au-eli-mcp

An MCP server for Australia's Federal Register of Legislation (legislation.gov.au), the official source of Commonwealth legislation. It searches, fetches, and cites Acts, with a verifiable citation on every response.

Part of the MateMatic eu-legal-mcp production line, extended into Asia-Pacific alongside jp-eli-mcp, sg-eli-mcp and my-eli-mcp. Same citation contract (a stable identifier + a human-readable citation + a source URL), adapted for a jurisdiction with no ELI.

Scope. This MVP covers Acts only (collection(act)); regulations and other legislative instrument types are not yet covered. Discovery is by title (au_search_acts); fetch the current consolidated text with au_get_text (truncated for very large Acts). Every response carries a dataset_note.

Licence. Federal Register of Legislation content is official public information published by the Australian government. This connector relays it with attribution and a source_url.

The tools

Tool	What it does
`au_search_acts`	Search Commonwealth Acts by (partial) title.
`au_get_text`	The current consolidated text of an Act (truncated at ~300,000 characters).
`au_coverage`	Declare what this connector covers, when each family was captured, and - explicitly - what it does NOT cover. Every gap carries a fallback.

Every response carries the contract: eli_uri (Australia has no ELI - this is the durable legislation.gov.au URL keyed on the document's own FRLI identifier, e.g. https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2004A00042/latest, see eli_note), human_readable_citation (the Act title), and source_url.

Install

Not yet on PyPI - install from source until the first release ships:

bash

git clone https://github.com/matematicsolutions/au-eli-mcp
cd au-eli-mcp
pip install -e .

Once released, this will be uvx au-eli-mcp.

Configuration via env:

AU_ELI_BASE_URL - default https://www.legislation.gov.au
AU_ELI_CACHE_DIR - default ~/.matematic/cache/au-eli
AU_ELI_AUDIT_DIR - default ~/.matematic/audit

No API key. legislation.gov.au is keyless.

Configure (Claude Code / any MCP client)

config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "au-eli-mcp": { "command": "au-eli-mcp" }
  }
}

Windows 11 with Smart App Control

Smart App Control blocks unsigned executables, which covers uvx.exe, pip.exe and the au-eli-mcp.exe launcher that pip writes at install time. The python.exe and py.exe from the python.org installer are signed by the Python Software Foundation, so running the module through the interpreter works:

bash

python -m pip install au-eli-mcp
python -m au_eli_mcp

pip.exe is blocked for the same reason, so install with python -m pip, not pip install. If python is not on PATH, use the Windows launcher: py -3 -m au_eli_mcp.

config.json

{ "mcpServers": { "au-eli-mcp": { "command": "python", "args": ["-m", "au_eli_mcp"] } } }

Do not turn Smart App Control off to work around this - it cannot be re-enabled without reinstalling Windows.

Governance

Public data only - read-only against legislation.gov.au; no client data leaves the machine.
Robots-compliant - robots.txt allows crawling (only /assets/ is disallowed); this connector caches aggressively rather than hitting the site repeatedly.
Audit log - every tool call appends one JSON line to ~/.matematic/audit/au-eli-mcp.jsonl.
Vendor-neutral - talks only to legislation.gov.au; no LLM provider, no telemetry.
Verifiable citations - every response is independently checkable via source_url.

See CONSTITUTION.md and DISCOVERY.md.

Tests

Terminal

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest tests/test_instructions_drift.py -v   # offline
pytest tests/test_smoke.py -v                # hits live legislation.gov.au