation No. 48
  s 3A  Working holiday makers and working holiday taxable income ...

And verify_citations is the guard rail for the other direction — models inventing sections that were never enacted:

verify_citations text="See s 3A and s 999 of the Income Tax Rates Act 1986."
→ [OK] Income Tax Rates Act 1986 [C2004A03348] — in force.
    [OK] s 3A exists: "Working holiday makers and working holiday taxable income"
    [NOT FOUND] s 999 — Provision 999 was not found in this compilation. It has
      28 sections and 6 schedules. Closest by number: s 30, s 29, s 28

A real law reported missing is the worst failure a tool like this can have, so network and API errors are always reported as UNVERIFIED rather than NOT FOUND, and a section is only checked against an act when the citation actually binds the two together.

The same rule governs the text itself. The register has published in three different formats since 1901, and the oldest of them — as-made scans of acts from the federation era — carries no structural markup at all, only the numbering in the prose. Those are read from their own numbering, and the result is accepted only when the section numbers it recovers run in order from section 1. When they do not, the tool says the compilation could not be read rather than reporting an act with no sections or filing one section's words under another's number.

Scope

Commonwealth legislation only, by design. State registers either have no open API (Vic), sit behind bot challenges (NSW), or require registration (Qld). Case law databases (AustLII, Jade) do not permit automated access, so there is no case-law tool. ATO rulings are not machine-accessible. If any of that changes, the scope can grow.

Data source and licence

Legislative content comes from the Federal Register of Legislation API and is licensed CC BY 4.0 by the Commonwealth of Australia; every response that reproduces register content carries the register's required attribution. This project is independent: not affiliated with or endorsed by the Office of Parliamentary Counsel or the Australian Government. Output is legal information, not legal advice — the authorised version of any law is the one published on the register.

Code is MIT.

Development

npm install
npm test                        # build + unit tests (offline)
node scripts/smoke.mjs          # live API smoke test
node scripts/protocol-test.mjs  # stdio round trip against the live API