Legal Citation

Read this guide in conjunction with the Australian Guide to Legal Citation.

Legify - A free tool that locates and links to the authoritative version of Australian legislation and delegated legislation.

Western Australian Legislation - Western Australian Legislation Database, includes links to Bills and other parliamentary documents.

Federal Register of Legislation - Commonwealth Legislation Database, includes legislative material from the non self-governing territories and Bills and other parliamentary documents including Government Gazettes.

Commonwealth Bills and Legislation Information - Parliament of Australia website, offers searching, browsing, information on proposed legislation and alert services.

LawNow Legislation - Database of current national legislation for all Australian Federal, State and Territory Jurisdictions. Includes related materials and links to judicial consideration (case law) of legislation and/or sections. From Lexis Advance.

Lawlex - Subject index and links to Australian legislative materials, includes links to Bills and Hansard.

Federal Statutes Annotations - From Lexis Advance.

The essence of citing delegated legislation is:

Short title + year + (jurisdiction) + pinpoint reference.

Notes:

The notes listed here are not exhaustive, but are designed to point students to the pertinent sections of the Australian Guide to Legal Citation (4^th ed, 2018).  AGLC rule 3 details the requirements for citing legislation.

Delegated legislation should be cited in the same manner as primary legislation

Pinpoint Reference

When completing a pinpoint reference, additional abbreviations to those listed in rule 3.1.4 may need to be used. 

These abbreviations include order or orders (‘ord’ or ‘ords’ respectively), regulation or regulations (‘reg’ or ‘regs’ respectively) and rule or rules (‘r’ or ‘rr’ respectively).  See AGLC rule 3.4 for a list of acceptable abbreviations for pinpoint references when citing delegated legislation.

Where a sub-regulation is added, it should appear in parenthesis after the regulation number with no space.  In the example above, the regulation number is 41 and the sub-regulation number is 7. 

The abbreviation should correspond to the highest ‘level’ cited in the pinpoint reference.  In the example above, the highest level of the pinpoint is to a regulation; therefore the abbreviation being used is ‘reg’.