lex-au

Commonwealth Acts as Akoma Ntoso (AKN) 3.0 XML - open civic infrastructure for Australian legislative data.

Australia's legislation.gov.au provides DOCX and PDF downloads. This dataset provides structured XML, section-level addressing and AKN for Commonwealth Acts in force.

Version: v0.7.4 - 3,066 Acts + 2 Regulations (full Act list).

See github.com/cchew/lex-au for source code and CLI (if you want to change the AKN mapping), version history and known limits.

Quick example

Extract a single section's text and defined terms with lxml:

from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
from lxml import etree

path = hf_hub_download(repo_id="cchew/lex-au", filename="xml/privacy-act-1988.xml", repo_type="dataset")
AKN = "{http://docs.oasis-open.org/legaldocml/ns/akn/3.0}"
root = etree.parse(path).getroot()

section = root.find(f".//{AKN}section[@eId='sec-6']")
print("".join(section.itertext())[:300])

for term in root.findall(f".//{AKN}TLCTerm"):
    print(term.get("eId"), "->", term.get("showAs"))

Every section, subsection, and schedule clause carries a stable eId (e.g. sec-6__subsec-1__para-a) for citation-level addressing - see "What's in this dataset" below for the full element reference.

What's in this dataset

Each Act is a single AKN 3.0 XML file with:

• FRBR URIs (/akn/au/act/{year}/{slug}/aus/{comp_id})
• Structural hierarchy: parts, divisions, subdivisions, sections
• Intra-section hierarchy: <subsection>, <paragraph>, <subparagraph> with nested eIds (e.g. sec-6__subsec-1__para-a)
• <ref> elements for same-Act section/subsection references and cross-Act FRBR URIs
• <preface> with <toc>/<tocItem> and compilation notices
• Schedules as <attachments><attachment><hcontainer name="schedule">
• <term refersTo="#term-X"> and <def> in definition sections; <TLCTerm> registry in <references>
• <quantity refersTo="#penaltyUnit|#custodialSentence|#deadline"> for penalty units, imprisonment terms, and statutory deadlines
• <role refersTo="#commissioner|#minister|..."> for known Commonwealth officeholders; <TLCRole> registry
• FRBR completeness: FRBRcountry, FRBRsubtype, FRBRnumber, FRBRname, FRBRprescriptive, FRBRauthoritative
• <date> elements for statutory dates and time expressions
• <blockList>/<item> for unnumbered list structures
• <lifecycle>, <temporalData>, <passiveModifications> populated from Endnote 3-4 amendment history
• <quotedStructure> for single-provision amendment inserts; <figure>/<img> for embedded images; <rref> for section range references
• Corpus index at index.json (also mirrored as title_id/comp_id columns in data/train.jsonl) — combine title_id with https://www.legislation.gov.au/{title_id}/latest/text for a working link back to the Act's real page on legislation.gov.au (Act-level only; the site has no stable per-section anchor scheme). Parse report per Act in reports/.

Full element-by-element conformance detail, organised by AKN 3.0 spec chapter: docs/akn-conformance.md in the source repo.

Licence

CC BY 4.0. Source legislation is Crown copyright - Commonwealth of Australia; reproduction permitted for non-commercial and research purposes under the PSI Framework.

What's built on this dataset

• lex-au-search - hybrid dense + BM25 search API and MCP server
• lex-au-graph - cross-reference graph and definition resolution across Acts
• ClauseKit - LLM extraction of evaluatable rules (JSON Logic) from Acts

Related

• github.com/cchew/lex-au - source code and CLI
• lex-au.netlify.app - browsable preview of the corpus, rendered from this XML
• Open Australian Legal Corpus - complementary plain-text corpus