legislation-cth — Australian Commonwealth Legislation (jurisd data module)

A self-contained, offline retrieval module for the full Commonwealth of Australia legislation corpus: primary Acts and legislative instruments from the Federal Register of Legislation, segmented into chunks, locally embedded, and cross-linked into a citation graph. It is the baseline data module for jurisd, an MCP server for Australian/NZ legal research.

Everything here is CC-BY-4.0 and redistributable — Commonwealth legislation under the Federal Register of Legislation's CC-BY-4.0 terms, with embeddings generated locally by an open model. No case law (court material is excluded for licensing reasons) and no state/territory legislation.

At a glance

Jurisdiction	Commonwealth of Australia
Documents	32,143 (4,661 primary Acts + 27,482 legislative instruments)
Chunks	857,262
Citation-graph edges	927,210 (783,336 act–provision, 143,874 cites)
Embedding model	BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5 (384-dim, L2-normalised)
Licence	CC-BY-4.0
Snapshot date	2026-06-13
Module version	0.1.0

Files

File	Rows	Description
documents.parquet	32,143	One row per legislation document: version_id, work_id, type, jurisdiction, source, citation, url, date.
chunks.parquet	857,262	Segmented text with inline embeddings: chunk_id, version_id, segment_type, provision_ref, char_start, char_end, text, facet, facet_confidence, embedding (fixed_size_list<float>[384]).
edges.parquet	927,210	Citation graph: act–provision containment and cross-document cites edges.
unmatched_citations.parquet	25,399	Detected citations that did not resolve to an in-corpus target (provenance / coverage honesty).
manifest.json	—	Machine-readable module descriptor: per-file sha256 + row counts, embedding descriptor, licence block, and the base_uri jurisd resolves files against.

The embeddings are inline in chunks.parquet, so the module is fully self-contained: no separate vector store and no embedding step needed to query it.

Use with jurisd

The jurisd MCP server installs and queries this module directly:

jurisd fetch-module legislation-cth     # downloads + verifies against manifest sha256
jurisd verify-module legislation-cth

A query is embedded locally with the same bge-small-en-v1.5 model and ranked by cosine similarity over the inline chunk embeddings, entirely offline.

Source and provenance

Built from the Open Australian Legal Corpus, filtered to Commonwealth primary and secondary legislation. Provenance is pinned in manifest.json via the corpus sha256 and the recipe git commit; per-file integrity is enforced by jurisd's fetch-module against the manifest sha256 values on download.

Licence and attribution

Released under CC-BY-4.0. When redistributing, retain:

• Contains material from the Open Australian Legal Corpus, CC BY 4.0.
• Federal Register of Legislation material © Commonwealth of Australia, CC BY 4.0.
• Embeddings generated locally with BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5 (open, ONNX); offline module class.

Citation

@misc{jurisd_legislation_cth_2026,
  title        = {legislation-cth: Australian Commonwealth Legislation retrieval module},
  author       = {Brenner, Russell},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {Hugging Face Datasets},
  url          = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/workingmem/legislation-cth}
}

Contact: contact@workingmem.ai