Rules as Code

The QUT Chair in Digital Economy is hosting Stacey Talbot from the Office of the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel on a four-month secondment as part of the Queensland Public Service Leader Connect program. During her placement with the Chair Stacey is exploring issues relating to legislation in a digital environment. Last week Stacey attended a Parliamentary Counsel’s Committee Forum in Sydney, here are her key takeaways.

Machine readable and machine consumable legislation, rules and policy are currently the focus of a number of digital transformation projects worldwide including:

• CSIRO Data61’s Regulation as a Platform project — development of a logic system to turn human-readable text into machine-readable versions of current laws, acts, policies and other regulatory documents.
• Mes Aides — a social benefits simulator to inform French citizens on their eligibility for 32 social benefits and LexImpact — a tool to simulate the impact of tax reforms on the French government’s budget and on the population’s standard of living.
• Denmark’s implementation of mandatory principles for digital-ready legislation.
• Apps and tools to help citizens and businesses understand their rights and obligations in relation to government services and benefits — for example the New Zealand SmartStart guide providing parents with step-by-step information and support in accessing family services and benefits and the Australian Government’s Citizenship Wizard designed to assist with citizenship applications.

Closer to home, two machine consumable legislation projects were the subject of discussion at a recent Parliamentary Counsel’s Committee Information Technology, Publishing and Office Systems Forum held in Sydney from 3 to 5 July. This year’s forum, an annual event, brought together staff from legislative drafting offices throughout Australia and New Zealand as well as representatives from Hong Kong, Singapore and Scotland to discuss key projects and topical issues in legislative drafting and access including the New Zealand Government Better Rules for Government project and the New South Wales Government Rules as Code project.

The Better Rules for Government project, sponsored by the New Zealand Service Innovation Lab, involved a three week discovery sprint on the connection between policy, legislation and implementation in the creation of human and machine consumable rules for two pieces of New Zealand legislation — the Rates Rebates Act (1973) and the Holidays Act (2003).

Similarly, the New South Wales Rules as Code project commenced with a four-week discovery sprint applying human-centered design thinking to legislation and other rule-making in NSW and has evolved to focus on building a Rules as Code ‘toolkit’, including a rules engine built on an OpenFisca platform.

Some of the key benefits and challenges identified through these two projects include:

• Co-design as a useful mechanism for enhanced policy and legislative development.
• Opportunities for better service delivery outcomes with multidisciplinary teams (policy staff, legislative drafters, service design staff and software developers) engaging in a co-design process with a user-centric approach.
• Downstream challenges in producing machine consumable rules if the policy and legislation has not been developed with this output in mind.
• Acknowledgement that the process is not applicable to all legislation and rule scenarios — by virtue of either timeframe or content (suitable for prescriptive rules rather than judgement-based rules).