Is this site legal?

This website is an unofficial citizen journalism project. It is not intended for, nor promoted as, providing legal advice of any kind.

The original, source data used from each state parliament is publicly accessible data. This includes the original (official) title of the bill, details about who introduced it and when it was introduced; the original text of the bill and its current status. No data is used or 'hacked' which isn't publicly available. 

Newspapers and journalists are allowed to mention by name and to nickname bills, and to state what happened (e.g. who introduced a bill, and when) while discussing bills. The data itself cannot be re-sold or re-published for profit, however it may be referred to as part of (for example) news articles on a subscription-based news site. The background, commentary and other information gathered by the journalist has commercial value and may be marketed. 

This website gives commentary on what the effect of bills is, both in the 'slang' bill title and the explanations of what the bill actually does. This is created by us, and may or may not be 100% correct. If you are in a legal situation where the law on an issue may have material impact on you - for example, you're a tenant concerned about changes to tenant rights - you should speak to a qualified lawyer to ensure you have the correct understanding of the changes and what they mean in your case, taking all relevant factors into account. 

Documents such as the original Text and Explanatory Notes for laws/bills as they are discussed; Notice papers; Speeches and other procedural documents may not be reproduced. We can't re-publish these for you, they are copyright and belong to the government. We maintain copies ourselves to help with searching and indexing, and will display a link to these on the original parliament website where they are available. 

Are you spamming the servers with requests? 

No. The data which is available is read, generally only once per day (except when our programmer is working on the website and manually running parts of the code to confirm things are fixed). The requests are slowed down on our end to not more than 1 a second, to avoid putting strain on the official servers. This isn't more strain on the servers than manually checking them each (working) day; actually, it's usually less - as the code doesn't also ask for images, CSS and other files it doesn't need.