australian-law-mcp is an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server for accessing the Australian Federal Register of Legislation. It lets AI clients search Australian Commonwealth law, read the text of a law in force on any historical date, and check whether statutory citations match the official Register. The project requires no API key and no registration; all content comes live from the Federal Legislation API.
Purpose
The tool mainly addresses two problems: first, querying what an Australian law actually said on a past date; second, verifying whether a statutory citation really exists, to prevent models from fabricating provisions that were never enacted. Tax disputes, visa decisions, contracts and court matters often depend on the state of the law on a past day, while models typically answer with today's law; this tool returns the text actually in force on a specified date through the official Register's point-in-time capability.
Main capabilities
- Search Australian Commonwealth law.
- Read the text of a law in force on any date (get_law_as_at), returning the original text actually in force at that time, not reconstructed content.
- Verify statutory citations (verify_citations), checking whether citations match the official Register.
- Data covers more than 130,000 Acts and legislative instruments and their compiled versions since 1901.
- Network or API errors are always reported as UNVERIFIED, not NOT FOUND; verification is performed only when a citation actually binds a provision to an Act.
- For the oldest of the three publication formats since 1901, unstructured-markup scans, the tool reads according to their own numbering and accepts the result only when the recovered provision numbers run in sequence starting from section 1; otherwise it reports that the compilation cannot be read, rather than reporting that the Act has no provisions or attributing the text of one provision to another number.
How to use
Supports Claude Desktop, Cursor or any stdio MCP client. Requires Node 20 or higher, no other dependencies need to be installed, and npx will fetch the package on first run. If you do not want to install Node on the host, the project provides a Dockerfile; the server uses stdio communication, so the container needs the -i flag. docs/tools.md contains the parameters and complete examples for each tool, including what each tool does when it cannot answer.
Applicable scenarios
Suitable for legal work that requires judgment based on historical legal states, such as tax disputes, visa decisions, contract review and court matters; it is also suitable for official verification before relying on a statutory citation, avoiding model hallucinations.
Limitations
Covers only Commonwealth legislation, not state legislation: Victoria has no open API, New South Wales has a bot challenge, and Queensland requires registration. Case law databases (AustLII, Jade) do not allow automated access, so there is no case law tool. ATO rulings cannot be accessed by machine. If these circumstances change, the scope may expand.
Data sources and licensing
Legislative content comes from the Federal Register of Legislation API and is licensed by the Commonwealth of Australia under CC BY 4.0; every response that reproduces Register content carries the attribution required by the Register. The project is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Office of Parliamentary Counsel or the Australian Government. Output is legal information and does not constitute legal advice; the authorized version of any law is the one published by the Register.
