Raw Aus Pol

Simple Wins / Australian Red Tape Every step, every clock, every authority -- written down.

Contribute a process

The database is only as good as the people who have actually done this. If you are a planner, a certifier, a council officer, a builder, a publican, a GP opening a practice — you know where the weeks go, and right now that knowledge exists only in your head and in your colleagues' heads.

The single most useful thing you can do

Not write a new page. Correct a duration on an existing one.

Almost every day count on this site is currently an estimate — a placeholder so the analysis has something to work with. Replacing one estimate with a sourced figure improves the database more than a whole new process mapped from guesswork.

Tell us three things:

  1. Which step. Name the process and the step.
  2. How long it actually takes, and how you know — your own files, published performance data, a section of an Act.
  3. Why it takes that long. This is the part no public dataset records, and the part that makes the database worth building. Was someone assessing? Or was the file sitting in a queue, waiting for a meeting, waiting on you?

Adding or editing data

Everything is plain TOML in data/. No database, no admin login, no CMS. One file per entity, and the file is the record.

data/
  jurisdictions/   federal, states, territories, councils
  bodies/          departments, agencies, certifiers, referral authorities
  processes/       the processes themselves, with their steps inline
  reforms/         proposals to change specific steps

A minimal step looks like this:

[[steps]]
id = "notify"
name = "Neighbour notification period"
type = "notification"
body = "nsw-council-consent"
depends_on = ["adequacy"]
legal_basis = "Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 (NSW) s 2.22"
statutory_clock_days = 14
typical_days = 14
wait_type = "statutory"
confidence = "legislated"
sources = ["EP&A Act 1979 (NSW), s 2.22"]

Then run the build. It validates everything and tells you what is wrong:

python build/render.py

The build fails on broken references, unknown vocabulary values, duplicate step ids and dependency cycles. It warns on any duration stated without a source, and those warnings appear publicly on the verification backlog. That is deliberate.

The rules we hold contributors to

Every number carries a source or is labelled an estimate. If you do not have a source, set confidence = "estimate" and say so. That is a completely acceptable contribution. Quietly asserting a number you are not sure of is not.

Describe the process as it is, not as it should be. Frustration is welcome in a reform proposal. It does not belong in a step description.

A reform proposal must state what is being traded away. Every reform page has a "what is being traded away" section, and the build renders a visible warning where it is empty. If the honest answer is "nothing", the page must explain why the step exists at all. Proposals that claim to cost nothing are the ones that get governments into trouble.

No legal advice, ever. We describe administrative process. We never tell anyone that an obligation does not apply to them, and no page should be capable of being read that way.

Name the body, not the officer. Delay is nearly always structural. Individual council staff are working inside a system they did not design, and this project gets nowhere useful by treating them as the problem.

What we would most like next